Combatting stigmatisation of social housing neighbourhoods in Dublin, Ireland

This article examines the implementation of three of the strategies most commonly used to de-stigmatise social housing neighbourhoods – built environment refurbishment, poverty deconcentration and public image change initiatives – in three predominately social rented neighbourhoods in Dublin, Ireland. This article echoes the consensus in the literature regarding the intractability and complexity of place-based stigma and the difficulties in changing stigmatised reputations once established, but it also reveals that several interventions can help to reduce this problem or prevent it from emerging in the first place. Tenure mixing is effective in combatting external stigma, particularly when employed in new developments, but it can also undermine the internal cohesion of target neighbourhoods. Media campaigns and cultural events helped improve the external perceptions of some of the case study neighbourhoods but were less effective in other cases. Similarly, many built environment adaptions had limited impact on stigma but public space redesign and public transport improvements which increased neighbourhoods’ permeability to non-residents were useful in this regard.