Belfast City Council and Stormont’s Department for Infrastructure will not admit they are trying to engineer trouble out of the landscape, literally, at the Bloomfield Walkway in east Belfast, the site in recent years of the Chobham Street loyalist bonfire.
A play park was built in 2016, to no avail. Now £190,000 has been spent landscaping the area with low hillocks, leaving barely a pallet-sized patch of level ground. Local sensitivities and the absence of ministers may explain why officials are pretending this is just a spot of gardening. However, designing out public disorder has always been a subject of coy fascination to the authorities in Northern Ireland.
Bonfires should be a relatively straightforward problem to tackle in this manner. Develop a site in any way and it is no longer available, as the property boom of the last decade often demonstrated. Rioting flashpoints are trickier but solutions should be possible. There is a particular mix of space, cover, access and escape that rioters like and urban planning could remove. Parading is the great unmentionable. Can the psychology of ‘traditional routes’ be changed by pedestrianisation, for example?
Politicians and officials still turning up to events at Stormont were almost confronted with these issues last year.
The assembly commissions an annual series of academic papers and seminars from Northern Ireland’s universities to inform policy making. The last paper presented before the programme was suspended, in June 2018, was entitled “Hidden barriers and divisive architecture: the case of Belfast.”
This paper, from Ulster University, looked at the city’s unacknowledged peace walls. The best-known is the Westlink, dividing west and north Belfast from the city centre, but there are numerous other cases of roads, car parks, industrial estates or just waste ground that serve the same function.
The paper points to “a little-known process of security planning that accompanied the comprehensive redevelopment of inner-city Belfast between 1976 and 1985.”
But it adds much of this was organic - interfaces naturally become waste ground, or useful only for car parks.
Some of it was standard planning, with security appeal. Small cul-de-sacs and housing estates with few exits were highly fashionable at the time, based on the latest European ideas. Residents found them reassuring and the security forces found them a mixed blessing, contrary to urban myth.
The paper ended by challenging policy-makers to recognise hidden barriers as peace walls and remove them.
As a small example, cul-de-sacs could be given through-access, at least on foot.
Roofing over the Westlink for a linear park - currently the height of fashion - would be the ultimate example.
What has happened at the Bloomfield Walkway presents another challenge - to recognise hidden barriers as peace walls and improve them.
Although the bonfire site is not an interface in the strictest sense, as a scene of confrontation with the police its landscaping is a de facto peace wall. We can all agree it is a pity this is necessary. But if it works, what urgency is there to re-level the ground and why should the concept not be applied elsewhere?
High-rise apartment buildings often appear to be effective peace-walls, or displacers of bonfires. Leisure centres and other community facilities, such as at the former Girdwood Barracks site in north Belfast, are meant as hidden peace walls yet can be expensive and ineffective. Should these unfashionable facts be acknowledged and explored?
Like the difference between integrated or shared education, it is the difference between ending division or managing it.
While ending division might be the desirable end goal, managing it might be an essential first step. Or it could be entrenching and counter-productive. Or it could be an end-state we could live with. Many of the world’s greatest cities were redeveloped with riot control in mind, Paris being the most famous example. Academics considered the subject for London after its 2011 riots.
By refusing to admit what they are up to in east Belfast, the council and the department are stymieing this crucial argument and even discrediting it, given that the purpose of their civil engineering is so blindingly obvious.
Whatever the political or legal reasons for their double-speak there is no need to be embarrassed. We have made a tourist industry out of our peace walls, so we are beyond embarrassment already.
