This slide show is enhanced content for "Livable Historic City Cores: Attracting Investment to Cities" by John O'Brien in the Summer 2013 Forum Journal (Preservation in the City). To learn more about Preservation Leadership Forum and how you can become a member visit: http://www.preservationnation.org/forum

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Forum Journal (Summer 2013)
Takeaway for “Livable Historic City Cores: Attracting Investment to Cities”
Dublin, Ireland:
“Talent Hub” Strategy Based on Livability of the Historic City Core
By John O’Brien
Dublin provides an interesting case study of a place that has leveraged its
cultural heritage with other assets to create a “talent hub”—attracting world
leaders in knowledge industries to establish operations there while at the
same time becoming a hotspot for indigenous entrepreneurial development.
Over the last three decades, Ireland has been very successful in attracting
FDI, which now plays a vital role in the economy, accounting for:
• 250,000 jobs directly and indirectly out of a total of 1.8 million in
employment;
• US$150 billion in exports, or 80 percent of the country’s total exports;
• 65 percent of Corporation Tax payments; and
• 68 percent of business expenditure on research and development.
This investment comes from the world’s leading companies in information
and communications technology, life sciences, financial services, and
engineering, and increasingly from “born on the internet” content and service
providers including companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay,
Blizzard, and Electronic Arts. Indeed, the “IBM Plant Location International
Report 2011” ranked Ireland as the number one destination worldwide for
foreign investment projects by value and number two worldwide for FDI jobs.
Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency is the government body charged
with attracting FDI to Ireland and working with existing investors to maximize
their contribution to the economy. An important part of its job is to continually
monitor trends in global investment and develop an appropriate response by
government and other public bodies to these trends so that they can
maximize the FDI contribution to the economy in terms of jobs and added
value.
Activities increasingly depend on two critical factors: interconnectivity with the
rest of the world, and, above all, the availability of talent. Ireland’s competitive
strategy is based on four Ts: Talent, Technology, Tax, and Track Record.

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It became clear in recent decades that for many of the world’s leading
companies that rely on a high creative input, their choice of where to locate
was boiling down to deciding on which city rather than which country.
Therefore, while Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency continues to
promote balanced regional development in line with the government’s
National Spatial Strategy, for many key projects success would depend on
the promotion of Dublin (the only Irish city classified by the OECD as a metro-
region) as an attractive city location compared to other similar competing
European cities.
Over the last 20 years, major conservation projects have been undertaken
in Dublin, by both the state and city authorities, on important public buildings
including the Royal Hospital (1684), Dublin Castle, Collins (Royal) Barracks
(1709), Dr. Steevens’s Hospital (1719), Custom House (1791), Kilmainham
Gaol(1792), and City Hall (Royal Exchange) (1769). A works project has been
ongoing in the Phoenix Park, including the reinstatement of the main entrance
gates and the return of the Phoenix Monument (1747) to its original position
on the main axis of the park. Conservation works have also been completed
and new uses found for the former Bluecoat School (1773) and the churches
of St. George (1802) and St. Catherine (1760).
But in the city as a whole, the track record on the survival and conservation of
the historic urban fabric is more mixed, directly reflecting the changing social
dynamics of the city, the conflicts of the early 20th century, and modern
redevelopment. Some surviving properties, particularly on the north side of
the city, lost original fabric and details when they were converted to tenement
occupation (although this too is now an important part of their history). Private
individuals and bodies have also done significant conservation work,
particularly in the northern side of the city. One important example is the
project on North Great George’s Street, where conservation and new
interventions to replace missing historical fabric have helped to revitalize and
reestablish the integrity of the street. Dublin City Council has published a
conservation plan for Henrietta Street and recently started a program of
urgent conservation works on a number of properties in the street (UNESCO
2010).
The linking of investment promotion to a specific urban redevelopment project
in Ireland started with the establishment in 1987 of the Customs House Docks
Development Authority (CHDDA) as a statutory body to promote the
redevelopment of historic but derelict inner-city docks areas of initially 11
hectares. It was envisaged that the economic basis for the redevelopment
would be the establishment in the area of an International Financial Services
Centre (IFSC), and incentives were put in place to both encourage
redevelopment and entice international financial companies to locate in the

