The Great Reimagining: Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a 'New' Northern Ireland 9781782386223

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Landscapes of Change in the Transitional City
1 A Place Apart? Sectarian Geographies, Shared Space and the Material Production of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland
2 From ‘Gunland’ to Globalization The ‘Space of Flows’ Meets Place in a City ‘on the RISE’
3 Neutral Space is Shopping Space. Or is it? The Choreography of Consumption in Belfast City Centre
4 Beautiful Barriers: Contesting the Symbolic Reimaging of Community along a Belfast Peace Line
5 Transforming the Stone Recasting Derry’s Diamond War Memorial for the Demands of a Shared Future
6 Art on the Frontlines Civilizing Derry’s Ebrington Military Barracks for a ‘City of Culture’
Conclusion: The City as Civic Identikit? Twenty-first Century Public(s) on the Transnational Urban Stage Set
Appendix. Interview Profiles
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Great Reimagining

Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Edited by Birgit Meyer (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University) and Maruška Svašek (School of History and Anthropology, Queens University, Belfast) During the last few years, a lively, interdisciplinary debate has taken place between anthropologists, art historians and scholars of material culture, religion, visual culture and media studies about the dynamics of material production and cultural mediation in an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity. Understanding ‘mediation’ as a fundamentally material process, this series provides a stimulating platform for ethnographically grounded theoretical debates about the many aspects that constitute relationships between people and things, including political, economic, technological, aesthetic, sensorial and emotional processes. Volume 1 Moving Subjects, Moving Objects Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions Edited by Maruška Svašek Volume 2 Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea Ludovic Coupaye Volume 3 Objects and Imagination Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning Edited by Øivind Fuglerud and Leon Wainwright Volume 4 The Great Reimagining Public Art, Urban Space and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland Bree T. Hocking

The Great Reimagining Public Art, Urban Space and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland

Bree T. Hocking

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015 Bree T. Hocking All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hocking, Bree T. The great reimagining : public art, urban space and the symbolic landscapes of a ‘new’ Northern Ireland / Bree T. Hocking. pages cm. — (Material mediations : people and things in a world of movement ; volume 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-78238-621-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-78238-622-3 (ebook) 1. City planning—Northern Ireland. 2. Urban landscape architecture —Northern Ireland. 3. Social conflict—Northern Ireland. 4. Northern Ireland—Social conditions—21st century. I. Title. HT169.G72N734 2015 307.1’21609416—dc23 2014033552 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-78238-621-6 hardback ISBN 978-1-78238-622-3 ebook

 Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction. Landscapes of Change in the Transitional City

1

1. A Place Apart? Sectarian Geographies, Shared Space and the Material Production of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland

22

2. From ‘Gunland’ to Globalization: The ‘Space of Flows’ Meets Place in a City ‘on the Rise’

43

3. Neutral Space is Shopping Space. Or is it? The Choreography of Consumption in Belfast City Centre

68

4. Beautiful Barriers: Contesting the Symbolic Reimaging of Community along a Belfast Peace Line

92

5. Transforming the Stone: Recasting Derry’s Diamond War Memorial for the Demands of a Shared Future

118

6. Art on the Frontlines: Civilizing Derry’s Ebrington Military Barracks for a ‘City of Culture’

142

Conclusion. The City as Civic Identikit? Twenty-first Century Public(s) on the Transnational Urban Stage Set

169

vi

Contents

Appendix. Interview Profiles

194

Bibliography

195

Index

225

 Figures

0.1. A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Transitional Space.

17

1.1. Early twentieth-century statues on the Belfast City Hall grounds reflect an era of unionist hegemony.

24

1.2. Opened in 2012, Titanic Belfast is among the city’s recent ‘iconic’ constructions intended to attract tourists.

35

1.3. The Belfast Thanksgiving Square Beacon is one of the city’s most prominent post-conflict symbols.

37

2.1. Rise, a 37.5-metre-tall geodesic artwork, located at the Southern gateway into Belfast, is intended to symbolize hope for a better future.

44

2.2a. A view onto the sculpture from the working-class Protestant Village neighbourhood.

