William J. V. Neill

Urban Planning and Cultural Identity

Acknowledgements. Preface 1. Knowing Your Place: Urban Planning and the Spatiality of Cultural Identity 2. Planning, Memory and Identity 1: Acknowledging the Past in the City of Remorse 3. Planning, Memory and Identity 2: Erasing the Past in the City of the Victors 4. Place-making and the Failure of Multi-Culturalism in the African-American City 5. Cosmopolis Postponed: Planning and the Management of Cultural Conflict in the British and/or Irish City of Belfast 6. Conclusion: Environmental Citizenship as Civic Glue? Bibliography. Index.

The Debasing of Myth: The Privatization of Titanic Memory in Designing the ‘Post-conflict’ City

This article argues that the newly relaunched ‘Belfast Titanic story’ puts too much emphasis on extravagant claims for the real ship Titanic and thereby overly commercializes design and other public space issues in Belfast such that the Titanic of representation and its profound mythic status in western culture is debased. This reality in a ‘post-conflict’ city, where an ethnic war of attrition between competing identity claims forecloses mature cultural dialogue, is regretted.

Shaping our Future? The Regional Strategic Framework for Northern Ireland

This article presents a critical evaluation of the new Spatial Development Strategy for Northern Ireland. The regional plan is considered in the context of the wider peace process. The exercise drew on assimilationist and pluralist approaches to the divisions within the area. The article argues that, however well intentioned, there have been flaws in the planning process. It is the private housebuilding industry that has been most successful in separating assimilationist and pluralist rhetoric from the core practical reality of housing location issues and thus mobilizing to advance their interests. Lessons are drawn for planning practice in the future.

Carry on Shrinking?: The Bankruptcy of Urban Policy in Detroit

Much attention has recently been focused on the bankruptcy of the City of Detroit in 2013 and the reasons for the largest municipal fiscal melt down in US history. Contrary to a view gaining currency, which dismisses Detroit as the product of exceptional forces and largely calls it the architect of its own collapse, this article argues the case that Detroit conveys more general lessons for European cities struggling with decline, not least of which is the need for interventionist regional planning to avoid predictable but avoidable urban distress. The article briefly reviews the well-documented decline of the city of Detroit measured against population, economic, fiscal and image impacts. It considers five current misreadings of the reasons for Detroits predicament and implicit signposts for European practice before concluding with an assessment of what has been hailed as the shoots of yet another possible renaissance in the originally proclaimed Renaissance City over 40 years ago.

Berlin Babylon: The Spatiality of Memory and Identity in Recent Planning for the German Capital

The 2001 film Berlin Babylon explores place-making tensions in reunited Berlin concerned with the spatiality of memory. Taking cues from the film and based on interviews with memory workers in Berlin, the article considers the problems surrounding national identity narrative (re)construction in Germany and the role of spatial imagination necessarily invoked by this. Foregrounding the role of capital city planning in etching or erasing memory traces in identity construction, the argument is made that in the presentation of identity ambivalence Berlin fortunately remains an uneasy place where a national narrative of continuity exists in tension with an identity narrative which seeks to incorporate rupture.

Strategic Spatial Planning in Berlin–Brandenburg: A Requiem for Balanced Development?

Abstract This practice review examines Berlin–Brandenburgs new strategic spatial planning framework and considers, in particular, whether balanced development in this context is now simply a neo-liberal fig leaf and mantra acting as policy cover for more pragmatic accommodations in harsh times. The article concludes that such a judgement would be too harsh with the concept continuing to mould creative engagement by decision-makers.

Representing the Maze/Long Kesh Prison in Northern Ireland: Conflict Resolution Centre and Tourist Draw or Trojan Horse in a Culture War?

This chapter reviews the debate over the future of the Maze/Long Kesh (MLK) prison complex about 10 miles southwest of Belfast in Northern Ireland (see Fig. 12.1), the most notorious site of state detainment during the course of a low-grade civil war and violent action where the legitimacy of the British state in Ireland was the centre of traumatic and well-publicised conflict perversely developing in its wake the market niche of ‘terror tourism’. The MLK site has already been on an unofficial visitor/memorial trail with the wider tourist potential prominent in visions for future development. That some also propose the total razing of the prison, foregoing any touristic exploitation, bears testimony to the feelings churned up by the deeply affective terrain. The chapter proceeds by way of locating the contested meaning of the prison site and possible re-use within the wider phenomenon of the so-called dark tourism of which prison tourism is a part. This is followed by a brief consideration of the wider local framing context for the Maze/Long Kesh, where the notion of a still existing cultural war of attrition is introduced to make sense of this Northern Ireland prison controversy as the premier battle space for the high ground on which the dominant narrative and meaning of ‘the Troubles’ may be written. The history of the prison debate over the carceral material legacy is then reviewed with the main articulated options and their tourist potential outlined. The chapter concludes with a proposal for breaking a current impasse in decision-making. The case is made for the Maze/Long Kesh as part of a counter monument to mark the attempted working through of conflict by more peaceful means.

