Communities as constructs of People and Architecture: Historically assessing the spatial legacy of The Troubles in inner-city Belfast, 1969-1994.

The Troubles describes the social-historical phenomenon occurring between 1969 and 1994 when the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was at its most extreme. Those 25 years have had a profound impact on the social, political, economic, cultural and spatial structures of Northern Ireland ever since. The consequent reaction by government, security and statutory authorities bore witness to a profound material impact upon inner-city communities resulting in architectural and spatial disconnection and disengagement with the economic and social structures that manage, govern and regulate the built environment.

This review focuses on a specific aspect of material impact, the built structures installed within the inner-city to divide streets, disconnect spatial continuity, mitigate against vehicular flow and limit pedestrian movement. These vary in implementation and include walls, bollards, landscaping and the locating of housing across the path of existing streets. This material impact is extensive across inner-city Belfast. Whilst the sociological and economic impact of The Troubles has received much research attention the impact of these built interventions has yet to be systematically assessed. This review recognises the inner-city exemplar of Ballymacarrett, East Belfast as a community of disconnected people and disconnected spaces. The considered implementation of these divisive built structures has served to fundamentally fragment and spatially disconnect this community. This review conceives of a community as an intrinsic ecosystem of people and the built environment and addresses the challenging issue of engaging a disenfranchised and disconnected community with a broad range of stakeholders and academic research. The review process is a catalyst for inclusive discussion that involves a team of project partner stakeholders, directly linking the review process with the agencies with the remit and funding to implement urban regeneration and social housing policy review and change.

The aims of this review are to utilise knowledge gained from academic and practice-based research methods to inform and stimulate discussion amongst key stakeholders with active inclusion from policy makers and the community. Such discussion has the stated aim of developing a policy discussion mechanism that will continue to progress the issues highlighted by the review beyond the review period. These aims meet address the objective of engaging research with non-academic stakeholders; empowering the related community; developing a methodological framework that is transferable to other contexts.

The creation of buildings and spaces is a complex scenario involving stakeholders across the social, political and economic spectrum. As a consequence built artefacts contain much embedded information pertaining to a wide variety of perspectives that concern, and have potential to engage, the community within which they are installed. The research team of an architect and a fine art photographer presents a cross disciplinary approach to analysing this context. The disciplines have been aligned to provide a historical record that is accessible to a diverse audience of community, policy, politics and academia. Architectural and spatial analysis will identify Case Studies of built structures that will be documented and illustrated through conceptual photographic representation. Built structures will be utilised as mechanisms to extract data of historical and contemporary importance, eliciting new knowledge. Disconnections will be highlighted and former connections illuminated. The key relationships that are revealed will be essential tools towards addressing the very real architectural and spatial issues within inner-city Belfast communities. Such analysis will present a new perspective to the social, political, economic, cultural and spatial factors that shaped physical change in this community in a distinct and extreme period in cultural history.

A major impact of this review process will be the direct engagement of the review findings with the key stakeholders responsible for urban regeneration policy and strategy review, and social housing policy review. These agencies, The Department for Social Development and The Northern Ireland Housing Executive, are included as project partners in this review process. This engagement will be facilitated through a structured Stakeholder Engagement Workshop that will take place in August 2012.

A key objective of this workshop will be to support the formation of a Stakeholder Working Group that will maintain progressive discussions beyond the review period and help promote public sector impact. The workshop will address the issue of which agency is most appropriately placed to steer this issue forward.

Community representation will also form a key part of the Stakeholder Engagement Workshop and this will impact positively on this element of the general public. This Workshop will include specific activities that have been designed to bring members of the community into this engagement process, empowering them with the ability to be equitable participants. The active inclusion of community consultation in the review will form evidence-based findings that can feed readily in a mechanism that promotes policy change beyond the review period, as envisaged in the Stakeholder Working Group. This will help promote cultural change within a community that is disenfranchised and suffers high levels of social deprivation.

There will also be impact on Third Sector agencies related to this review. The East Belfast Community Development Agency and East Belfast Mission are project partners that have established third sector agency initiatives promoting health and well being in East Belfast. Both agencies will be collaborators in the Stakeholder Engagement Workshop. This process will engage these agencies with the review process and findings, thus fostering relationships. This process of engagement will link the real issues that are highlighted by the review with Third Sector agencies with the established infrastructure to help ameliorate these issues

The review process employs a developing methodology that is applied to a case study context. A major academic impact of this work will be its transferability to other contexts, where communities are impacted upon by conflict and where built structures can be distilled and interpreted to reveal historical information. This methodological inquiry provides an innovative approach to the Arts & Humanities and will be of interest to related researchers. This methodology and the new knowledge that it provides will be brought to the international academic community through articles in journals like the Journal of Architecture and History of Photography. A peer-review Workshop will take place in May 2012. The purpose of this activity is to further develop the research findings, in-progress, with acknowledged experts in the field, such as Eyal Weizmann (Professor of Spatial & Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths College, London), Stephen Graham (School of Architecture, Newcastle University), Mark Power (Professor of Photography, Brighton University) and David Campany (Reader in Photography, University of Westminster). This will be a multi-disciplinary meeting discussing inter-disciplinary research methodologies and provides a mechanism for knowledge exchange between the participants. The School of Architecture & Design has been developing a research focus in the area of Architecture, The Troubles and The Community, which this research would boost. A follow-up Symposium hosted by the School would disseminate the review findings to a wider research audience both within the University and amongst policy makers, politicians and the community.