59

2.2b. In late 2013, much of the area was in the process of a housing regeneration project.

59

3.1. The construction of the upscale Victoria Square shopping centre precipitated the Cornmarket public artwork.

75

3.2a. Spirit of Belfast has served as a platform to highlight multiple issues and identities.

83

3.2b. A group of evangelicals prays in front of the sculpture.

83

3.3a. An African acrobat warms up for his act on the Spirit of Belfast plinth.

85

3.3b. In the centre of the sculpture, youth participate in an Irish Jumpstyle session.

85

viii

Figures

4.1a. Artworks commissioned for the Cupar Way peace wall have highlighted unionist icons, military history and Shankill Road life.

93

4.1b. The Face references the area’s industrial past.

93

4.1c. Changing Faces looks at the neighbourhood’s evolution.

93

4.2. A hackney cab stands by as tourists sign the Cupar Way peace wall public art in mid-2010.

96

4.3a. The multi-panel Hewitt mural at Cupar Way.

104

4.3b. A panel of artists’ sketches in the Hewitt mural.

104

4.3c. The community art panel.

104

4.4. A tour bus passes the ‘Peace by Piece’ graffiti artwork.

105

4.5. A tourist takes a photo of a graffiti artist at the International Meeting of Styles event in August 2010.

106

5.1. A Remembrance Sunday service at the Diamond War Memorial.

119

5.2. Armoured police vehicles surround the war memorial during an Apprentice Boys procession in December 2011.

132

5.3a. Poppy wreaths, a symbol associated with the British military, are left at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.

134

5.3b. A bouquet placed on the memorial’s steps represents the preferred form of commemoration for Catholics.

134

6.1. The Peace Bridge links Derry’s commercial Cityside to the former Ebrington Barracks.

144

6.2. The Mute Meadow public artwork runs from the new Ebrington Square to the river’s edge.

157

6.3. A scene from the Peace One Day concert at Ebrington Square in June 2012.

161

7.1a. The infamous mural at the entrance to Sandy Row.

174

7.1b. The reimaged mural.

174



Acknowledgements

Many people have been crucial to the development of this book. First and foremost, thanks are due to Dr. Dominic Bryan, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, whose comments and advice have helped guide this work every step of the way. Not only are my views on ‘space’ forever transformed, but I will never watch a parade in quite the same way again. I am also grateful for the assistance of numerous former colleagues at Queen’s who have provided feedback and support throughout this project, including Prof. Liam Kennedy, Dr. Gordon Gillespie, Prof. Peter Gray, Valerie Miller, Joan Watson and, especially, Dr. Maruška Svašek, whose keen insights always push me to see the nuance and interconnectedness of urban life and its many art forms. This book would not have come to fruition without the voices of those who inhabit and shape the Northern Irish landscape, symbolic or otherwise. To all who participated in this research and gave of their time and insight so freely, I am especially appreciative. Finally, on a personal note, I am indebted to the family and friends who offered assistance at crucial moments. Thanks are due to Bruce, Coleen and Zachary Hocking, who have never let me down; to Abigail Borchert, my intrepid travelling companion in the ‘field’; to Ryan Merola, whose ability to run the world and take care of his friends never ceases to amaze; to SarahJane and Seamus Kelly for their immeasurable kindnesses; and, to Dr. William McEwan, whose willingness to sit in waiting rooms saved the day.



Abbreviations

ACNI

Arts Council of Northern Ireland

BCC

Belfast City Council

BCCM

Belfast City Centre Management

CRC

Community Relations Council

CSI

Cohesion, Sharing and Integration

DCAL

Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (NI)

DCC

Derry City Council

DCMS

Department for Culture, Media and Sport (UK)

