Mulranny Geodesign Workshop Phase 1. Geodesign is a methodology for planning large-scale urban and landscape settlements devised by Harvard Professor Carl Steinitz and used to design and evaluate how to plan and design future settlements. Steinitz has been developing on online Geodesign platform with Hrishi Ballal of UCL over the last two years. The Mulranny Geodesign Workshop was the first of its kind in Ireland and the first time globally in which community members played such an active role in collaboration with design professionals and academics. This two-day event involved 30 participants, a mix of local community members, local authority stakeholders, architecture and landscape specialists from UCD and invited experts in heritage, ecology, and environmental design.The workshop consisted of an intense two days of group work, facilitated by Carl Steinitz, and Hrishi Ballal, in which teams evaluated the study area under selected themes and then worked to make designs based on their earlier evaluation models.The workshop was a joint initiative of Mulranny Community Futures and the UCD School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy and was supported by the Heritage Council, Mayo County Council, Irish Design 2015.
Mulranny Geodesign Workshop Phase 2. The second phase involved a refinement of the projects and proposals made in Round 1. These were then placed on public exhibition and a public ballot of proposals was taken, which established a Public Design. This design was then negotiated in a final workshop to produce the Final Negotiated Design for Mulranny. This design is evidence based, has been negotiated by community stakeholders, local authority representatives, invited experts and academics and by the public through the open ballot process. The resultant package can be used a template for future planning in Mulranny.
Mulranny Crowd Mapping. As part of Heritage Week 2015, we designed a crowd mapping event, at which local community members from Mulranny recorded their knowledge of the cultural landscape of Mulranny village and the surrounding area under a number of headings including place names, habitat, routes, commonage, coastal change. The event was supported by the Heritage Council and the resulting maps were used as a source of data for the subsequent Mulranny Geodesign Workshop.
