Peace Building Grass

Christensen, Thea Dahl ; Ernshof, Sine Bjerg ; Dukic, Adi

4. term

Urban Design, Master

2020

2020-05-20

131 pages

Post conflict cities exist all over the world and experience unique challenges that require innovative and sensitive responses (James,2018). One such city is Belfast, Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has a history of 30 years of violence in a socio-political religious conflict between the protestant and catholic communities, known as the ‘Troubles’. This makes Belfast a city characterised as post conflict. The consequence exists in different terms both in the; political, historical, cultural and urban development. The urban process of Belfast has started to regenerate some of the existing vacant, poorly defined or unused spaces, to create shared green spaces. These spaces are today either influenced by hostile architecture; interfaces, fences and highways (which separate and to protect citizens from one another), or poorly defined and unused public spaces. These create conditions which work against social coherence and social interaction and make the urban development in a post conflict context even more complex. Theoretically, a variety of urban scholars have proposed different perspective and evidence on how shared spaces and green spaces have a positive effect on social interaction and social coherence. These studies call for new ways to ensure green spaces can become shared spaces. As a result of this, both policies, public bodies and academic literature there is a need an increased recognition of shared green cities. However, one oversight of these studies is that they often lack detail on the practical tools needed/considered to facilitate the development of shared green spaces. Thus, there is a missing link between the theoretical dimension of social interaction and social coherence on the one hand and the physical development and design dimension on the other. This is the gap this master thesis wants to investigate and fill out. Peace Building Grass presents a master thesis in Urban Design, exploring green spaces in East Belfast. It is research on how to turn theory and policy into regenerating- design tools. This thesis presents a case study of Ballymacarrett based on local expert assets with an emphasis on future and resents regenerating projects and activities in Belfast. The thesis takes forward the work of Ian Mell and Luisiana Lang by extending the missing development and focus on designing shared green spaces in a contested environment.

Regenerating ; Shared green spaces ; Post conflict ; Social coherence ; Segregation ; Interfaces

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