DOE

Department of the Environment

DRD

Department for Regional Development

DSD

Department for Social Development

DUP

Democratic Unionist Party

EPIC

Ex-Prisoners Interpretive Centre

EU

European Union

GSP

Greater Shankill Partnership

GVRT

Greater Village Regeneration Trust

HLF

Heritage Lottery Fund

HOTS

Healing on the Streets

ICE

Intercontinental Exchange Group

IFI

International Fund for Ireland

IJS

Irish Jumpstyle

Abbreviations

xi

KZN

KwaZulu-Natal

NIE

Northern Ireland Executive

NIHE

Northern Ireland Housing Executive

NIO

Northern Ireland Office

NITB

Northern Ireland Tourist Board

OFMDFM Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister PAW

Public Art Wales

PIRA

Provisional Irish Republican Army

PSNI

Police Service of Northern Ireland

RAAD

Republican Action Against Drugs

RTPI

Royal Town Planning Institute

RUC

Royal Ulster Constabulary

SDLP

Social Democratic and Labour Party

SWAT

SouthWest Action Team

UDA

Ulster Defence Association

UUP

Ulster Unionist Party

UVF

Ulster Volunteer Force

VAC

Verbal Arts Centre



Introduction Landscapes of Change in the Transitional City

Civic places and spaces in Northern Ireland have always been exclusive of one or another part of the population, and quite deliberately so. A civic life, inclusive of all, has to be constructed. And we do not mean constructed in the sense beloved of discourse theory, but in the solid form of concrete, steel and bricks, stone and glass. —Alan Jones and David Brett, Toward an Architecture: Ulster (2007: 22–24)

On a bright, bitingly cold day in early December 2011, Northern Ireland’s First Minister Peter Robinson stood in front of a triptych of steel pillars, each one chiselled with a single word. Together they read, ‘Remembrance’, ‘respect’, ‘resolution’. As a small gathering of shivering officials waited for the unveiling to commence, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader gestured expansively at the humble brick terraced dwellings in the Lower Shankill Estate. ‘It doesn’t make the place a cold place for people from other sections of the community’, Robinson said of the artwork. ‘There’s no fear in walking down a street that talks about respect or resolution or tolerance’. The steel pillars, which replaced a controversial mural dedicated to the ‘Defender of the Protestant Faith’ Oliver Cromwell, would send ‘a different message’, the first minister went on to aver. Robinson favourably contrasted this new addition to Belfast’s symbolic landscape with the remaining sectarian wall paintings in the surrounding area, which he said had been used to ‘stake out territory’. ‘I think it is important to create shared space for everyone’, he asserted. ‘In the future, we will move forward together’.1 Robinson’s optimistic assessment that day says much about the ‘postconflict’2 vision of politicians, policymakers and planners seeking to reconstruct the meaning and experience of public spaces in Northern Ireland.

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The Great Reimagining

Indeed, the statement is pertinent on a number of levels. First, it suggests a belief in the power of visual images and symbols to express new realities about space – in effect, to communicate inclusive values and endorse social change via material forms. Second, it implies that people’s response to and embodied experience of space can be predicted, or at least influenced, by certain ‘technologies’, such as public art. And finally, it embeds the production of a new society in which ‘we will move forward together’ within broader processes of spatial production. In this way, the micro-politics of the symbolic landscape provide insight into the post-conflict state’s relationship to space, the pressures and aspirations it contends with, and the role it envisions for citizens in a new public sphere where ‘equality’ and ‘good relations’ are both offered as virtues and legally required. While this state-space relationship is inevitably informed by the province’s legacy of conflict and communal division, it also reflects a number of universal trends in urban space, such as a desire to promote global capital investment and consumption, specifically through tourism. This has implications for the current campaign to reimage Northern Ireland, which goes far beyond efforts to jettison sectarian wall paintings, such as the Cromwell mural mentioned above, from working-class housing estates. More than 16 years after the defining moment of the peace process, the Good Friday Agreement,3 a range of public art initiatives, from small-scale community projects to expensive city-centre contemporary art installations, have been touted by officials as transformative tools that can contribute to the mixing of Catholics and Protestants as well as to the province’s economic renaissance. These have frequently occurred alongside wider regeneration efforts to reconstruct this former zone of conflict dramatically. As Northern Ireland repositions itself as an attractive ‘destination’ on the international tourist circuit, officials have looked to the built environment to tell new stories about the province to a global audience as well as to alter internal spatial perceptions. A glitzy new shopping mall and a Titanicthemed visitors’ centre now pierce the skyline of the provincial capital. A hotel and spa, and even a whisky distillery, are in the works for former prisons that once housed combatants of the Troubles. Contemporary art even pops up along Catholic-Protestant interfaces. As in post-apartheid South Africa, where the process of national reconciliation and, in effect, the creation of shared social space entailed the suppression of vengeance in the public sphere (R. Wilson 2005), Northern Irish officials have sought to downplay symbolic conflict in reconstructed public spaces. But how and to what end the state refashions ‘a place that in terms of meaning remains disagreed’ (Shirlow 2006: 105) is not without its complications. For although international capital and global interconnectedness exert considerable sway over these new landscapes, the demands of place, with its residual troubled

