Projects & TIMELINE

The NATURERX Rain Garden PILOT - An urban rain water diversion project

Bí URBAN has been funded by the Local Area Water Programme to develop a nature-based solution for urban runoff. The NatureRx Rain Garden Pilot will slow down the flow of rainwater using a simple community-based intervention. By diverting urban rainwater from residential rooftops into purpose built rain gardens we will diminish the overflow into storm drains that leads to the pollution of our water-courses.

As with all nature based solutions this project has been designed to address multiple urban issues. In addition to diverting rainwater from storm drains these purpose built gardens will:

• Create green spaces in otherwise sterile cement yards, increasing levels of  well-being

• Provide a connection to nature and horticultural opportunities for participants.

• Increase habitat for urban pollinators and wildlife.

• Act as a carbon sink

The pilot will develop a template and the data necessary to scale up the project and make a significant impact on water management in the city while creating enhanced levels of biodiversity and livability.

SOW WILD

Join us to create 10KM of pollinator-friendly territory through community-lead action. The NatureRx SOW WILD project is a seed packet and a year long citizen science project that you can engage in outdoors while social distancing.

There are hundreds of pollinating insects in Ireland including 99 bee species. Although honeybees get the limelight, many wild bees are infinitely better pollinators and one third of these fragile species are threatened with extinction. Habitat loss is the major contributing factor. To protect our pollinators, the best thing we can do is create more wild spaces. What the bees need we need! By making cities better places to live for people we have a special opportunity to protect endangered pollinators and the future of biodiversity.

…THE LIVES WE LIVE

We were delighted to be included in the recent publication “ …the lives we live” by the grangegorman public art working group (pawg). This book highlights the experiences of participants, artists and stakeholders who took part in the last 5 years of Grangegorman’s public arts programme, their projects and the communities they’ve developed & engaged with in the process.

We have always been hugely appreciative of the work they put into facilitating creative development, and clearing new pathways to learning. Our history with Grangegorman development agency goes back to 2007, when they began holding public consultations to inform the development of the new campus.

you can have a read of the book or our particular article by clicking the links below. There are some wonderful pieces of art and writing, and we’d highly recommend perusing the stories & work that have come out of this initiative.

Bulbs for Pollinators!

With funds raised by our Broadstone Park Honey (we like to say the bees crowdfunded with their produce), we bought and distributed 15,000 pollinator friendly flower bulbs with the help of Mr.Middleton, which were planted by the public (some in new DCC beds) and photographed during lockdown as they emerged.

Nature rx

Nature Rx is a Per Cent for Arts project focused on connecting nature, people and place in the Urban environment.

The aim is to encourage local communities to engage with nature in their urban environments through different creative processes, whether it be mapping, drawing, journalling or anything else as a means for documentation and expression.

We want to use these creative expressions to create an in-depth look at how we navigate and experience our local environments, and what parts of it we value and benefit from for our health and mental wellbeing.

You don’t need to be an artist to participate, all you need is your natural curiosity and enthusiasm paired with a desire to contribute to your community.

Bí URBAN

A nature based social enterprise and hub for community engagement and social creativity in the heart of Stoneybatter, our local community! It is also one point along our proposed greenway line in the north inner city.

Facilities include a shop, resource library of specialist books to support sustainable development, an area devoted to educational workshops and a product development lab. 

Bí Urban was established to create simple solutions to complex problems. Rethinking what it is to be urban is what we are all about. Everything we do feeds into the development of our core project, creating the LIFELINE, a Living Laboratory dedicated to partnering with nature to promote physical and mental health for all members of the urban community.

Bí Urban - An International Action Science Workshop

Bí URBAN 2015 was s a unique two day process of participatory research that partnered six urban beekeeping projects with representatives from social projects, academics, professionals and citizens resident in Dublin’s Northwest Inner City, to create a hyperactive learning environment and foster trans-disciplinary exchange.

Over the two days the vision for Bí Urban and the part it would play in urban regeneration of Dublin’s north-west inner city became clear, and started us on the path of what we are now.

All Ireland Pollinator Plan

In 2015, we contributed to the development of the All Ireland Pollinator Plan (AIPP) 2015-20, the National Biodiversity Data Centre’s ambitious cross-border initiative. We began our relationship with the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan (AIPP) when we began to study bees as mentors for social change and set up an outdoor classroom, honeybee apiary and wildflower meadow in Broadstone Park in collaboration with Dublin City Council, and ran a workshop monitoring wild bees with one of the Co-Founders of the plan, Úna Fitzpatrick.

