Urban Planning and Design in a Post-Conflict City: Walls, Memorials, and Public Space in Belfast, Northern Ireland

In the documentary Urbanized, various urban planners and officials from cities around the world discussed some of the major issues facing contemporary cities globally, including rapid migration into urban centers, accessible public transportation, and providing affordable and livable housing. Many of these cities were in regions reckoning with post-coloniality, some were in areas facing rapid loss of industry and business, and others were contending with heavily populated areas of substandard housing. As I was watching the innovate design and architecture plans to address some of these problems, I was thinking about my time spent living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and some of the challenges facing a post-conflict city.

Belfast is a divided city. The legacy of the conflict known as the Troubles (1968-98) is still mapped into the physical and social segregation of the city. While many people frame the Troubles as an ethno-nationalist or sectarian conflict between the country’s Protestant majority and Catholic minority, this characterization ignores the colonial roots of the conflict and violence. Beginning in the eighteenth-century, when all of Ireland was under British colonial rule, Protestant settlers were sent from England to Ireland, actively taking land from the native Catholic community. This plantation system was most robust in the province known as Ulster, most of which constitutes the six counties of Northern Ireland today. The actual partition of Ireland occurred in 1923, after years of fighting during a war for independence and civil war.

This map shows peace lines and areas of Belfast with majority Catholic populations (in green) and Protestant populations (in orange). You can see that the center and South of the city is relatively neutral, while the West is divided and the East is heavily Protestant. The distribution and segregation of communities in North Belfast is more complex than this map captures, but I'd recommend checking out the entire set of GIS maps at Ulster University's Conflict Archive on in Internet  (CAIN) at https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/victims/gis/maps/gismaps-02.html if you're interested.
Photo credit: CAIN 

Ireland was strategically carved up so that Northern Ireland would have a manufactured Protestant majority, ensuring loyalty to the Crown and the Unionist/Loyalist cause. This began forty years of institutionalized discrimination against the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican community, particularly in terms of housing access, employment, and voting rights. In 1969, protesters in the Bogside neighborhood of Derry were met with violence by the domestic police force, and this confrontation resulted in the three-day Battleof the Bogside, the deployment of the British military in Northern Ireland, and the intensification of state violence (overwhelmingly against Catholics) during the Troubles.

Peace Walls as Technologies of Government

The conflict formally ended with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and I moved to Belfast nearly twenty years after the signing, in 2016. Despite the two decades of relative peace and security, Belfast still bears the markers of conflict, most notably the “peace lines” that still divide communities throughout the city. The first of these walls were built in 1969 as temporary measures to keep Republican and Loyalist communities apart. However, many of these walls never came down, and now over 100 separate communities throughout Belfast.

The main peace line that divides the Falls and Shankill Roads

The main peace line divides working-class Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in West Belfast along the (Republican) Falls and (Loyalist) Shankill Roads. The wall now stands over 7.5 meters (25 feet) tall and stretches for 800 meters (1/2 mile). There are two gates that are still closed every night between sunset and sunrise, forcing residents (motorists and pedestrians alike) to navigate around the wall at night.Though this wall is perhaps most emblematic of the division of Belfast, a series of interrupted fences, corrugated metal and brick structures, and other smaller peace lines zigzag throughout the working-class neighborhoods of the city. These walls create what are known as “interface areas,” spaces where these segregated and polarized working-class residential zones meet. Today, these areas are still a kind of no man’s land where sporadic low-level violence such as throwing stones does still happen.

An interface area near the Shankill Road - many residents moved out of the homes directly along peace lines during the conflict, and these spaces largely remain empty today.