Introduction

3

history and conflicted ethno-national groups, remain powerful forces. And the ability of state authority in Northern Ireland to impose its preferred vision, or order, onto civic landscapes confronts limitations beyond what is typically found in ‘normal’ Western urban space. Like its predecessors, this volume of the Material Mediations series engages with themes of cultural production, transnationalism and the impact of globalization processes on human subjectivity and expression. Aiming to further these explorations, this book offers a critical assessment of the reimagining of urban space across Northern Ireland with resonance for a range of societies undergoing social, political and economic change. Here, the focus is on the ways in which the state has turned to symbolic elements, specifically public art, to facilitate new meaning for places in the process of ‘becoming’, places where internal conflict has to some degree retarded macro processes of globalization. In this way, Northern Ireland may be viewed as a laboratory for observing the means by which the global ‘network society’ (Castells 1996) is embedded in place via material interventions in landscape. Based on my ethnographic findings, I argue that shifts in the symbolic landscape are representative of wider aspirations to create new civic identities for Belfast and Londonderry on a global stage.4 Far from being merely cosmetic, however, these symbolic changes provide a vehicle to explore how dominant discourses are materialized in the landscape, and the means by which these discourses, and the ideologies underpinning them, are contested and constrained. Using public art as a prism, this volume aims to elucidate a more nuanced understanding of the state’s vision for urban space, and the degree to which this vision is curtailed or even upended in practice. As Wells (2007: 136) succinctly puts it, ‘It is the quality of visual and material culture to condense at once the everyday, the monumental, and the spectacular that makes it such a powerful tool for analysing the power relations that structure city living.’ Moreover, these ‘new’ landscapes also speak to the state’s vision of civic life and hold important clues as to the ‘type’ of citizen desired for the reconstructed spaces. Among the cultural artefacts that define and shape the urban experience, public art and the processes giving rise to it have much to tell us about the economic, social, political and cultural production of cities in transition, as well as the complex forces of globalization, consumption, community and troubled history with which such conurbations grapple. While serving as a sightline into the dominant discourses of the public sphere, the public art object is also implicated in the individual’s experience of and relationship to the built environment, with potential repercussions for the understanding of self in society. In Moving Subjects, Moving Objects, the inaugural instalment of this series, contributors plumbed the role of objects in evoking emotion and linking people and places across transna-

4

The Great Reimagining

tional contexts. As Svašek (2012: 20) asserted in that volume, ‘the range of possible ways in which people understand their interaction with material realities is vast’. Nevertheless, it is not entirely open-ended. The ability of public art materially to inject particular narratives of memory, heritage and identity into public space – to, in some respects, territorialize – assures that its creation and reception are inevitably subject to contestation. Battles over the right to define landscape before, during and after its material production reflect entrenched and contemporary social struggles. This book sets out to engage with these processes as a means to shed light on the ‘power relations that structure urban life’ (Wells 2007: 138) and order spatial practice in an interconnected age. Among the questions it explores are: What kind of visual images are privileged in civic space by state-financed public art processes? What response does the material mediation of space via art elicit? To what degree are official objectives for these spaces met? And finally, what vision of citizenship/subjectivity might these new symbolic landscapes foreshadow?

