Characteristics of a Future City – Wilderness, Farms & Smart.

Thanks to Darragh O'Connor and Cormac Staunton, I recently fulfilled a cherished ambition of mine by getting the opportunity to give a TED talk. 
My TEDx Galway presentation was entitled Characteristics of a Future City – Wilderness, Farms & Smart.
Click here to view it.
 
The talk is based on my personal experiences of living and working in Galway. It is about the urgent need for humanity especially urban dwellers to bring the rest of Nature back into our everyday lives. We have allowed 'civilisation', urbanisation, industrial farming, mineral extraction, consumerism and technology to scar the planet and to destroy so much of its species and their habitats. 
But even now in a time of accelerating destructive man-made climate change, I see hope in what ordinary individuals and communities in Galway and elsewhere are doing in order to bring the 'Jungle' into the Cities. 

For the first time in our history we should judge and develop technologies primarily on how they improve the Earth, its countless fascinating lifeforms, our own wellbeing and not on such requirements as 'efficiency', 'speed' and 'profit'. Nature is in our genes, and for 99% of our species existence on this planet we were more or less a benign planetary force. It is only relatively recently when we became 'civilised', circa 10,000 years ago with the development of urban settlements, that we started to become a self-centred malign phenomena. 

But if used wisely our human intellect can undo the great harm we have caused.
I hope that my talk will go some way to inspiring people to ensure that the Cities of the Future will not only be Smart but will also contain forests, wetlands, rivers, lakes, wildflower meadows and organic farms.

TEDx Talk - I survived!

What an experience! Having done the 'walk' so many times, I now had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do the 'talk'.
To say that I wasn't nervous having to take part in such a prestigious event and summarise such an important topic as I had in 18 minutes would be untrue. To be honest, I was a nervous kitten in the lead-up to the event. So unlike me!

But surrounded by professional speakers all experts in their own field in such a prestigious venue as the Town Hall Theatre in front of a sell-out audience who I knew would scan a critical eye over word I spoke and every gesture that I made, weighed heavily on me.
Anyway, I gave it my best shot on the night; thankfully I did not freeze or forget my words and so hopefully I gave justice to the hard work of all community campaigners, environmentalists and the socially aware Web/Internet of Things technologists of  Galway city and beyond.

My theme was on the urgent need for cities to be Green and Smart.
My advanced preamble was:
“As the Earth is being transformed into an Urban Planet characterised by an unprecedented growth in human population, energy consumption, technology revolutions, depletion of finite resources, huge mega settlements and climate change, the future of the human species is under threat.  So cities, the new abode of our race, have to radically transform in the areas of energy, transport, health, water, food, environment, social, housing, governance and work if they are to accommodate huge numbers of inhabitants in a way that gives them a beneficial quality of life that is sustainable.
Brendan Smith looks at the need to bring nature back into our everyday urban lives. Using Galway as an example he makes the case that, as well as relying on smart technologies, cities have to be characterised by organic farms, community gardens, rooftop/exterior building vegetation, woodlands, waterways, outdoor classrooms, Greenways and local community stakeholdership. “
The Galway TEDx talks will be up on YouTube in the next few months. In the meantime I will publish a longer written version of my talk in late October (when my travels to Africa and the Middle East are completed for this year).

Finally I would like to give a big public thank you and a traditional Irish ‘Bualadh Bos’ to two brilliant hard working creative gentlemen, namely Darragh O'Connor​
and Cormac Staunton who were the brains and brawn behind TEDx Galway. With a wonderful range of international, national and local speakers and an eclectic mix of subjects, they did a superb job. Darragh- you have a wonderful future ahead of you as a 'Master of Ceremonies' extraordinaire.

Pioneering App-making Open Data workshop at Insight Centre of NUI Galway.

