July is not a usual month in Belfast. It’s holiday time — north coast beaches, infinite Donegal sands, the beautiful flat half-light of dusk of the western coast. For others it’s a time to play their part in, what is for some a controversial historical narrative that has, one way or another been weaving its way down through Ulster’s history — bonfires and marches. July is a month of distractions — holidays and bonfires. What a strange time then for the pre-planning consultations for two controversial schemes in the city to take place. 

On the face of it, the scheme presented at the recent public consultation by the developer and their architects seems, nice enough. A public square surrounding one of Belfast’s most historic buildings, Rosemary Street Presbyterian church; a new glass office block; cafes, restaurants, retail units; photoshopped people, sitting in the sun outside coffee shops. But spend some time looking at the glossy computer visualisations and it isn't long before another story starts to emerge. What looked like a public square is really just a privately owned psudo-public space; a privatised space, to be owned and controlled by the eventual landlord. This is a worrying trend happening in cities across the UK and Ireland where the the democratic openness of cities is being privatised at the expense of our access, experience and enjoyment of the city.

At night-time, when the shutters drop, this psudo-public space, animated for a few hours a day by office workers heading to their generic office block —which if you didn't know was in Belfast could be anywhere — will be empty. Add to this Belfast’s high retail vacancy rate (one of the highest in the UK at 17%), and the lack of affordable housing provision — in a city in desperate need of housing — one begins to wonder what, if anything, this space will do to contribute to the life and vitality of the city other than produce the atonal hum of what sociologist Sharon Zukin calls “pacification by cappuccino”.

This is a worrying trend happening in cities across the UK and Ireland where the the democratic openness of cities is being privatised at the expense of our access, experience and enjoyment of the city.

Across the street proposals for a nineteen storey, £12m scheme, comprising of 121 private rented apartments, a ground floor reception and Cafe go on display. Housing is a matter that is very important to the life and vitality of Belfast city centre, but I am not sure that high rise ‘private rented accommodation’ will achieve this. Common in England, I have been told by a large architectural practice who have researched the private rented sector (PRS) that “there is probably no market yet in Belfast for this kind of apartment type.”

I do know of other PRS proposals that are basically a living space with a window and a bedroom, either with no window or with a high level window, such that the apartments can be built with an 8m lightwell core around which the bedrooms are arranged.  The assumption is that office workers living in a city, or possibly students able to afford the rents, will only be living in a unit for 6 or 12 months and won’t therefore care whether there is no view or much light from their bedroom. It seems unlikely that the developers claim that the “scheme would contribute to the council's target of increasing the number of city centre residents” will not be achievable through a PRS model. Temporary occupancy typical in a PRS scheme will make little contribution to the life and vitality of the city centre.

At a public exhibition for the ‘regeneration’ of the Cathedral Quarter in Belfast I ask the developer where the affordable housing provision is; “oh, we’ll be putting that out there over the way” he answers. I ask him where ‘over there’ is, to which he answers, “oh we don't know yet”. I ask the same question to the developer of the PRS scheme, who says that “affordable housing isn’t a requirement or a private development of this nature, and not appropriate in a build to rent development of this scale”. Statutorily this may be true but the latest figures from the Northern Ireland Housing Statistics show that between 2015-16 11,202 households were accepted as homeless. In that period 3303 were discharged. While there was a 12% increase in house building during that period, social housing (SHDP) was down by 27%. There are currently around 40,000 households in need of social housing. Housing provision is a significant issue for Belfast. In an article in the Irish NewsNicola McCrudden, Chartered Institute of Housing director for Northern Ireland said that:  

“These statistics highlight the two very different sides to our housing market. More houses are being built but increasing numbers of people are unable to maintain a home…On one hand there has been a welcome improvement in the number of new homes completed, which increased by 12 per cent on the previous year’s quarter. The ongoing recovery of the private housebuilding sector will help to ease pressure on rents and house prices, keeping an affordable home within reach for more people…But on the other hand there has been a large increase in the number of households who are homeless and qualify for full assistance, by 16 per cent on the previous quarter….This is unacceptable and continues a gradual rise over the previous five years, with increasing numbers of people with complex needs such as addiction and mental health problems."

Food for thought.

Less than a mile away a massive infrastructure project known as The York Street Interchange will punch its way through an already blighted area of Belfast, leaving some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the city disenfranchised and disconnected. “Residents affected by the new wider road crashing through their neighbourhood and back gardens have fought hard to have their concerns listened to” says architect Mark Hackett who has been working, pro bono, with local residents to help them understand what the often complex and unintelligible plans produced by the Department for Infrastructure actually mean for them and their communities. “It is very clear to me that such a road design would never be proposed through an affluent area in this manner, nor with this poverty of city vision and planning.” As one resident puts it “I feel we are entirely forgotten, and we are only a short distance from the city centre. It is like we will be walled in on 3 sides below this road. It would not happen in [affluent] South Belfast.”

 Our cities matter, our collective ability to shape them is a fundamental human right.

So July has been spent working with various groups to help raise awareness of some of the complicated issues surrounding these schemes. To help people realise that developments like this; a stones throw from each other (not to mention the multiple other regeneration projects taking place across the city) are thoroughly interconnected. That our cities are complex, entangled networks.That we are in the world and we are of the world; and that when we think the city in this way it “ceases to be just a matter of singularities; sidewalks, parks etc ,…institutions and relations between people” (Lancione, 2016, 147) as the discourse of loveless regeneration would have us believe. Rather the city becomes a “matter of entanglements between small objects and bodies, discourses and power, performances and blueprints for action — a universe of capacities that need to be traced in their contextual deployment” (147). The city is a “rhizome of eventful post-human crossroads within which - and not only where - multifaceted experiences of [experience] are constituted” (147). 

Geographer David Harvey describes our ‘right to the city’ as “one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”. For it is through changing the city that we get to change ourselves and through changing ourselves that the city is changed. Our cities matter, our collective ability to shape them is a fundamental human right. But when the discourse surrounding the regeneration of our cities is reduced to the banal loveless platitude of commercial reality’, then we must raise our voices and speak for our cities.