Abstract
Fostering open conversation injects innovative ideas and strategies accessible to all people. Against the backdrop of the end of oil, climate change, pandemics, and other converging catastrophes in cities where online education and work, civic engagement and social unrest are increasingly common, there is only one institutional remedy – knowledge based urban development (KBUD) to build back better, safer, and fairer cities (Alraouf, 2020; Boehnert, 2012; Kunstler, 2006). Since COVID-19, we can observe the centrality of online platforms. On the one hand, online platforms have diminished the institutional relevance of university campuses and corporate headquarters, while on the other it has disrupted complex socio-technical, cultural and political systems. An Open Society generates holistic knowledge rather than scattered, fragmented and isolated research centres or higher education based on ICT facilities. This is necessary to defuse the deep structural conflicts when transforming our carbon society. All-inclusive knowledge networks must be established by sectors of the community to confront employability, the crisis of post-secondary education, political radicalism and cities that become unliveable as they are deserted by qualified workers. Pivoting from the national “Smart City” debate in Canada, the absence of grassroots planner’s skilled in post-carbon narratives explains Google’s Sidewalk Labs decision to pull out of Toronto. The creation of the African-Irish (AI) Coalition aims to establish a Smart City policy of global significance by exploring the Irish Memorial Park alongside Open Science advocates. This approach alludes to the post-World War period, where urban renewal projects across North America required vulnerable groups to form multi-ethnic coalitions to stop gentrification, establish community centres and build affordable housing (Kim, 2020). KBUD generates many questions about an urban post-carbon society and the usage of new education technology. For example, how must citizens mobilize public solutions to rising global inequalities? A digital revolution for sustainable urbanism comprehends historic undercurrents of race, transnationalism and politics (de Laurentis, 2021; Thompson, 2020). To orient social change intelligently the AI Coalition primes a critical conversation about contagious structural dynamics of industrialization, questionable land ownership, and repulsive political and religious interference that led to 170 years of the famine memorial’s neglect. Open Science argues that education prioritizing wealth is a kind of high treason. Exigencies of the civic engagement in a knowledge economy require access to free scientific research to promote democracy, alongside healthy and ecological living. To expand, deepen and mobilize scholarly Open Science globally, this project draws from the expertise of the “Association science et bien commun” (ASBC), a publishing house and resource for cognitive justice with privileged links in Africa and Haiti. Established in 2011, the ASBC is a member of Radical Open Access and publisher of a Diamond Open Access journal. The late ASBC president, Florence Piron co-authored “Open Science Beyond open Access: For and with communities.” Existing platforms bridging local and global citizenship, such as Edmonton’s Africa Centre, do not provide a brave space to share stories and generate an Open Society. Holistic knowledge ties local history and community responsibility. The Irish Memorial Park must embed a global legacy for the 6000 famine victims and the volunteers that sacrificed their lives to assist the destitute immigrants afflicted by typhoid. To avoid urban conflict and exodus caused by energy and education disruptions, the case study envisions conceptual tools for a conscience of place that modernizes synergies between humans, the environment and new education technologies (Magnaghi, 2014, p. 6). The AI Coalition is a new global paradigm for knowledge-intensive “urban bio-regions” that empowers multi-ethnic transnational communities to adopt resilience and self-sufficiency.