Don’t mention the culture war: Beyond creative ambiguity and professional “quietism” in Northern Ireland/North of Ireland spatial planning?

The breakdown of political talks in Belfast over Christmas in 2013 dealing with how the legacy of conflict (including its spatial expression) and frictions involving symbolic spatial markers (flags, parades and commemorations) should be handled, came as no surprise to many who saw chickens (if not turkeys) coming home to roost. While these talks, facilitated by US diplomatic envoy Richard Haass, grappled with warring narratives of conflict amidst a faltering peace process, the lack of any spatial planning voice from either the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) or Irish Planning Institute (IPI) in the over 600 submissions to the initiative should not go unacknowledged. As I argued 15 years ago, since at the nub of the peace process is the issue of how identities can be given agreed and officially legitimised forms of expression, the profound link between identity and place makes this issue also very much a spatial planning matter (Neill, 1999, p. 273). If, as a recent editorial in this journal has argued (Campbell, 2010, p. 473), that the planning profession needs to be less risk averse, this Haass self-imposed exclusion must be seen as an important opportunity missed. The constraints involved, discussed below, do not, it is argued, excuse it. While discussion is focused on planning amidst conflict in Northern Ireland, the point that planners have a responsibility to stimulate spatial imaginations has more general applicability.

Comment: Klaus Kunzmann's Reflections on Spatial Planning

Klaus Kunzmann, more than any other German planning academic, has pioneered leading edge European spatial thinking and disseminated it to a wide continental and especially English-speaking audience. For the last 30 years he has been professor at the Institute for Spatial Planning at the University of Dortmund. This collection of articles published in a variety of European journals and books over the period usefully brings together under one cover seminal material for those interested in the evolution of European spatial development strategies and concepts over the last three decades. The material is variously written in German, English and French but with German overviews for each thematic section provided by colleagues of Kunzmann at Dortmund. The sections dealing with the future of European city regions, with the Ruhr in Germany used as a laboratory case study particularly emphasising the importance of cultural strategies as drivers of regional development, occupy over half of the book with the remainder dealing with planning in the developing world and European planning education. It is the first cluster of concerns dealing with the need for a planning hand at the spatial tiller of European regions, sailing as they do in an increasingly neo-liberal sea, that particularly grab attention. Here Kunzmann is keenly aware of the power of spatial metaphor. In 1992 he suggested a bunch of grapes as a desired image of Europe’s spatial future responding to the banana prominent in European regional planning literature in the late 1980s. The banana suggested that Europe’s spatial future lay predominantly in a large corridor extending through Manchester, London, Benelux countries, Rhine-Ruhr and Rhine-Main to Milan. The bunch of grapes was to symbolise both the interconnected reality and desired state of Europe’s urban system representing 2000 years of settlement heritage incorporating the aspiration of relative spatial equity. Almost 10 years ago Kunzmann posed the question “is there any hope of maintaining and promoting spatial equity in Europe, beyond ideology, beyond political rhetoric, and beyond the cohesion fund?” (p. 47). Despite publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective in 1999, endorsing the notion of polycentric development of the EU territory as the desirable guiding hand at the European spatial tiller, Kunzmann’s question remains as valid as ever. In the 21st century it is certain that Europe’s grapes will be squeezed. With a drastically ageing population, increased migration flows and cultural mixing and the with the outworking of globalisation, Europe’s city regions will be vastly different places in 20 years time, with associated challenges to governance and economic development. Will the encouragement of the creative city region, a current concern of Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 7, No. 4, 489–491, December 2006

Beyond the Balm of Communicative Planning: Can Actor -Network Theory Insights and a More Agonistic Practice Help Unlock Creative ‘Post-Conflict’ Potential?: Towards a Renewed Research Horizon in Northern Ireland

Abstract In a situation, where tribal tram lines seem stuck in place this commentary suggests that an imaginative jolt taking into account recent thinking in planning theory may be warranted and go some small way to subvert the current state of stasis on the still contested terrain of Northern Ireland/North of Ireland. The alliance of procedural agonism and analytical actor network theory (ANT) offers, it is suggested, the augmented potential of a more conceptually diverse approach to planning in terms of conjuring with spatial imaginaries and airing latent outcomes, where communicative planning on its own has exhibited imaginative limitations.