Theorizing the Symbolic Landscape: Power, Image, Contestation In considering the questions at the heart of this work, certain theoretical assumptions are acknowledged. Following Lefebvre, space is conceived as a social product, an arena constituted by ongoing political, ideological and strategic power negotiations (Harvey 1976; Lefebvre 1976, 1994; Soja 1989) that are intimately influenced by dominant modes of production (Lefebvre 1994). The restructuring of global capital, in the form of neoliberal institutions and economic regimes, combined with an ongoing information technology revolution and the rise of the ‘network society’ (Castells 1996), has radically altered urban space and the conditions of its production (Castells 1989; Harvey 1989, 1993, 2002; Soja 1989, 1997). Increasingly fashioned by the ‘economies of signs and space’ (Lash and Urry 1994), the cities of postmodern capitalism are chiefly characterized by ‘continuous spectacles of commodity culture’ (Harvey 2002: 168) and privatized, hyperreal themed spaces, awash in simulation and pastiche (Urry and Larsen 2011). As civic spaces are remade for tourism, now one of the world’s largest industries, place marketing and branding and the visual imagery required to propel these processes, have become central to urban policymakers (Urry 2006; Lash and Urry 1994) seeking to situate their municipalities within the global ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999). But the experience of space is rarely left to chance. Signposted at every step of the way, the new urban stage sets contain and demand a constant supply of symbolic mediation, delivered primarily through cultural productions and artefacts, both material and ephemeral. That said, as Soja (1989: 158) reminds us, ‘[c]apital … is

Introduction

5

never alone in shaping the historical geography of the landscape and is certainly not the only author or authority’. Urban space is lived in myriad ways counter to official diktat and is marked by ‘coexisting’, if highly unequal, ‘heterogeneity’ (Massey 2005: 9). From an anthropological perspective, spatial analysis must take into account the ‘cultural and intercultural context’ and the importance of the vernacular in exploring ‘new forms’ of globalized, postnational spaces (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 29–30). Real places, imbued with layers of political, economic, cultural and social meaning, are conceived here as ‘landscapes’, and the production/construction of landscape as illustrative of ongoing negotiations over identity, ideology and control in urban space (Zukin 1993; Schein 1997; Cosgrove 1998; Ross 2007, 2009a, 2009b). On an empirical level, the symbolic landscape embodies ‘social and political meaning’ through ‘specific public images, physical objects and other expressive representations’, including public artworks and monuments (Ross 2009a: 6). These constitute a form of ‘masquerade politics’, in which ‘politics [are] articulated in terms of non-political cultural forms’ (Abner Cohen 1993: xi). Such ‘icons of identity’ (Whelan 2003: 17) make up a broader ‘geography of identity’ (Osborne 2001) for both places and people. Reflecting on the importance of the built environment to the production of meaning, Neill (2001a: 7) contends that the ‘the narrative of identity is constituted spatially’. Symbolic sites in cities are subject to struggle ‘because of the power which they bestow’ (Neill 2001a: 7). Ashworth and Graham (2005: 4) also posit that ‘if it is axiomatic that place images are created, then someone creates them for some purpose’. Landscapes contain the spatialized ‘mediation and contestation’ of power (Whelan and Harte 2007: 196), and serve as valuable analytical tools for approaching questions of history, memory and identity (Schama 1995; Johnson 2003). According to Cosgrove (1989: 125), ‘All landscapes are symbolic … reproducing cultural norms and establishing the values of dominant groups across all of a society’. In this respect, Vale (2008) sees monumentality as an incisive commentator on the relationship among power, architecture and national identity. Numerous studies have assessed the importance of iconic monuments and buildings to wider social and political projects. Prominent among these are David Harvey’s (1979) reading of the Sacré-Coeur basilica’s construction as a metaphor for broader nineteenth-century clashes between French labour and the bourgeois, and Atkinson and Cosgrove’s (1998) critique of the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome as a (somewhat unsuccessful) political ‘theater’ for the manipulation of ‘public memory’. Whelan, whose work has explored the symbolic reimaging of postcolonial Ireland, interprets the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century European ‘frenzy’ to construct new monuments as indicative of ‘their key role as foci for collective participation in the politics and public life of villages, towns and cities’