Memorials as Arenas in Belfast

As you can likely imagine, there are too many memorials throughout Belfast to discuss here. There are some state-sanctioned spaces of memorialization, such as the Ulster Museum in the politically neutral, more affluent neighborhood of South Belfast, but the state has been largely invested in transforming public space into usable, communal space rather than memorializing a highly contested narrative of conflict and violence. So, most of the memorials throughout the city are erected and maintained by either Catholic or Protestant communities, in sectarian areas and neighborhoods. These memorials are most often murals painted on the sides of homes and businesses. Some were put up by formal means and institutions like political parties, and others were drawn on the sides of homes near sites of fatalities, these spaces claimed by paramilitaries during the conflict.

The infamous Bobby Sands mural is painted on the side of Sinn Fein (the major Republican political party) headquarters on the Falls Road. 

This mural is on the end of a row of houses in the Shankill Arcade. Some residents willingly volunteered their homes to have these types of murals put up, and others had the murals put up without their knowledge or consent.

There's a phrase common among the tour companies that guide visitors through the segregated neighborhoods in West Belfast - the history of the city is written on its walls. These walls are not only the sides of homes and businesses, but also the peace lines themselves. Over time, as the peace lines were transformed into memorial spaces, the possibility of their destruction has become all the more complex. One of the walls known as the International Wall, depicts a series of conflicts worldwide that the Republican community wants to declare solidarity with or highlight. Even the gates and the length of the main peace line have become canvases for survivors of the Troubles, newer generations of Northern Ireland residents, and visitors alike to leave their mark on the city. These arenas throughout the more working-class and segregated parts of the city make it imperative that there be some public spaces not embroiled in these dialogues, even if it is a manufactured silence. 

Transforming Public Space in Post-Conflict Belfast: The City Centre

Though many public spaces throughout Belfast are explicitly coded as Republican or Loyalist, there are some spaces in the city that are meant to be politically neutral and culturally inclusive, particularly the city centre. Belfast is an easy city to navigate- the North, South, and West areas of the city are all adjacent to City Hall and the surrounding area of the city centre (the East part of the city is a bit more removed, across the River Lagan). During the Troubles, the city centre was a highly militarized zone; cars were prohibited from entering the centre, and securitized military checkpoints were set up along the perimeter. The goal was to keep paramilitary activity, notably car bombs, out of the center of Belfast. These security measures were an attempt to control violence and create a neutral zone in the city where commerce could continue. Today, the city centre remains the main area of commerce, a neutral space where the city has deliberately tried to foster cultural inclusion by pushing memorials and narratives of the Troubles to the periphery of the city. There are no obvious signs of sectarianism in the city centre; instead the emphasis is on shopping for residents and tourism for visitors that emphasizes more apolitical sites such as City Hall, a leaning clocktower, a weekend market, and most recently, Game of Thrones tourism.

This photo shows one of the security checkpoints surrounding Belfast City Centre during the Troubles. Cars were prohibited from entering the center of the city, and pedestrians had their bags searched when crossing the barriers. The gates were closed every night at 6pm.
Photo credit: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-37409410

A photo of the same intersection today; the security cage long gone. Interestingly, much of the city centre remains primarily designed for pedestrians, with narrow roads available to city buses but closed to private cars.
Photo Credit: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-37409410

Efforts to foster this kind of cultural inclusion and tourism in the city centre include a massive open air shopping center (a design I frequently questioned during long Belfast winters and rainy conditions) and a revitalized tourism office across from city hall where tourists can come for information, maps, and to purchase souvenirs. Tourism efforts in the city centre are helped by the city’s bus lines; the main lines all begin and terminate at city hall, making navigating simple even for visitors. During my last visit to Belfast this summer, the city had just released a new bus system, connecting the West and East areas of the city, a trip that was impossible with the securitized city centre during the Troubles and unpopular until recently because of longstanding sectarian divides.

Despite these change, as the short video above shows, these physical divides and remnants of conflict are just the outward expressions of the kinds of psychological and generational trauma that still affects much of Northern Ireland’s population. Though urban planning and design is just one way of reimagining a future for Northern Ireland that does not reify longstanding political divides in the community, the transformation of public space has been a key component of the city’s plan for revitalization and a more prosperous life for all its residents.