Transport and Energy Futures Box Game!

Cork's relationships with travel and energy haven't always looked like they do now. Butter once arrived at the Cork Butter Exchange by cart and horseback along the Butter Roads. People rowed boats down St. Patrick’s Street, along the Grand Parade and back up the South Mall. You could take a train from Cork to almost any town in Ireland: a network twice the size of today's, with long-closed stations still dotted into corners of the country no railway reaches now. You could catch a ferry from the city centre down to Castletownbere, or all the way to Wales. Can we use these past sustainable forms of transport to imagine futures where a green transport revolution has transformed our city?

Did you know that the Firkin Crane was built with a rainwater harvester on its roof, long before "sustainable design" was a phrase anyone had ever heard of? Did you know that Ireland’s peat bogs are amazing carbon sinks? Can we be inspired by the wisdom of nature and the ingenuity of the past to conserve resources and energy in the present?

Let’s imagine what a genuinely green Cork might look like next. Come play a futures-thinking game inspired by the past!