Mike Morrissey

Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space: Gaffikin/Planning in Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Contested Space

SECTION 1: Contested Space: Concepts and Theories . Chapter 1: Cities in Conflict. Examines forms of urban conflict over resources, identity and sovereignty leading to a new typology of urban contests that distinguished between pluralist and sovereignty disputes, with some detailed examples. Also specifies the key theoretical frameworks within which space and place are currently conceived, elucidating the distinctive features of contested space .. Chapter 2: Multicultural versus Cosmopolitan Urbanism. Explores contemporary debates about the efficacy of multiculturalism compared to cosmopolitanism, in the context of policies for greater community cohesion and social inclusion. Identifies the links among important components of sustainable cities: addressing the deprived city the competitive city and the public city . For instance, in what ways can bonding social capital that accentuates solidarity within identity communities impair the requisite common civic purpose for a competitive city? In what ways can the issues of social exclusion overlap with those of inter-communal rivalry and strife, so that interventions to alleviate social deprivation can unintentionally sharpen divides?. . SECTION 2: Collaborative Planning in an Uncollaborative World . Chapter 3: Managing Divided Cities. Focuses on policy responses ranging from the benign to the coercive, examining how the operational logic of conflicts reshapes both governance and policy for instance, the frictions between (1) expanding human rights & democracy and dealing with insurgency and (2) includes the disaffected and the costs of these interventions to other citizens. The analysis includes an outline of the diseconomies of conflict, and the related stultification of viable development, as an indication of the twin process of regeneration and reconciliation. Chapter 4: Contested Space: The Failure of Planning. This chapter explores the extent to which conventional planning models deal with these problems. Can urban planning and policy inadvertently accentuate rather than ameliorate the city conflict? Do planning systems need to be reshaped for conflict situations? Yet, what are the limits of collaborative planning in achieving such objectives?. . SECTION 3: Case Studies: Belfast Chicago Jerusalem. Chapters 5 & 6: New Approaches to Planning Divided Cities. Following these previous theoretical and discursive sections, this part offers the empirical evidence. Two main case studies, each dealing with two cities. One would be in the context of the UK, comparing Belfast with Leicester, a similar sized English city and the other would be international, comparing Chicago and Jerusalem. In each of the two case studies, pluralist city conflicts (Leicester and Chicago) are compared to sovereignty city conflicts (Belfast and Jerusalem caught up in ethno-nationalist disputes). While the UK experience of exclusion and division allows comment on contemporary community cohesion/Islamic fundamentalism issues, the focus on Chicago and Jerusalem allows appraisal of conflict in two cities of global significance. The data for this analysis derives from an international research project on contested cities. . SECTION 4: Conclusions and Ways Forward. Chapter 7: Rethinking Cosmopolis Amid Increasing Diversity . This chapter proposes a new model of agonistic planning, more suited to addressing the dilemmas of contested space, and located within an approach to conflict resolution designed to transform rather than manage divided cities.

Community Cohesion and Social Inclusion: Unravelling a Complex Relationship

In a global context of an emphasis on identity politics and a ‘cultural turn’ in social analysis, deep concern has been expressed about multiethnic Britain becoming a broken society with many ‘sleepwalking’ into segregation and separatism. Given the close correspondence between areas of acute ethnic segregation and those of multiple deprivation, intercommunal tensions have included disputes about the equitable allocation of scarce urban resources across ethnicity. This creates the possibility that urban programmes may inadvertently accentuate intercommunal tension and confound efforts to synchronise cohesion and inclusion agendas. Following recent debates about the implications of increased diversity, influenced by arguments that multiculturalism has encouraged ‘parallel lives’, an emergent policy framework emphasises more proactive integration to promote ‘common belonging’. Criticism of this agenda includes its confusion between community and social cohesion, and its disproportionate focus on cultural aspects such as identity formation and recognition, relative to structural issues of income and class. In exploring this contested terrain in Britain, the article suggests that the longer-term debate about segregation, deprivation and community differentials in Northern Ireland can offer useful insight for Britain’s policy discourse.

Northern Ireland: Democratizing for Development

This introductory article does three things. First, it indicates the general purpose of this special edition and outlines the structure and intention of the four main articles that follow. Secondly, it elaborates the arguments and theoretical discourse underpinning the articles, and thirdly, it locates these concerns and development initiatives not only in the specific regional context of Northern Ireland, but also in the wider framework of a new global economy.

Remaking the City: the Role of Culture in Belfast

This chapter explores the diverse contribution of culture in regenerating a city like Belfast, badly divided both in social and sectarian terms. Beginning with a brief historical account of Belfast’s industrial development, it identifies the sequence of planning initiatives in more recent decades in order to reshape the city in a more post-industrial period. It notes the emphasis accorded the city centre as an assumed neutral space capable of accommodating new growth in the service sector, and the relationship between this revitalisation and the prospects of the city’s most deprived communities. At this point, the chapter considers the potential of the cultural industries in the city as a whole, and in particular in those communities, such as West Belfast, most scarred by economic restructuring and political violence. There is a problem here. The very term ‘cultural industries’ is ill-defined. Clearly, this sector is significant and growing. But, at the most generous interpretation, it can include every barman and waiter working at the interface between tourism and the cultural sector. However, whatever the problem with precision in this regard, the chapter considers the capacity of Belfast to deploy the sector as a contribution to regeneration (especially through the notion of a ‘cultural corridor’) while coping with deep social and sectarian division. Outlining the difference between ethnic, neutral, transcendent and shared cultural space, it examines the possibility of a city whose international appeal could rest with a more multicultural future, where diversity is prized as a social and economic asset.

Northern Ireland:The Development Context

This article provides a con textual framework for the new agenda for development, represented in the economic strategy known as Strategy 2010, and the regional spatial plan known as Shaping Our Future. These are considered in the following two articles. This article begins by setting a perspective on the political economy of Northern Ireland an d follows with an outline of the spatial planning process. In conclusion, it raises the key challenges facing attempts to renew the region.

The Other Crisis

This article critically reviews the most recent economic development strategy for Northern Ireland, Strategy 2010. It is discussed within the con text of more general approaches to region al development and in terms of questioning whether it is adequate to address the key structural weaknesses of the local economy. The judgement is that it represents a superior approach to previous economic development strategies, but remains weak in integrating social inclusion objectives into the economic development process, underestimates the potential for developing economic relationships with the Irish Republic and fails to acknowledge that community division remains a barrier to successful development.

Bringing cheer to a depressed economy — economic development in N. Ireland

In this, the first of two articles, the authors examine the particularly grim problems of the local economy in N. Ireland. They argue that such problems have to be understood in the context of N. Irelands distinctive politics and administration. Following an assessment of economic development performance in recent decades, they conclude with a critical review of government strategies for the future. In the second article they intend to examine other local suggestions for economic policy, and to outline a “popular” alternative strategy.