6

The Great Reimagining

(Whelan 2003: 18). She proceeds to endorse Lerner’s observation that the monument ‘is a particular way of staging politics that is centred on the spectacle or visual display’ (Lerner 1993: 178). Symbolic landscapes have particular salience in societies undergoing political and economic transitions. Their evolution can be a powerful indication of social change (Ross 2007, 2009a), with ‘greater inclusiveness’ (Ross 2007: 320) signalling ‘a mutuality and shared stake in society’ that may ‘help to reshape relations between groups’ (ibid.: 325). This book is informed by, and hopes to advance, a body of work that has examined the role of symbolic landscapes after conflict. These are drawn from a number of societies, including that of Guatemala (Steinberg and Taylor 2005; Hoelscher 2008), the American South (Ross 2007), Mozambique (Tester 2006), South Africa (Freschi 2007; Ross 2007, 2009b; Marschall 2009, 2010a, 2010b), the Irish Republic (Johnson 2003; Whelan 2003), the Czech Republic (Svašek 1995, 2007) and post-Soviet Russia (Grant 2001; Forest and Johnson 2002), to name just a few. In addition to the creation of new monuments and artworks, strategies employed have included the removal or recontextualization of old monuments, as well as the reappropriation of existing public art for new political purposes (Levinson 1998; Ross 2009b). Of course, the marked absence of particular symbolic expressions, such as memorials and monuments, is also telling. Where power relationships may still be in the process of ‘settling’, Steinberg and Taylor (2003: 449–50) observe, ‘no one side can claim public space in which to construct obvious landmarks’. To be sure, the presumed isomorphism between the identity of any ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson 1983) and place can no longer be taken for granted and must be situated ‘within systemic developments that reinscribe and reterritorialize space in the global political economy’ (Gupta 2003: 322). These developments range from transnational population movements, and the ‘global memoryscapes’ (Phillips and Reyes 2011) that accompany such mobilities, to the (often-fleeting) arrival of multinational firms that ‘creatively’ destroy and reconfigure space for extra-local purposes, frequently with the assistance of significant public subsidies. It is here that this book aims to fill a critical gap. With much public art production firmly embedded in economic and spatial frameworks aimed at promoting tourism, the production of meaning is imbricated within global capital networks, which exert considerable sway over both people and place in the ‘new’ Northern Ireland. Like those in many transitional societies, Northern Ireland’s evolving symbolic landscapes are intended to signal the province’s status as a desirable ‘stopping-point’ for capital (Urry and Larsen 2011: 29), redolent of the symbolic and aesthetic experiences such a designation implies. In achieving these ends, art holds particular appeal. It projects mean-

Introduction

7

ing and definition onto landscape, providing the instantaneous ‘imageability’ (Lynch 1960, emphasis in original) considered so crucial to urban fortunes. Within urban regeneration programmes, public art is credited with a range of (mostly unsubstantiated) social agencies, from instilling civic pride and social cohesion to spurring economic regeneration (Selwood 1995; Miles 2000). It has become an established means to ‘bolster the image and competitive position of place’ (Pollock and Paddison 2010: 335) and attract ‘mobile finance and tourist capital’ (ibid.: 336). This doxa has been widely embraced by municipal officials via the adoption of ‘creative class’ theory (Florida 2002), which predicates urban economic success on the presence of (or an area’s attractiveness to) ‘creative’ professionals. The spread of cultural quarters, cultural tourism and the promotion of the so-called creative industries5 as a means to wealth, jobs and regeneration are key components of this urban orthodoxy and the ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ (Featherstone 1991) it entails. Furthermore, the global embrace of culture-led regeneration strategies, which nearly always include a public art component, also reflects Pierre Bourdieu’s assertion that the ‘field’ of art production is the ‘most predisposed to express social differences’ (Bourdieu 1984: 226) and distinctions through its influence over taste and consumption patterns. Cities seek to enhance their symbolic positions (and attractiveness to capital) through high-profile cultural additions such as public art. The increased international reliance on ‘globalized civic patronage’ (Julier 2005: 871) and ‘urban policy tourism’ (González 2011: 1398) are inseparably linked to wider processes of globalization, or what Robertson (1992: 8) terms the ‘compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness about the world as a whole’. Globalization processes, in Eriksen’s (2007: 6, emphasis in original) view, are marked by a weakening of ‘local power’ concurrent with an emphasis on ‘local identities’. This is manifest through ‘glocalization’ (Robertson 1992; Ritzer 2003), or ‘the interpenetration of the global and the local’ (Ritzer 2003: 193), as well as through ‘grobalization’ (Ritzer 2003), which references the ‘ambitions of nations, corporations, organizations and other entities’ (ibid.: 194) to expand their power, profits and presence throughout the world. Ritzer argues that ‘grobalization’ is ‘associated with the proliferation of nothing’ (Ritzer 2003: 194) or ‘forms that are centrally conceived and controlled and are largely devoid of distinctive content’ (ibid.: 205). The grobalized quickly becomes the glocalized when it touches down in specific places (Ritzer 2003: 195). Against this backdrop, I propose the term ‘civic identikit’ as a useful designation for public art, as well as other urban development projects, that harmonize symbolic forms across urban space while (ironically) aiming to distinguish place and bolster cultural or symbolic capital. Like globalization itself, civic identikit public art is typified by ‘form not content’ (Eriksen

