Frederick W. Boal

Belfast: walls within

Abstract Belfast has been characterised by a degree of residential segregation between Catholics and Protestants from the city’s founding in the early seventeenth century. This segregation has increased over time, producing current levels that are higher than in any earlier period. It is suggested in this paper that a useful framework for understanding Belfast’s segregation history is to see the city as one that has developed in a ‘frontier zone’—a zone founded on the interfacing of the ‘British’ and the ‘Irish’ realms. The dynamics of the situation can be periodised under four headings—referred to here as the ‘colonial city’, the ‘immigrant-industrial city’, the ‘ethnonational city: beginnings’ and the ‘ethnonational city: rampant’. Segregation in Belfast has provided a basis for community solidarities whilst also generating an environment for the maintenance of community conflict and group stereotyping. In this context only a resolution of the ethnonational conflict itself is likely to lead to a reduction in residential segregation.

Ethnic conflict: geography of

Much ethnic conflict is territorially based. From a geographical perspective, ethnic conflict can be viewed at three scales – the interstate, the intrastate, and the predominantly micro-urban level. However, conflicts at these scales are intimately connected and interact with each other. The outcomes of conflict can produce secession, segregation, or at least some degree of separation of the groups concerned. Again, this can be viewed across a range of scale levels. A number of territorially based solutions or at least means of regulating ethnic conflict can be delineated – territoriality, dominance, and mutuality.

Book reviews : Ashworth, G.J. 1991: War and the city. London: Routledge. xii + 228 pp. £40.00 cloth. ISBN: 0 415 05347 1

analysis by noting that cities have fulfilled a large number of varied defence functions, which in turn have played an important role in the location, morphology and functioning of urban places. In seven substantive chapters the author works his way through these topics. First examined is the fortified city, a phenomenon characterized by the deliberate erection of physical structures intended to provide a military advantage to a defender and to impede or otherwise disadvantage an attacker. Four phases in the evolution of the fortified city are recognized an evolution driven by technological ’improvements’ in artillery. As artillery improves so urban fortifications expand further and further from the city in an attempt to keep enemy weaponry at a safe distance. Indeed Ashworth notes that this