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The Irish traditional music festival ‘Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann’ was first held in Drogheda, Co. Louth in August 2018 and subsequently in August 2019. The host town benefitted not only economically during the festival, but also from enhanced investment in infrastructure and marketing. This created a legacy that has outlasted the event itself. Irish traditional music has typically been associated with the west of Ireland and narratives and marketing related to the tradition typically involves reference to rurality. As an urban place on the east coast near the border with Northern Ireland, Drogheda presented a new location and new spaces for the festivalisation of Irish traditional music culture while simultaneously requiring organisers to consider the use of urban public space for festival activities. The local authority was a significant stakeholder in Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann in Drogheda and utilised the opportunity to create and disseminate an identity for the town and region that would have a legacy for tourism beyond the staging of the event. Using reflective ethnography and interviews with local authority representatives and the festival organisers, this study critically considers how towns are thinking about their public spaces in terms of outdoor staging, public congregation and access. This chapter focuses on the use of such public space during the festival and the development of an identity for Drogheda as a place of festivals. The chapter highlights the importance of urban 'public spaces' and their utilisation as something both local government policymakers and festival audiences are looking for. Such 'public spaces' once re-imagined are now seen as 'experience spaces' in which the quantity and variety of festival experience possibilities are vital.

Ireland has many established participatory design experts and enthusiasts, and a rich landscape of practice. PDC Place Ireland comprises of a series of panels, exhibitions, and workshops, and will bring together academics, research students and practitioners to explore current practices in participatory design enacted in Ireland and internationally. These events will map participatory research across a number of contemporary contexts including public health, architecture, policymaking, and disability.

The United Nations (UN) considers universities to be key actors in the pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet, efforts to evaluate the embeddedness of the SDGs in university curricula tend to rely on manual analyses of curriculum documents for keywords contained in sustainability lexica, with little consideration for the diverse contexts of such keywords. The efficacy of these efforts, relying on expert co-elicitation in both subject-matter contexts and sustainability, suffers from drawbacks associated with keyword searches, such as limited coverage of key concepts, difficulty in extracting intended meaning and potential for greenwashing through “keyword stuffing.” This paper presents a computational technique, derived from natural language processing (NLP), which develops a sustainability lexicon of root keywords (RKs) of relative importance by adapting the Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method to a corpus of sustainability documents. Identifying these RKs in module/course descriptors offers a basis for evaluating the embeddedness of sustainability in 5,773 modules in a university's curricula using classification criteria provided by the Association for the Enhancement of Sustainability in Higher Education's (AASHE). Applying this technique, our analysis of these descriptors found 286 modules (5%) to be “sustainability focused” and a further 769 modules (13%) to be “sustainability inclusive,” which appear to address SDGs 1, 17, 3, 7, and 15. Whilst this technique does not exploit machine learning methods applied to large amounts of trained data, it is, nevertheless, systemic and evolutive. It, therefore, offers an appropriate trade-off, which faculty with limited analytics skills can apply. By supplementing existing approaches to evaluating sustainability in the curriculum, the developed technique offers a contribution to benchmarking curricular alignment to the SDGs, facilitating faculty to pursue meaningful curricular enhancement, whilst complying with sustainability reporting requirements. The technique is useful for first-pass analyses of any university curriculum portfolio. Further testing and validation offer an avenue for future design-science research.

Climate change has already had a significant impact on both tangible and intangible cultural heritage globally. Climate change-induced impacts on tangible cultural heritage include historic buildings being damaged by increasing sea levels, and harm caused to coral reefs as a result of increased water temperatures to give just two examples. In the sphere of intangible cultural heritage, climate change can lead communities to abandon their environment and related customs and practices, influencing how they live, eat, work, socialize and worship. Given the spiritual connection between Indigenous Peoples and their land and nature they are disproportionately affected by climate change. This loss is inter-generational, as Indigenous practices and customs disappear when communities are forced to leave their traditional homes and lifestyles. This article seeks to assess how the international legal framework can potentially address the impact of climate change on Indigenous intangible heritage. It also review recent efforts by UNESCO to address climate change and its impacts on cultural heritage.

