Project Objectives

This project aims to enable the citizens of Dublin to:

examine urban sustainability through the lens of Irish literature.

compare and contrast the manner in which sustainability has been explored within historic and contemporary writing .

participate in public forums, such as poetry seminars and musical tales, that raise awareness of sustainability.

understand that creative writing is in itself an essential component of urban sustainability, and to participate in that process.

express their understanding of sustainability in literary forms to be shared with the wider world.

collectively propose and share approaches to urban sustainability (crowd-source) within an online social media ESD hub dedicated to harnessing opinions within the public sphere and/ or in creative literary formats (public installations).

Description & Partner Role:

In 2010, Dublin became the fourth City of Literature within the UNESCO creative cities network. Literature is in the fabric of Dublin, with four Nobel prize winners in literature (Shaw, Yeats, Heaney and Beckett) among other globally noted writers such as Swift, Wilde and Joyce. Cultural urban citizenship & sustainability require active participation by citizens for it to be a living city. And Dublin’s historical and contemporary reputation as a place of great writing and storytelling is vital to the vibrancy of the city. This project aims to use literature as a vehicle for examining issues around sustainable societies, with a specific focus on urban sustainability. It thus focuses on raising public awareness and improving public expression of key sustainability issues through the examination of Irish literature exploring social, cultural, economic and / or environmental sustainability within urban areas, such as Dublin.

Three events will be hosted in conjunction with partners (DCU and Fightingwords), one each on poetry, literature and music to correspond with major events in the Calendar such as Bloomsday, that focus on sustainability. For example: Strumpet City by James Plunkett has an emphasis on poverty and corruption within Dublin in 1913, and lends itself to discourse around economic, cultural and social dimensions of sustainability. Similarly, Louis McNiece’s poem ‘Dublin’ explores connections between environment, society and identity formation. Therefore, the examination of literature provides both a context and a mode for exploring sustainability within society, and thus is a creative form of implementing ESD. The contributions in and from each of these events will be collated in a compendium of poems, stories and musical offerings within the theme of sustainability, and will be made available to others through a web-based ESD platform.