A Sustainable Cities initiative @Phibsboro Tower, Dublin 7
The Urban Hedgerow is an open innovation biodiversity challenge to expert, non-expert and cross-disciplinary stakeholders to communicate and cooperate in order to forge impactful solutions to urban biodiversity loss.
The stakeholders in the Urban Hedgerow ecosystem are local residents and citizens, education providers, environmental and horticultural scientists, private land owners and public realm managers.
The D7 Urban Hedgerow is a ‘community of participation’, learning and sharing knowledge to identify and enact measurable actions in the urban fabric to enhance native species biodiversity and support insects and wild life in the contested and hostile environment of a modern city.
Urban Hedgerow partners with Phibsboro Biodiversity Group, Shandon Sustainability Group, @PhibsTidyTowns, @ConnectingCabra, @CabraTidyTown, Cabra Youth Community Garden, Phibsboro Mens Shed and The Bohemian Way.
The Urban Hedge project was awarded the BuzzFest Biodiversity Award for a Community Garden, in association with DCC Biodiversity Office in 2022.
Urban Hedgerow Sustainable Cities – an NGI | TRUBLO case study
The Urban Hedgerow initiative is one of two case study contributors to the European funded NGI TRUBLO research project Crowdfield Companion culminating in the publication of a whitepaper titled: Smart farming and climate action: knowledge transfer and stakeholder reputation in multi-disciplinary innovation ecosystems. The second case study was provided by the nascent decentralised science collective VIN-Q , a regnerative agriculture initiative targeting the wine-making industry in Catalonia.
Together each project created a community- specific use case for the CFC mobile wallet to demonstrate the benefits and challenges for agri-blockchain in remote and dissparate communities. The mobile wallet provides the infrastructure to deliver a custom-curriculum for multi-disciplinary innovation ecosystems. Each “Learn-to-Earn” application incentivises learning pathways in climate-facing knowledge domains.
An important aspect of the study was to identify key stakeholders in these emerging multi-disciplinary ecosystems and to bind new knowlege with the advent of precision agriculture and ubiquitous computing on farms and in agriculture and landscape managment domains.
These ecosystems are early-adoptive, and bound by a shared sense of common purpose. Challenges included synchronizing communication and collaborative actions within the new context of hybrid-virtual farming and re-wilding scenarios.
One notable effect of engagment within the communities themselves was the role of imagination, posturing and performance in how each participant viewed their own role and those of others as influencer, advocate, activist or champion within this novel context of ‘Digital Grower Collectives’.
This extended to how trustworthy, reputable or reliable the information shared by each participant was considered. The remote-hybrid nature of communications and knowledge-sharing led to a reordering of existing social roles and those with adaptive personalities, online social networking skills and smart-phone proficiency were able to adapt to the emergent context quite well.
Social proofs and partnerships
Urban Hedgerow on OpenSea
Urban Hedgerow – Phibsboro Tower collectables are the first series of proofs for community activists to document, validate and verify climate positive actions in their locales. Unlike other records of community action (often through social networking), the Urban Hedgerow collectables reward participation by issuing proofs-of-work (PoW), proofs-of-existence (PoE) or proofs-of-play (PoP) as NFTs in partnership with local green initiatives and sustainability-focused groups. View the full collection of Urban Hedgerow – Phibsboro Tower here.
All revenue from this collection will be used to fund the establishment of new urban greening and biodiversity projects with other self-selecting communities. All earnings generated from secondary sales will be directed to fund similar initiatives in perpetuity.
This engagement with Web3 systems and technologies led the group to support the CFC | TRUBLO project aims and to test the CFC mobile app, a Learn-to-Earn microcredential incentive and reward scheme for climate-smart activist ecosystems. More here.
In the beginning – Local Green Initiative
In 2021 Kevin Lynch established the Phibsoro Local Green Initiative to identify candidate spaces for regeneration and reclamation for community and climate-friendly ends. Linking with local groups including the Phibsboro Biodiversity Group at Villa Bank Gardens and Shandon Sustainability Group, Kevin worked together with the Property Manager at Phibsboro Tower (BNP Paribas) and local horticulturalists to bring about the Urban Hedgerow at Phibsboro Tower, a 73m long, portable native species city hedgerow on top of the single-story car park, under the stadium lights at Dalymount Park, at Phibsboro Tower, one of Dublin’s divisive city buildings, a brutalist ‘elephant’ in the heart of Dublin 7.