Since then we have been persistent in advocating for pollinator awareness, and took part in a community-wide project in Stoneybatter to become the first pollinator-friendly community in Ireland. The community succeeded in it’s goal, and we managed to register over 70 sites, including gardens, communities, schools, headquarters and businesses.

Established an outdoor classroom and educational apiary in Broadstone Park

A DCC Green Flag Award Winner! In Broadstone we planted a wildflower meadow, practice treatment free beekeeping and provide wild bee monitoring training for upload into the National Biodiversity Centre Database. We now manage apiaries in four urban locations, and use this location to run part of our Bee Stewardship programme.

SPUDS

SPUDS (The Sustainable Potatoes United Development Study) was launched as a proactive response to the trialling of GM potatoes in Ireland. The aim was to provide a naturally blight resistant alternative, test it’s viability with a large pool of participants and highlight the issues of food waste caused by unreasonable aesthetic standards set by the food industry.

In 2012 gave away 1.5 tonnes of non-GM blight resistant potato seed to anyone willing to join our study. 300 participants took part across Dublin and the results were overwhelmingly positive, with a 90% success rate. This was followed by the planting of a commercial sized field to provide samples to chefs across Dublin, an exercise with kids to normalise loveable wonky potatoes, and our own crisp brand that won a Bridgestone Award.

Multi-disciplinary in collaboration with TU Dublin Students Learning with Communities Programme

Our collaboration with TUD’s Students Learning with Communities began back in 2009 with Catherine Bates. Since then we have steadily been working with students of all disciplines, including nutraceuticals, architecture, design and medicinal chemistry amongst many others. It has been a wonderful experience to have input from such a diverse range of knowledge and skills

Our most recent collaboration was with Brenda Duggan, Visual Communications at TU Dublin, on a project where students conducted mapping based sensual information.

Community Clean up and biodiversity study of the Great Midwestern Railway Cutting site

Prior to Luas Cross City construction, we invited Ecologist Mary Tubridy (now ecologist for DCC Stoneybatter Greening) to help us collect and document data as part of her study of Dublin City biodiversity at that time. We would like to revisit this study ten years on to collect current biodiversity levels now that the Luas Cross City has occupied this site and the TU Dublin Campus is under construction.

The Lifeline

A project which has been in the works for over 10 years, and is at the heart of our mission and our driving force for everything we do here at Bí.

The Lifeline is a community-led project based in North Central Dublin (NCD), advocating the importance of nature to our health and wellbeing. The final goal is to establish a territory dedicated to environmental regeneration that will connect the Botanic Gardens with the Liffey, creating a ribbon of biodiversity and fertile ground for social innovation, green enterprise and nature-based solutions. 

The LIFELINE is a think tank where individuals and groups explore these issues and trial greener & more sustainable solutions to urban problems through local action. Bí Urban is its hub, run by a collective of volunteers and collaborators. Skills are shared and all contributors have value, whatever their background or discipline. Everyone has an essential role to play in how we want to live in cities going forward.

BENCHMARK

Since it’s inception in 2005 the Sitric Compost Garden Community has always been interested in enriching the culture and value and improving the liveability of this particularly anti-social space at the foot of Sitric Road.

In 2007 (after several cars had been burned out at this location) we painted a particularly ugly section of the wall white. The idea of wall art on Sitric Road attracted some negative feedback from a few people who considered it graffiti so we held off pursuing our proposal to engage local kids in a community mural project, and diverted our effort to using our excess compost to develop herb beds and a bench on the street.

SITRIC PICNIC STREET FEST

In 2005 The Sitric Compost Community Garden proposed using local demonstrations, community based research and street parties to promote urban composting and won a conservation award from Vodaphone and Irish Conservation Volunteers.

The poster for the first Sitric Picnic harvest festival that October displayed the exotic selection of home grown organic vegetables we cultivated on our own kitchen waste that first year. A far more important aspect of the harvest was the goodwill and community cohesion this simple exercise had generated amongst residents of every age and description.

Sitric Community Garden & Composting Demonstration Site

Someone once suggested that taking down the walls between terraced houses and replacing them with compost bins could cause a social revolution. In May 2005 residents on Sitric Road decided to test the theory.

We cleared a desolate scrap of ground at the end of our terrace of 60 artisan dwellings, placed two composting bins on it and limited ourselves to using what was freely available locally to begin our experiment.

The garden’s fertility has grew exponentially and our composting demonstrations, horticultural experiments and renowned bi-annual street parties (the Sitric Picnic & the Sitric Soup) became a forum for hundreds of enthusiasts to swap skills and expertise.