The continuity of the pattern of streets is crucial in facilitating all sorts of social and economic linkages across the city. In Belfast this continuity is in places severely compromised by ‘peace walls’ and combined with techniques of ‘wedge planning’ (where industrial zones or infrastructural arteries are used in place of actual walls). They enforce new or disputed territorial boundaries, or simply reinforce existing ones. Living in the shadow of such artefacts must be arduous, until one considers the alternative. Local attempts continue to be made to mitigate their impact on daily life, through landscaping and other community projects. These are only a minor relief from the banality of such stark utilitarianism, but are the first steps in an important and often thankless task of community capacity-building.

The physical presence of the peace walls, shocking as it is, masks a deeper, even more insidious phenomenon. The conflict-era planning strategy for Belfast has been called ‘the construction of emptiness’. This goes beyond the simple segregation of the two communities one from the other. The security mentality of government bodies continues to apply the long-debunked concept of ‘defensible space’ to create communities that are segregated within themselves.

The grid of Belfast’s residential streets has been replaced with a patchwork of cul-de-sacs. The cutting of the urban grain in this way means everywhere becomes impermeable, isolated, peripheral. The essence of urbanity is connectivity, accessibility, commonality, utility. How can such built form be ‘decommissioned’? How can the residential districts of Belfast be retro-fitted for city life?