Abstract While European integration has predominantly been addressed in terms of its common market and through questions of European identity, this article explores alternate perspectives of environment in peripheral landscapes as a practice through which European center-periphery relations are negotiated. Drawing on two case studies, namely the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and the arid regions of Almeria in southeast Spain, we highlight how these landscapes have been variously framed as explicitly European spaces through either developmental narratives or environmental activism and advocacy. We argue that European integration is realized and contested through the discursive and material transformation of landscapes. With this, we contribute to an understanding of environmentalism and the politics of the environment as instrumental in addressing broader and parallel political concerns. Combining southern and eastern European perspectives on the political geography of the environment, we show that the landscape functions as an intrinsically political arena that materializes and discursively frames the different meanings and interests of European integration at stake.

Recent decades have seen a dramatic increase in research output on arts festivals and cultural events, and a growing focus on the role festivals play in negotiating and constructing meanings of place. However, little attention has been paid to how place shapes the process of festival making and artistic production. This paper attempts to address this shortcoming by examining the extent to which place matters to the production of festival activity and asks: how does place influence festival making and artistic production in a local arts festival context? The study is part of ongoing qualitative research into the Five Lamps Arts Festival, a local urban festival in Dublin’s North Inner-City and employs a mixed methods approach. Findings indicate that processes of festival making and artistic production are permeated by the social, cultural, and physical dimensions of place, thereby revealing the potent and mutually inter-dependent relationship between place and festivals.

Abstract As mines go deeper and get larger, mine designs become more fragile largely due to the response of the rock mass to mining. Ground control and rock support become important levers in the mine construction schedule, production performance, and excavation health. For example, in cave mines, the production footprint together with associated mine infrastructure are significant investments in a modern caving operation. This investment must be protected and maintained to reduce the risk of ground-related production disruptions. It is necessary to preserve the health of these excavations and their maintenance through an effective rock support design. Rock support thus becomes a strategic element in asset management. This article focuses on support design for brittle ground when displacements induced by stress-fracturing consume much of the support’s capacity. It deals with the functionality of the support in deforming ground. Several interlinked concepts are important when assessing excavation health. Designs must not only account for load equilibrium but also for deformation compatibility and capacity consumption. Most importantly, the support’s displacement capacity is being consumed when the rock mass is deformed after support installation. Hence, it is necessary to design for the support capacity remaining at the time when the support is needed. If support capacity can be consumed, it can also be restored by means of preventive support maintenance (PSM). This concept for cost-effective ground control is introduced and illustrated on operational evidence. Furthermore, how design can impact construction costs and schedule are discussed. Support is installed to provide a safe environment and preserve an operationally functional excavation. It also must assure senior management that investments in high quality support and its maintenance will substantially reduce delays and with it, costs. It is demonstrated that the use of ‘gabion-like’ support systems can achieve these goals. A technical summary of the ‘gabion panel’ support system design is presented.

Global cultural heritage is threatened by the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters caused by climate change. International experts emphasise the importance of managing cultural heritage sustainably as part of a paradigm shift in cultural heritage perception, understanding, and management. This paradigm shift has stimulated a need to integrate cultural heritage into pre-existing disaster risk management governance. However, there is currently a lack of robust and practical approaches to map the complex nature of disaster risk management governance. It is here considered that a shared understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of the different organisations involved in risk management is a critical element in improving the preparedness of cultural heritage sites. The purpose of this article is to present the utility of the Organigraph technique and its main components as a tool to map governance structures, identify key stakeholders, and integrate cultural heritage experts into wider disaster risk management. The article presents a semi-empirical research approach, consisting of four iterative phases in which a series of digital workshops, semi-structured meetings, and bilateral expert meetings were used to co-produce five Organigraphs for heritage sites participating in an ongoing European Project. Our findings suggest that Organigraphs provide a valuable tool at the disposal of practitioners and academics with the potential to provide a basis for cross-national, cross-issue, and cross-scale peer learning between heritage sites. Furthermore, the technique is a valuable self-diagnostic tool to facilitate learning and proactive discussions in the preparedness phase of disaster risk management. Finally, they facilitate the co-creation of solutions through an evolving, interactive platform to integrate data-driven approaches.