In the context of the past decades in Belfast, the building of any new public building can only be a vote of confidence in the future of public life in the city. The construction of the Waterfront Hall is very welcome. However it is placed within a new ‘premium’ precinct, isolated by the arteries of trunk roads, railway tracks, viaducts, and the Lagan itself.

The Waterfront quarter not only repeats the segregated pattern familiar in ‘splintering urbanism’ around the world. It compounds these problems by poor urban design. Because the district is disconnected from the rest of the city, its public spaces lead nowhere and are accordingly deserted. People can’t easily get there on foot, nor get from there to anywhere else. The quayside is dead.

These weaknesses are repeated in the architectural design of the buildings. The office-, hotel-, apartment-, and multi-storey carpark buildings are of large scale and appear as an incoherent jumble. Their generic architectural design is placeless, to the extent that many do not even have opening windows. The proliferation of gated entries, blank walls, and ground-floor carparks makes for a demoralising experience at street level.

These are Belfast spaces segregated along newly-drawn lines of difference, and for wholly new reasons. The opportunities that come with a wonderful public building and a superb waterfront site have been squandered. Will the same mistakes be made in the further development of Laganside? What sort of urban futures does Belfast want for these areas?