Searching for the soul of the city
Inspiring Cities Dublin Week - an overview
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15-06-2007 /views: 304 in past 12 months.
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Now that we’re coming to the end of Inspiring Cities Dublin Week, we thought it would be good to recap on the massive amounts of discussion and debate we’ve had on all things to do with the cultural and urban development of Dublin City.  Over the week we’ve published 36 articles on different aspects of culture in the city and we’ve interviewed 9 people about their thoughts on the importance of cities and city life.Some of the people we interviewed included: Anngret Simms, David Norris, Conor Skehan, Alan Mee and Frank McDonald.  We also included the thoughts of students from home and abroad on city life in our Culture and Cities questionnaire section.
School of Spatial Planning on making better use of what we identified as under-used places in the city.  The results of these workshops on places like Newmarket, Wolfe Tone Street and Phoenix Park are shown in our Planning and Design section.
 
Inspiring Cities encourages debate on culture and the city.  We published some articles on different topics, including Art in Urban and Suburban Public Space, creating the Five Minute City, a debate among planners on Spatial Planning and why it’s worthwhile to Invest in the City.  These are all in our Inspiring Cities Debates section. 
 
Inspiring Cities is all about making the city a better place to live.  We think that promoting cultural development in all its forms can do this.  There are interesting global cultural movements, but each place is different and has its own culture so this search is endless.  That’s why our motto is “Searching for the Soul of the City”.  Some of our regular contributors provided presentations on this very topic. 
 
Inspiring Cities has a Lost and Found section.  This is where we feature interesting things that are appearing and things that are disappearing from city life. 
 
We also have a CityPoems section, where Inspiring Cities is building an online museum of poems in public spaces. This week, we featured CityPoems from Dublin, on top of the ones we already had:
> Dublin CityPoem no 1: At the Café Zanzibar
> Dublin CityPoem no 2: Anonymous: “Don’t Quit”
> Dublin CityPoem no 3: Anonymous: “Community Gain”
> Dublin CityPoem no 4: “There’s Poetry in a Pint of Guinness”
> Dublin CityPoem no 5: Rupert Brooke: “War Sonnets”
> Dublin CityPoem no 6: Oscar Wilde: Epigrams and Quips
> Dublin CityPoem no 7: Dr. Bob Moorehead: “The Paradox of our Age”
> Dublin CityPoem no 8: Anonymous: “Open Your Eyes”.

We’re sure you noticed that Inspiring Cities coincided with Blooms Week, probably Dublin’s most special cultural occasion.  But did you realise how many other cultural things are happening right now in the city?   

For more Dublin Cult Up Your City on Inspiring Cities, see:
Things to do in Dublin at the moment include the Dublin Writer’s Festival, Temple Bar Diversions Festival, the Bloomsday Festival, the International Street Performers World Championship, Docklands Summer Programme and the Taste of Dublin Festival.  You can also visit a unique exhibition of the Codex Leicester – possibly Leonardo da Vinci’s most impressive collection of scientific memoranda – on in the Chester Beatty Library.  
 
Or, if you just happen to be in Lisbon you could visit the impressive Irish contribution to the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2007, entitled “Line to Surface”, which explores many of the subjects that Inspiring Cities has looked at during the past week. 
 
You could just stay in and read some Inspiring Cities Dublin Week debates.  Or you could go out and enjoy some of the above events like we’ll be doing.  But remember that Inspiring Cities is an open source network and we want to hear your ideas, so if you’ve got anything to say about city and culture, let us know.  Ideas beget ideas, and that is what will make cities better places for everyone.
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