Dr. Fiona Mc Dermott

Industrial sites and their surrounding regions are key drivers of Europe"s economic growth and competitiveness, providing jobs, resources, technological innovation. Industrial production and its linkages with energy, mobility, and supply chains have historically prioritized operational efficiency and short-term cost reduction often at the expense of long-term environmental and social sustainability, leading to substantial negative externalities, including high consumption of raw materials, excessive greenhouse gas emissions, high energy demand, inefficient waste and by-product management, fragmented infrastructures. These impacts extend beyond the industrial site boundaries, putting significant stress on adjacent cities and regions through air and water pollution, resource depletion, and spatial inequalities. CIRCUIT will implement a set of innovative governance mechanisms, participatory methodologies, digital tools, evaluation frameworks and upscaling activities to enable industrial sites and urban regions to transition toward sustainable, circular and climate-neutral ecosystems. The interdependencies between urban and industrial coexistence, energy systems, land use, public procurement, mobility, and waste/resource flows" demand pose also additional challenges for this transition. CIRCUIT will leverage advanced digital technologies, i.e. interoperable dataspaces, participatory digital twins, real-time monitoring systems, and simulation models to support planning, engage stakeholders, and facilitate evidence-based decision- making. These tools will be designed for replicability and scalability, ensuring that they are adaptable and tailored to diverse local contexts and governance structures. CIRCUIT will bridge behavioral and institutional gaps by designing capacity-building programmes, communication strategies, collaborative learning environments to support local actors in adopting circular and climate- conscious practices.

In the dual contexts of increased pressure for more ICT networked systems, and increasing global resource scarcity from energy, raw materials and ecosystems survival, there is an ever greater need to critically engage with the complex and often contradictory relationship between the ICT industry, energy demands and the climate crisis. The industry has to date successfully shaped public discourse, by obfuscating the material reality and associating new developments with `inevitable" progress, all the while facing growing issues of acute cost-of-living challenges, uneven development and societal pushback. Yet in shaping a strong public narrative of technological prosperity around the proposed economic and environmental gains of future developments, there exists a notable absence of both counter-narratives on their material resource usage and monopoly driven business models, as well as alternative strategies for dealing with developments and their climate-impacting emissions. As a means of challenging these narratives, we take an engaged research approach inspired by feminist science and technology studies, to bring attention to the new logics, lived experiences, and emerging frictions brought about by these new ICT infrastructural arrangements. We offer forms of counter data as a means to displace the dominant narrative of infrastructural change as put forward by those with vested interests. Importantly, the intention is not that of blunt antagonism but to refocus attention and support for the untold social and ecological costs of ICT technologies. For more information, see: https://counterdatalab.com/

The Connected Communities project is a transdisciplinary research project involving academic partners at Queen"s Communities and Place (QCAP), CONNECT at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), and a network of inner-city community development organisations in Belfast and Dublin. The project seeks to empower under-resourced urban communities in Belfast and Dublin to take an active role in shaping the digital interventions that directly affect their lives. Positioned at the intersection of urban planning, open-data informatics, and community engagement, Connected Communities addresses the systemic exclusion of marginalised communities from the data-driven decision-making processes that drive urban innovation. Central to the project is the need to challenge the epistemic and structural imbalances prevalent in traditional smart city models. The project aims to challenge this dynamic by creating a network that amplifies the voices and agency of community groups across smart city project areas in Ireland. Its approach is rooted in community-led governance and participatory co-design, ensuring that marginalised communities have a meaningful role in shaping urban innovation. The initial phase of the project (2024) focused on three key objectives: (i) Empowering urban communities: Connected Communities prioritised connecting local communities to strengthen their capacity for collective action. By promoting collaboration both locally and regionally, communities can be better positioned to influence urban development agendas and address shared challenges. (ii) Bridging the gap between stakeholders: The project sought to bridge the gap between those managing smart city projects"usually academic, municipal, and commercial consortiums"and the citizens living and working in the so-called "opportunity areas." While managing entities are typically well-networked, local communities often remain disconnected from the decision-making processes, a gap that Connected Communities aimed to address. (iii) Establishing cross-border collaboration: Connected Communities introduced a North-South dimension to existing smart city projects, linking communities and researchers across Belfast and Dublin to enhance knowledge exchange and collaboration. This cross-border network mirrors the existing economic and skills corridors and aims to influence smart city agendas not only locally but also on a broader European scale, over time. https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/qcap/news/ConnectedCommunitiesAmplifyingLocalVoicesinUrbanInnovation.html#:~:text=Connected%20Communities%3A%20Amplifying%20Local%20Voices%20in%20Urban%20Innovation&text=The%20final%20workshop%20for%20QCAP's,Dublin%20on%2011%20June%202024.

The ARTSFORMATION research project explores the intersection between arts, society and technology and aims to understand, analyze, and promote the ways in which the arts can reinforce the social, cultural, economic, and political benefits of the digital transformation. More specifically, the project aspires to boost Europe's ability to use the arts in tackling complex technological transformations, such as data ethics and quality, artificial intelligence, unequal participation opportunities in the digital economy, and more. Through research on the transformational capabilities of the arts, and by involving actors from many different sectors of society, the project intends to mobilise the arts towards a better and more participatory digital world. https://artsformation.eu/

Entanglement explores the materiality of data and the interwoven human, environmental, and cultural impacts of information and communication technologies. It highlights how data production and consumption territorialise the physical landscape, and examines Ireland"s place in the pan-national evolution of data infrastructure through raising awareness about the material footprint of the global internet and cloud services, which is entwined with the Irish landscape both historically and in the present day, from the landing of the first transatlantic cable at Valentia Island in 1858 and Marconi"s, transmission of wireless radio messages across the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century to Ireland"s current role as Europe"s data centre hub.