Why Converting vacant buildings to digital growth hubs is key for recovery of our towns

Opinion piece by Eoin Costello, Digital Champion for Small Businesses at DigitalHQ clg

As light appears at the end of the post-pandemic tunnel the plight of our cities and towns is starting to come into sharp focus. High vacancy rates on our main streets, derelict buildings and decaying heritage are “eating away at communities, eroding our sense of place and jeopardising the viability of local businesses and traders”.

We are a social enterprise located in Dun Laoghaire. We convert empty space in listed buildings in town centres into vibrant hubs to attract digital businesses and support traditional businesses. We call these facilities Digital Growth Hubs and we believe they can play a major role in the regeneration of our towns in the coming years.

The economic future of our Town post-pandemic

While Dún Laoghaire is an urban town within the greater Dublin region (with over 140,000 people living within a 10-minute drive and 34% of the population under 30 years of age) its high street struggles with many of the same challenges that towns across Ireland do. The main thoroughfare, George’s Street, is approximately 1.2 km long and features 264 shop fronts, most of which were built in the 19th century.

In my time as co-founder of Startup Ireland, I witnessed first hand the positive impact on urban areas of the conversion of vacant buildings into vibrant digital hubs but one element that was missing for me was the importance to extend the mission of the digital hub to include supporting local traditional businesses.

For the past 5 years, we have been working hard with the help of Bank of Ireland and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council to make this happen in my home town of Dún Laoghaire. Our work to date here reflects our goal of enhancing the vibrancy and economy of the town by supporting a strong employment base through digital.

The Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Development Plan, which sets out the land use framework to guide future development, closes for public submissions this Friday, 16th April 2021. We feel that this provides DigitalHQ with a good opportunity to highlight the potential of our Digital Growth Hub model. Our model enables localities to leverage people’s loyalty to location to create indigenous engines of growth in their area that are not dependent on large factories or MNCs but on the existing fabric of towns and cities in both the built and social sense.

We believe that within 10 years coworking spaces will be the highest use of unoccupied space in our towns providing hubs of collaboration and community for knowledge workers. However, this will only come to pass if towns can provide a suitable environment and suitable office space to attract digital and creative talent.

This is essential to creating sustainable local jobs as knowledge-intensive innovation-driven businesses create high-quality jobs which produce a positive multiplier effect for the locality. Moretti identified that for each knowledge-intensive job 5 additional jobs are created in the locality.

What’s the collective noun for a cluster of small businesses? A town

Eoin Costello, Digital Champion for Small Businesses at DigitalHQ

What is a Digital Growth Hub?

I wrote recently about the inspiration behind DigitalHQ’s model being thought leader Bruce Katz. His concept of New Localism describes a problem-solving practice for communities in the twenty-first century.  He believes that the real power of regeneration lies locally in communities where people live and work. Katz suggests the business community of twenty-first-century towns must comprise both traditional businesses and innovation-driven enterprises.

The key benefit of this is the future-proofing of small businesses with a local market focus (such as restaurants, dry cleaners, professional service providers), they need to sit next to a cohort of innovation-driven enterprises (businesses that have a global market focus with products and innovation at their core) to benefit from sustained footfall with a high capture rate.

Our approach seeks to achieve this through creating a fusion between new and old ways of doing business. While traditional enterprise centres and commercial coworking spaces focus inwardly on their client companies and community within their facility, a digital growth hub focuses both inwardly on the incubated member businesses but also outwardly on digitally empowering the locality it sits within.

This outward focus is what distinguishes a digital growth hub from a remote working hub or an enterprise centre. The goal of a digital growth hub is unashamedly to spark a digital revolution in regional localities and create a virtuous cycle of economic growth for all elements of the business community.

Figure 1 – DigitalHQ’s model for an engine of economic growth in a locality

The main components of our Digital Growth Hub model have been fine-tuned in Dun Laoghaire Town and includes:

—  Repurposing Space – Under the name ‘Dún Laoghaire Enterprise Centre’ 10  businesses are incubated in the enterprise centre operated by DigitalHQ with the support of Bank of Ireland. The centre acts as a marketing hub to attract new businesses to our town.

As a social enterprise, all the membership fees from the hub go into supporting DigitalHQ’s work in the town. Our coworking space is also a feeder for the commercial coworking spaces and serviced offices in Dún Laoghaire thus making a whole new layer of coworking spaces possible in the town.

—  Attracting and Networking Innovation Driven Enterprises – Our hub helps build the bridge between the digital and traditional business communities in the town through our programme of Meetups. Under the name @DigitalDunLaoghaire we have run 33 free events since 2016 for over 1,300 attendees who heard in excess of 97 expert speakers.

—  Collaborative promotion of traditional businesses – Under the name ‘Love Dún Laoghaire’ almost 100 local businesses have been supported by our hub through 10 digital promotion campaigns. These Buy Local campaigns focus on the online offerings of local small independent businesses at key events in the calendar such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, January Sales as well as sector specific promotions.

Figure 2 – Our Digital Growth Hub model in action

A new vision for our town centre as a remote working destination

“I believe that securing high-quality coworking space is important now more than ever as remote working becomes part of the new norm and many businesses disband their central office spaces. At present, there is high demand for such facilities, with supply falling behind in Dún Laoghaire.”

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill T.D – Honorary Patron to DigitalHQ

When I was a County Councillor back in the early noughties I learnt the hard way that it is difficult to unite people unless there is a clear vision, one that offers benefits to all stakeholders. Our Chairman’s recent presentation to Minister English described DigitalHQ’s vision for a future post-pandemic Dún Laoghaire as “the Palo Alto of the east coast of Ireland, the Brighton of the Dublin region, bustling with innovation-driven businesses that support existing traditional business, a hub for tech and digital talent and vibrant business networks.”