8

The Great Reimagining

2007: 11), and may be classified among what Castells (1996: 419) has called the ‘architecture of the space of flows’. After Castells, I adopt the term ‘civic identikit of flows’ to designate largely abstract work overlaid with locationspecific narratives or heritage references intended to add an element of local flavour or place identity to the work. This allows for considerable interpretative flexibility before, during and after construction, although as a term it may also be applied to the reimagining of places (both materially and cognitively) through standardized, replicable processes. As such, civic identikit may include the perpetuation of a limited menu of nostalgic images of the past or present, images that nearly always elide uncomfortable historical and social realities. Such art is referred to here as the ‘civic identikit of place’. The civic identikit of place, while representative of specific local identities and histories, is part and parcel of the broader ‘Disneyization’ (Bryman 2004) of society and its concurrent commoditization of space through ‘theming’ and other performative practices. As a form, the civic identikit of place contributes to the ‘staged authenticity’ (MacCannell 1999) of so-called tourist locales, offering consumable narratives for specific places denuded of their full complexity, ambiguity and contradiction. Unlike mere ‘plop art’, civic identikit public art claims to represent or evoke defining aspects of locality and to channel some sense of its civic ethos. In this way, the term is intimately linked to the intersection of ‘grobalization’ (as the content-free product of global firms/consultancies/artists that produce spaces around the world) and ‘glocalization’ (whereby the local has an impact on a global form or process). Much civic identikit public art exhibits a close relationship to Marc Augé’s ‘non-place’, where the ‘link between individuals and their surroundings’ exists ‘through the mediation of words’ (Augé 1995: 94). Globally, the popularity of culture-led regeneration strategies, combined with the growth of multi-billion dollar design consultancies such as AECOM, which has carried out infrastructure and public-realm work in more than 150 countries and is heavily invested in the production of public space in Northern Ireland, has accelerated the spread of civic identikit public art. This trend was perhaps foretold by the counterintuitive subtitle of an early work heralding the potential of culture in urban development, Charles Landry’s (2000) The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. In the Northern Irish context, a civic identikit model has held additional appeal, as it offers the opportunity to transcend the divisive sectarian territorialization of past and place in favour of a ‘normalized’ future in the ‘space of flows’ (Castells 1989). The reconstruction of the city as a site of civic identikit has implications beyond mere aesthetics. Public space and the identities it embraces matter. The built environment contains significant clues about the nature of acceptable identities in space. It telegraphs who belongs in certain places, as