A pioneering workshop took place today at my workplace of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics NUI Galway. A team of dedicated volunteers of Pueng Narumol, Bianca Pereira, Niall O'Brolchain, Eoin Jordan brilliantly led by Souleiman Hasan delivered a pioneering app-making course based on Open Data. The latter are defined as facts and statistics that are freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.
In Ireland open data produced by public bodies such as government departments, local authorities and research institutes are stored on the website Data.Gov.ie  www.datagov.ie. The information available is vast and varied, covering topics such as population statistics from the national Census, yacht mooring locations, value and weight of fishing landings, family farm income, farm size, livestock numbers, traffic accident statistics, Luas stop locations, CO2 emissions by type of fuel and by engine size, and locations for playgrounds and protected structures. 

Utilisation of Open Data can bring great enormous benefits to society. Our institute Open Data expert Niall O'Brolchain is working hard to promote this message in the corridors of power across Ireland and particularly in Galway where he is a leading advocate for its development as a Smart City.
For me, 2016 will be the 'Year of App-Making' and the 'Year of Open Data' as I plan to organise a series of thematic courses in second-level schools as well as with my good friend Eoin Jordan in Coderdojo Galway city

N6 Road Route is the death knell for Developing a Sustainable Transport Infrastructure for Galway city

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A few months ago I wrote an article, that with later additions by other visionary community activists, became the first public announcement from a new NGO formed to help reverse an outdated car-centric philosophy that wants to build a new roadway that will only exacerbate the transport problems of Galway city and which goes against the trust of modern progressive urban planning.

The article appeared in the Galway City Tribune newspaper.

Hopefully once the campaign season starts in September, I can get active on this issue as due to a heavy work schedule in Ireland, Germany and South Africa, as well as family committments, I have had to take a step back.

 

Dear Editor,

A number of well known community and environmental activists in Galway city are coming together to form a new alliance to promote a ‘Future Cities’ concept based on a green ethos, smart technologies, a sustainable transport hierarchy and is neighbourhood centric which they say is the “antithesis of  the outdated policies of  the proposed N6 routes and the original bypass route”.

The group comprises veteran local community, environmental, cycling, educational and resident activists. According to Brendan Smith one of the members of ‘Future Cities’, “Across the developed world, cities are constructing new transport infrastructures prioritising public transport, cycling and walking. Copenhagen, Seattle, London, Melbourne, New York, Seville and Berlin are humanising their urban environments by introducing woodlands, gardens, recreational parks and a city-wide 24/7 cycling, walking and public bus or train systems.  Old inner city areas that were once soulless concrete jungles of offices denuded of the sounds of families and residents  are springing back to life as living vibrant communities. Whereas for Galway city, transport officialdom is proposing to build motorways that will decimate third level colleges, neighbourhoods, sports fields, key wildlife habitats, farmlands and in the process only exacerbate the transport problems leading to further urban sprawl and a city where the car takes priority over more environmentally people-based modes.

The Galway City Transport Project has nothing to do with solving our urban transport crisis but rather is based on promoting an uneconomical motorway connecting Connemara to east Galway that current data clearly shows represents only 10% of the present city traffic flow. As we were conned in the past by the official by-line that roundabouts facilitate pedestrian flow, so we are being sold yet another untruth with the proposal that a further car-based motorway will be the answer to our present chaos.

If Galway city is to have a sustainable future, the authorities should immediately bin a policy based on a discredited private car based transportation model that represents a failed 20^th century system. Instead we should use the €750 millions that we are told is available to construct a hierarchical transport model based on prioritizing pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users as was stated in the Galway City Development Strategy 2002-2012 but unfortunately never implemented.

Prioritizing private cars and motorways ignores the reality of the inevitable fossil fuel crisis as these energy sources dry up, ignores our international obligations to lower greenhouse gas emissions, poisons our air with toxins, covers much needed parks and woodlands with tarmac and concrete, and dramatically increases the noise levels that collectively impact negatively on the health of neighbourhoods and of the individual citizen.

Within our third level colleges and local industry we have the engineering and science expertise to use for instance smart technologies to help create a Living City that would attract inward investment, improve people’s quality of life, expand green zones and provide us with a template for other urban centres to emulate.