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center. While the CHDDA would be responsible for the development of the
area, the government mandated that IDA Ireland promote the center to
investors. The initiative proved to be very successful, and today there are
30,000 people employed in financial services and ancillary support activities
in the IFSC. Dublin is now a center for international banking, funds
management, and insurance, and the sector continues to grow despite the
international financial crisis.
In 1997, the CHDDA was subsumed into the Dublin Docklands Development
Authority (DDDA) with a broader mandate to promote the development of the
entire Dublin docklands area consisting of 520 hectares. Since the DDDA’s
inception in 1997, the area under its control has attracted more than €3.35
billion of public and private investment and has seen the creation of 40,000
new jobs. The number of residents in the area has grown from 17,500 to
22,000, and 11,000 new homes have been built, of which 2,200 are either
social or affordable. In addition, the area has developed as a vibrant cultural
center with a new theater and a new concert venue.
In 2003, as part of a further urban regeneration initiative, the government
formed the Digital Hub Development Agency, an Irish state agency, to
establish a digital hub in the historic Liberties area of the city. Its role is to
provide incubator space and support for largely indigenous, small and
medium-size enterprises while promoting the broader social and economic
regeneration of the area. It currently houses more 90 such enterprises
developing products ranging from mobile apps to online games.
Dublin, as the major urban center in the country, had always attracted a
significant share of FDI into Ireland. By the mid-1990s, it was already
attracting major investments from an impressive range of international
companies, including Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and SAP, as well as major
financial institutions such as Citicorp, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and
HSBC. (See figure 1.1.) IDA Ireland recognized that this established track
record, combined with the exciting urban redevelopment of the city core,
provided the opportunity to promote Dublin as a “talent hub” that would attract
the web-based knowledge industries of the future as well as encourage the
existing technology and financial services companies already established
there to deepen their investment and add more knowledge-based activities.
To succeed with this endeavor, it was evident that Dublin would need to
have state-of-the-art data interconnectivity with the rest of the world. While
this would be largely supplied by the private sector, it was clear that some
pump priming would be needed, so IDA Ireland sought and received
government funding to invest in a project, called Global Crossing, that
connected Ireland to the transatlantic fiber network between the United

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Kingdom and the United States and thus to the rest of the world. This made
Dublin a credible location for investment projects that require the speedy and
secure transmission of high volumes of data at a competitive cost.
A basic pillar for the promotion of Dublin as a talent hub was the
concentration of higher education institutions in the city. These include three
universities (Trinity College in the city center and University College Dublin
and Dublin City University just outside the center); the Dublin Institute of
Technology, also in the city center; and the National College of Ireland that
relocated its campus to the heart of the IFSC as part of the urban
redevelopment project. These institutions educate 65,000 undergraduates
and postgraduates in the full range of disciplines, with a strong focus on
technology and business. They also conduct a wide range of research, with
faculty and postdoctoral students drawn from varying backgrounds and
nationalities; research activity has increased significantly since 2002 with the
support of Science Foundation Ireland. While having good higher education
institutions locally can provide a stream of talent, it was clear that this, while
necessary, was not sufficient to build a talent hub. Apart from the fact that (as
has been pointed out by analysts such as Florida) not all cities with good
universities retain their graduates, knowledge-based companies would only
locate their regional base in a city that could supply people offering a wide
range of skills and languages. Companies would need to feel that a Dublin
location gave them access not just to a good local talent market but to a
European talent market; this would be based on Dublin’s appeal to “creative
class” people, especially those in the 20 to 40 age group.
Dublin is attractive to such people because it is seen as a livable and
dynamic city with good nightlife and leisure facilities but also with a strong
cultural heritage that was reflected in a regenerated city center and the
significant investment (public and private) in heritage conservation over
recent decades.
Recently, Dublin has successfully attracted most of the leading internet
companies to establish operations to service the European, Middle East, and
African (EMEA) market from Dublin. Companies such as Google, Facebook,
Linkedin, Zynga, Popcap, and Twitter have chosen to locate in the city center
in or near the urban regeneration area. Others such as PayPal, eBay,
Amazon, and Yahoo have chosen larger sites further out of town, as have
many of the larger tech companies such as Oracle, HP, SAP, and Symantec.
The importance of talent to these companies can best be illustrated by
Google, which established its EMEA headquarters in 2003 in a building in
the Dublin docklands regeneration area. It currently employs more than

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2,000 people, all higher-education graduates, to support all of its products:
search engines, consumer products (Gmail, calendar), advertising products
(Ad Words, Ad Sense), right through to business solutions for major
corporations.
It also undertakes new product development through a dedicated engineering
team and provides central support for the finance, payroll, legal, and human
resources functions. To do this effectively it operates in 45 languages and
covers 65 countries.
It is also important to note that not all of the creative and innovative activity
has been generated by FDI. The Digital Hub has been highly successful in
nurturing and developing creative and innovative small and medium-size
enterprises. The Digital Hub is currently home to more than 90 companies
employing more than 500 people doing everything from developing apps for
mobile phones to web design to computer games. This is only one
manifestation of the strength of indigenous high-tech entrepreneurship in
Dublin that feeds off the nexus of multinational corporations, innovative
research in educational institutions, and the availability of venture capital.
The success of the talent hub approach can also be seen by the fact that in a
recent survey called “Hotspots” (EIU 2012), which ranked the
competitiveness of 120 major cities worldwide, Dublin ranked first in the
Human Capital sub index and was tied for fifth (with Paris and Vienna) on the
social and cultural sub index.
The following chapters give many more examples—from diverse places
around the world facing varied economic and social challenges—that further
demonstrate the role of heritage conservation as a major contributor to
economic development.