Just back from Ireland, where I had the honor of presenting a keynote at the launch of Dublinked, a joint data-sharing initiative of the capital region’s four local authorities.

I last visited Dublin in 1989, which means my experiences of the place neatly bracket the economic boom and all the Celtic Tiger rhetoric that went along with it. It’s clear that the flush times swept over the city and then receded like the tide, leaving it (like so many other places) now having to do more with less; Dublinked, in its own way, is part of that effort.

I explored the implications of this with Deirdre Ni Raghallaigh of the City Council’s innovation Studio, City Architect Ali Grehan, and Owen O’Doherty, coordinator of Dublin’s bid for World Design Capital 2014. They were kind enough to share with me the city’s admirably clear and concise public realm strategy, and spend a morning contemplating what the move toward open municipal data might mean for that strategy and the streets encompassed by it.

There was also time for a talk at the brilliant Science Gallery (which I recommend you save time for should you happen to be passing through town). If the Dublinked keynote was, appropriately enough, oriented toward the opportunities and benefits of spontaneous order from below, my Science Gallery presentation tried to balance that out some, with a discussion of the challenges that inhere in networked public objects.

Finally, I was lucky enough to visit the Occupy Dame Street protest, and participate in a General Assembly on healthcare issues. I can surely understand why this might not be an obvious or a particularly popular thing to suggest, but I heartily recommend that anyone involved in the provision of municipal services spend a few off-duty hours at the nearest Occupy site — if for no other reason than to expose yourself to a pungent précis of constituent sentiment at this moment in history.

Among the things I gleaned from listening to the General Assembly was a concern that cropped up again in my conversations with City Council, having to do with the yawning disconnect between the community’s needs and the relatively high percentage of Dublin properties that have fallen into dereliction and its predictable sequelae.

This, of course, isn’t a problem confined to Dublin, or to Ireland; I was just reading the other day about the physical and social implications of a heavily-foreclosed landscape for outer Queens. But the collapse of the real-estate bubble does seem to have hit Ireland with particular force. It’s resulted in the mass transfer of foreclosed and otherwise nonperforming properties to NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency, and a good number of these have been left vacant, or even abandoned mid-construction. (See Conor McGarrigle’s NAMAland for an augmented-reality guide to NAMA-owned Dublin.)

Technically, it’s easy for us to imagine some kind of space-as-a-service intervention that would return at least a portion of these structures to active use. But the things that prevent us from doing so generally aren’t technical. They’re institutional, economic, structural. Many an empty, decaying edifice is carried on a bank’s books at a wildly unreal notional value, and absent some other intercession, the act of writing them down en masse to permit the kind of use we have in mind would be catastrophic. Until something is done about these ludicrous valuations, neither you nor I nor anyone we know will be able to apply the tools we have ready to hand to the situations that are otherwise so clearly suited to their deployment.

This is a dynamic we see cropping up time and again in our work. Consider this very nice, student-designed integrated transit map for Dublin: there’s no reason on earth why something like this couldn’t be offered to the ridership…but for the fact that the various transit agencies involved simply won’t coordinate their activities. Or think of the city’s new digital arrival-time panels for buses, which have to be mounted on their own plinths a few meters from where people wait, because a private concern operates the bus shelters themselves. How are we ever going to offer people anything close to our vision of transmobility when the usual reasons of interinstitutional friction scuttle our efforts at or close to the outset?

I’d argue that open data is surely a part of the solution to these problems, but primarily important in its power to catalyze the efforts of an activist constituency. Dublinked, along with comparable efforts like DataSF and London’s official Datastore, are vitally necessary, but nowhere near sufficient. The rest has to come from the citizens themselves — and that means closing the gap between the seemingly distant Venn circles inscribed by Dublinked and Occupy Dame Street. We’d appear to have our work cut out for us. [Insert smiley.]

Many thanks to Deirdre, Ali and Owen for inviting me over; to Andrew Montague, Lord Mayor of Dublin, for getting it; to Ré Dubhthaigh for the obligatory pint of Guinness; and to Occupy Dame Street’s General Assembly for the inspiration and insight.

- My Dublinked talk wasn’t the only keynote in the shop this week: Leah was down South to present to the annual conference of the Georgia chapter of the AIA. (This was rather sinisterly named “One Architect, One Future.”) Her talk addressed the various modes of practice now available to the architecturally trained — from traditional to experimental — and ways in which young architects are adjusting to a difficult economic climate. Including, presumably, going to work as a GIS specialist for an urban systems design practice.

- Elsewise, work continues on Transitflow Chicago; Mayo and Leah are cranking away on maps and goodies for our new and sorely needed website, which is closing in on completion; and Mayo, after many wranglings with the wild and wacky world of New York City real estate, found an apartment on the same block as the famous 10th Street Baths. Jeff, meanwhile, is working his way through the logistical tangle of LLC law, and is doing a damn impressive job of same if I may say so. See y’all next week.