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BELFAST: SEGREGATION, VIOLENCE AND THE CITY . Segregation is reproduced not by the boundaries between places but via the deeds and actions that maintain the need and desire to remain separate. Despite the decline in violence, identity formation remains influenced by a real and imagined presence of
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1. Pete Shirlow School Of Law Queen’s University Belfast
2. BELFAST: SEGREGATION, VIOLENCE AND THE CITY Segregation is reproduced not by the boundaries between places but via the deeds and actions that maintain the need and desire to remain separate.
Despite the decline in violence, identity formation remains influenced by a real and imagined presence of an ontological ‘other’ that is ‘threatening’.
Sectarian consciousness is spread across a wide plain from the mild and relatively benign acknowledgement of difference to the exclusivist and dramatic desire to remain uncontaminated by the presence or contact with the ‘other’.
Practical spatial relationship based upon the desire to create ‘good’ relationships, between communities, by remaining apart.
This benign ‘solution’ is at times rational given that threats abound but such threats are not representative of a whole group but of sections within it.
3. BELFAST: SEGREGATION, VIOLENCE AND THE CITY Sectarianism is not merely a repressive relationship between communities but also within them, given that highly vocal sectarians undermine the capacity or desire to publicly articulate a shared intra-community future.
Problems exacerbated when political leaders aim to define, to the group that they oppose, what their interpretation of democracy is.
There is ‘no’ political alternative capable of challenging the sterile and repetitive politics of ethno-sectarian based resource competition.
4. The Belfast Agreement
5. UVF: Pre-Ceasefire
6. Loyalist: Pre-Ceasefire ‘Tom and Gerry Adams’
7. Republican: Pre-Ceasefire
8. Republican: Pre-Ceasefire
10. A Segregated City
11. January, February, March, March, March
12. Catch 22
15. The Two Ardoynes
16. Republican Victimhood
17. Victimhood Through the Ages: Loyalist
18. Loyalist: Victimhood
19. SEGREGATION LEVELS Segregation in Belfast by Community Background
20. ETHNIC POKER The difficulties of promoting integrated housing and the need to protect freedom of tenant choice.
The very ‘wickedness’ of the problem explained the lack of a normative stance.
It is important to understand the ‘restless search’ for state legitimacy in a period of uncertainty in public policy in general and housing in particular.
21. ETHIC POKER CONTINUES? Clearly, there has been progress in the attitude and response of the state to territoriality and the legacy of conflict.
However, viewed in the context of the wider strategic development of Belfast, in the last 30 years, a number of contradictions and inconsistencies emerge in the way in which problems are conceptualised, managed and resourced.
For instance, whilst there has been a response within a number of sectoral areas concerned with the use and development of land, it is not clear who leads, where the strategic oversight rests and how different Departments and agencies work together on very similar problems and opportunities.
22. PROBABLY The analysis and management of territorial problems requires a broader context that understands the economic, social and environmental aspects of locality change and development.
The investment made to develop the capacity of groups in order to turn their neighbourhood around, deliver an incredible pace of growth and heal divisions in some of the most polarised places in the city seems dangerously optimistic.
IT MAY BE TOO LATE
23. A FURTHER GUIDE
