Making-Belfast

Architectural Research Quarterly, 2009

2018

Designing Place International Urban Design Conference Proceedings, 2012

This paper describes an inter-disciplinary project, Urban Research Belfast, which combines architecture and graphic design for pedagogic research and experiential urban design analysis in Belfast’s neglected urban edges. The paper first addresses an identified lack of effective collaborative skills amongst UK built-environment professionals, through supporting literature and precedents, and examines shared concepts of (dis)orientation and place- based storytelling as critical teaching and learning approaches to urban design. The paper then focuses on the development of an original shared pedagogic framework called T.A.L.K. (Teaching, Action, Learning and Knowledge), and the evaluation of a collaborative tool for urban design investigation, M.E.U.L (Machines for Experiential Urban Learning). MEUL adapts W.H.Whyte’s urbanist notion of triangulation as narrative-led experiments and events in ‘empty’ spaces to engage members of the public and local institutions in observations or conversations about these areas and the wider city. The research draws lessons about the potential of these local approaches to help designers investigate, reveal and reflect on more implicit place qualities and historical or cultural aspects of urban spaces. The paper then discusses the project’s relevance to improving the confidence and skills capacity of future designers to engage with professionals, communities, and policymakers. The paper concludes that tools like MEUL, which focus on socio-cultural narrative and open- ended ‘storytelling’ processes over discipline-specific solutions, play an important role in helping elicit higher levels of critical thinking in early-stage urban design processes, and promoting greater understanding from within rather than as an outsider. The research suggests the pedagogic lessons on creative collaboration are transferable to broader debates about place in architecture, planning and allied design disciplines; toward a more relevant, critical, and spatial place-making praxis that aspires to greater empathy with local needs and vision in urban design without necessarily sacrificing individual creative skills.

2016

Belfast, Northern Ireland is a city permeated by structural divisions, echoing underlying and deeply rooted societal divisions, which no amount of architectural intervention, even Tabula Rasa, can completely eradicate. In a city where, from the late 1960s, civil unrest prescribed a solution of walls, these once temporary structures are now permanent, having increased in size and number since the signing of the Belfast Agreement of 1998. The duality of the walls ensures that on one side communities are isolated in social housing developments where the British Army historically approved planning measures dictated by security issues. On the other, a culturally neutral postmodern city centre, re-imagined as a global tourist destination, a free and inviting environment of consumption. This city’s built environment is further fractured by major roads initiatives. Without sufficient, organized or effective opposition, such as was seen in Manhattan, Belfast’s motorway planning has ensured d...

The urban regeneration in Belfast in Europe that looks ahead" comprises contributions of international experts, that have worked together on the Belfast transformation experiences, producing systematic reflections on the role of urban design and planning in Belfast and promoting the dissemination of those experiences. The goal of the research process has been to identify, through a comparative approach between insiders and outsiders, possible solutions that could be transferable to other European countries.

This paper presents the concept of social practice placemaking (SPPM), placing this within a placemaking typology, and further anchor SPPM within a social architectural practice. It will present this thinking with global examples of SPPM and with research findings from Art Tunnel Smithfield , Dublin. SPPM is a grassroots urban and arts-led placemaking and a co-produced and performative artform. The paper will conceptualise this activity as the logical extension of urban arts practice, from public/new genre public art (Lacy 2008) and participatory arts to a ‘new situationism’ (Doherty 2004). The paper will problematize the notion of urban ‘arts and architecture’ practice and the formal sector as a critical spatial practice (Rendell 2006, Petrescu 2006) and will extend architectural critical thinking on the co-production of art as constructive of new spatial configurations and emergent relations between users and space, impacting public life (Meejin Yoon 2009), whereby locating it in the socio-political of urban life, this practice has to be understood as an art form that dematerialises the built object and is concerned with creative and social processes and outcomes. SPPM is a polylogic performative artform with space/place the non-human actant (Whybrow 2011, Kwon 2004) to the human ones of creative process and practice. It will detail who may be required in a cross-disciplinary team to affect change in urban placemaking, including the notion of ‘urban creatives’, a co-production team of ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ actors in equanimity, which includes the users of the space, planners, policy makers, artists and architects for example. It will address issues of the urban city space as a place of artistic hybridisation, cross arts boundaries in creative production, in co-production and the degree to which urban city spaces may be transformative their urban setting – for the individual, the community, the material space and arts practice.

This article explores how the spatial qualities and diversity of one of Belfast’s main arteries, North Street/Peter’s Hill, was transformed by urban planning decisions throughout the twentieth century. It looks specifically at how a car-dominated planning system contributed to the deterioration of the street fabric. Predicated on ideas of plot- based urbanism, the analysis of historic maps and plans points to the ways in which the function and dimensions of the buildings have contributed to the vibrancy of North Street/Peter’s Hill and how the more recent transformation of those functions and dimensions damaged these streets. The article acknowledges that streets are made of the social and cultural context in which they exist, while their form and function is instrumental to their embedded public life.

2019

International Journal of Architectural Research: ArchNet-IJAR, 2017

An urban space is a vital stage for social interaction and city life. Measuring the city life is always related to social, economic and cultural conditions of an urban context. Social gathering increases the quality of urban space and improves economic vitality. This paper aims to explore how successful urban spaces could impact the growth and performance of an urban context, not only as a physical urban reality, but also as a generator of social life. Utilising St. Enoch Square as a case study, a multi-layered methodological approach constituted in a series of tools was implemented, including behavioural mapping, visual preference survey, walking tour assessment, contemplating settings, and observing physical traces and by-product of use in order to interpret various forms of experiences that take place. Findings reveal various attributes of St. Enoch Square while highlighting different qualities that promote and support the overall vibrancy of the city life. Conclusions are dra...

Astrágalo. Cultura de la Arquitectura y la Ciudad, 2021

Good cities reward those who walk, looking outwards and upwards, and reflecting on the paths taken and on the sauntering asides that open an easy relationship with the city and its neighbourhoods. The Spanish paseo and the Italian passeggiata are, of course, as much about meeting friends and family as about using the connecting streets and passageways between one part of the city and another, and such act of walking is liberating, enjoyable and important in the making of place. Belfast does not, in many neighbourhoods, have that easy, social connectivity. The once easy cross-city network of minor streets is, in large part, gone. Interface walls, motorways, and other barriers and separation devices are not overtly visible in the commercial city core but continue to define key emblematic neighbourhoods. And the growth of smallscale political tourism manifested in several bus, black-taxi trails and short neighbourhood walks to visit the interface areas and their walls, have potential r...