Cities everywhere are fragmenting. Differences in social, economic, and cultural identity are increasingly articulated by the built environment. In almost every city there is evidence for the emergence of an ‘archipelago society’, an urban patchwork of isolated differences. Shared spaces everywhere are under threat.

Belfast is already a city splintered into polarized territories. The stark segregation has not only been driven from within the two communities, but also reinforced through the planning of infrastructure and the distribution of land uses in the city. Citizenship in Northern Ireland has been understood almost exclusively as a politics of identity rather than also as a politics of place. As a direct result, a whole range of environmental issues of local and regional concern to both communities have remained largely un-championed. Meanwhile, structures of government have been left highly-centralized and locally-unaccountable in response to thirty years of civil conflict. The construction industry has taken advantage of both these conditions by leading the way with generic commercial developments familiar from fragmenting cities elsewhere, often indifferent to local social, spatial, and environmental contexts.

Despite the peace dividend, there appears as yet to be little movement to decommission the ‘carceral’ city and the mechanisms that produce it, or to imagine dynamic pluralist alternatives. While there have been numerous attempts at generating new ‘city visions’, much of this is premised on the denial of existing conditions in favour of idealised futures. What is at stake is the public life of the city.