Will there be enough demand for the step-change in suitable office space we are proposing for the town? We would reply in the same vein as Henry Ford, reputedly when developing the Model T he quipped that if he had asked people at the time what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.

We believe that the evolving demand for hybrid workspace options post-pandemic mean that the opportunity for Dun Laoghaire, in its pivotal location, to become Dublin’s coworking capital is real and achievable.  To do this we need to create a critical mass of suitable office space, a hive effect. We believe that this is a goal that the public and private sector in our town need to unite behind for the common good.

DigitalHQ’s chair, Chad Gilmer, proved in our town that repurposing vacant retail space works. He took a long term unoccupied retail space in Dun Laoghaire and converted it into Glasshouses2, a high-quality coworking space that has brought 100 professional jobs to the main street of the town who all shop locally.

While in the public sector there are a number of vacant buildings in the town that are suitable for repurposing where the owner has a direct economic interest in the economic vibrancy of the town, i.e. the County Council and state agencies.

Creating an influx of knowledge worker jobs would be a significant benefit to local retail, with the potential to upscale the offering and mix of retail businesses in the town. As noted by Philip Oltermann in “the age of Amazon, it seems the way to thrive is to specialise”.

In some ways, the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin show one way forward for small businesses in the future of retail. A good example of a local business that has deepened its offering as the town has progressed is JJ Darboven.  This business has grown its presence in the town from their traditional coffee brewing for individual customers to full coffee roasting on site and even a barista training academy.

JJ Darboven, Dun Laoghaire

Vacant buildings should be repurposed

Our submission to the County Development Plan will propose that an engine of economic growth in the form of a top-quality coworking space needs to be included in the development of each quarter of Dun Laoghaire town to achieve the twin objectives contained in the Urban Framework plan namely:

1. The provision of a variety of small shops with well-defined frontages that help create a busy village character with improved shop fronts and signage.

2. The creation of the conditions to attract internationally mobile investment and provide opportunities for indigenous enterprise growth.

The State’s Architectural Heritage Protection guidelines cite the benefits of adapting historic buildings to meet changing needs being remodelled to accommodate new uses, and especially those that have outlived the functions for which they were constructed. On the basis that the greenest building to build is the one that is built already our proposal identifies four unoccupied, listed buildings in Council/State ownership which would benefit from refurbishment, conservation and repair that repurposing to coworking hubs would entail.

At the heart of our submission is a proposal that No. 9 Georges Place and No. 3 Kellys Avenue, Dún Laoghaire (Formerly Offices and Stores for the Council Depot) become a digital growth campus for the twenty-first century.

George’s Place, Dun Laoghaire

These buildings are vacant since 2013 and according to DLR CoCo, there are no current plans for the possible future re-use of these buildings which are “Protected Structures” in the County Development Plan 2016 to 2022.

DigitalHQ have submitted a detailed proposal for how these two adjoining empty properties in George’s Place could be sensitively repurposed as a vibrant enterprise campus giving new life to the listed buildings. We believe that the proposed digital growth campus in George’s place would replace the economic activity lost in that locality when the nearby Dun Laoghaire Enterprise Centre closed (with the loss of office space for 17 businesses) and could act as an economic engine for what the draft development plan terms the ‘Old Town Quarter’.

Figure 3 – Architectural concept drawings of the proposed Digital Growth Campus

The digital growth campus would cater for a mix of small businesses, social enterprises and digital/creatives.

The other buildings that will be included in our submission include

—  Former Carnegie Library Building – corner of Library Road & Lower Georges Street, Dún Laoghaire; Quarter: Old Town Quarter. This building has been vacant since 2015.

—  Former Senior College Dun Laoghaire building, Eblana Avenue Quarter: Town Centre Quarter. This building has been vacant since 2014 and has temporary occupants currently.

—  Park House, 66 Lower Georges Street, Dún Laoghaire (on the corner with Park Road). Quarter: Park End Quarter. This building has been vacant since 2010 apart from the temporary popup shop on the ground floor.

If implemented our proposals have the potential to deliver a major boost for the town and could likely lead to a transformation of the fortunes of many businesses in the town, while also increasing the likelihood of new investment.

This exciting possibility could provide an inspiration to other towns across Ireland that have vacant state-owned buildings and want to attract knowledge-intensive jobs.

About the author

Eoin Costello is the Digital Champion for Small Businesses at DigitalHQ clg. He is an expert trainer in digital marketing, social media and digital productivity tools delivering programmes for DLR LEO and Accelerate. As former CEO of Startup Ireland clg he rapidly built the new organisation’s impact through digital channels (Twitter followers from 0 to 22,000 followers, LinkedIn Group 0 to 13,500 members and Facebook Page to 5,000+ Likes).

In this role he was national director of Ireland’s national startup week, the Startup Gathering. By leveraging digital the Startup Gathering saw 420 events take place in 22 counties. It was trending nationally over the 6 days with 5.4m impressions and achieved 400,000 views on YouTube.

Eoin was also programme Manager TU Dublin Hothouse for 3 years where he managed the incubation centre and Ireland’s largest entrepreneur programme, the flagship New Frontiers Programme. He was SME Innovation Advocate to the Info2Innovate national programme for Enterprise Europe Network leading delivery of the EU funded action on SME innovation and productivity in 5 cities across Ireland in 2012.

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