Introduction

9

well as what activities, behaviours and values the state or other governing authority is keen to encourage in the public domain – in essence, what public(s) it hopes to attract or create. Hence, the production of public space as site of super-saturated consumption has repercussions for the meaning of citizenship and plays a constitutive, though not wholly determinative, role in delimiting the outlines of civic participation and virtue. For instance, urban spaces rooted in an ‘ethic of seamless, individuated movement and circulation; public interaction based on the model of commodity and capital flows’ (Mitchell 2003: 11) reflect the dominance of neoliberal governance structures, structures that have done much to perpetuate the civic identikit model. This book speculates that post-conflict spatial restructuring in Northern Ireland has promoted an idealized vision of citizen as consumer-tourist, a vision that also points to a concomitant class of symbolic citizens needed to perform the landscapes on which its antipode grazes. This vision is further supported by the centrality of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 2002) to spatial ‘imagineering’ across Northern Ireland, and the ordering power this global gaze is presumed to wield in official rhetoric. The implications for cultural and political identities delimited by the narrative demands of global capital are potentially (counter)revolutionary and even deleterious. The commodified self and city, designed to service certain experiences in space, may find themselves ultimately subsumed into the harmonizing wash of ‘grobalization’, albeit a grobalization marked by vestigial traces of place. Given its role in shaping urban visual cultures, public art has been critiqued by scholars for its potential to mask the inequities of urban regeneration programmes (Zukin 1995; Deutsche 1996; Miles 2000). Deutsche contends that the ‘new’ public art that emerged in the 1980s and was proclaimed as ‘socially responsible’, ‘site-specific’ and ‘functional’ (1996: xv) is one tool that has altered space in the interest of ‘the late-capitalist city’ to produce a veneer of consensus for ‘uneven development’ (ibid.: xv–xvi). Such art asserts spatial ‘coherence’ and conceals ‘social conflicts’ (Deutsche 1996: 68). Nearly all the case studies considered in subsequent chapters support these assertions. To some degree, in each, uncomfortable social realities and divisions were downplayed or ignored. That said, Young’s assertion that public art helps ‘to create shared spaces that lend a common spatial frame to otherwise disparate experiences and understanding’ (1993: 6) is not without merit, though the extent to which this occurs varies. Theorists such as Deutsche (1996) and Miles (2000) are right to question the ability of government-funded art to interrogate what Hall (2003: 234) has called the ‘prevailing trajectories of urbanisation’, though some degree of social critique through processual negotiations and postproduction reappropriation of space is hardly precluded by such art. Hegemony, as Gramsci reminds us, is never an absolute project. Urban regeneration programs reflect the power

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The Great Reimagining

relationships that produce these redevelopments, and these relationships inevitably shift over time. The ‘political exercise’ of public art is constrained by the multiple ways in which people interpret and respond to landscape, and thus can never be assured in its outcomes (Sharp, Pollock and Paddison 2005: 1020). That these recreated urban spaces, and the art that defines them, do not always ‘work’ as intended is evident across the following ethnographic investigations. The materiality of public art may exist as a mediator between ideology and subjectivity, but the ‘always polymorphous’ meanings of cultural landscapes are shaped by reception in addition to government or other elite ‘authorship’ (Forest and Johnson 2002: 538). As de Certeau has stated, space is produced through a combination of ‘strategies’ employed by the powerful, such as urban designers, planners and politicians and ‘tactics’ used by the less-powerful to subvert official representations of space (de Certeau 1984: xix–xx). These ‘tactics’ may include walking routes, systems of naming and other non-sanctioned interactions with the built environment, such as graffiti. The semiotician Roland Barthes stakes a similar position when writing that the urban ‘speaks to its inhabitants’, while acknowledging that individuals also ‘speak’ the city ‘simply by living in it, by wandering through it’ (Barthes 1997: 168). In this manner, individuals and groups are invested with power in the production of space. Nevertheless, the production of space is more complex than strict global/ local, powerful/weak binarisms suggest, and may just as easily be marked by mutual appropriations as by strict oppositional positions. Indeed, the global-local dialectic, or the ways in which the global shapes the local while the local also informs activities elsewhere, is one aspect that makes the study of urban landscapes, and the artefacts that define them, so compelling. Conceptually, Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’, the so-called ‘structuring structure’ (Bourdieu 2002: 31), is a useful starting point in bridging the critical divide between the ways in which space shapes (and is shaped by) various practices, including both ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 10). This spatial dialectic underscores the tenuous link between civic image projected in global space and actual spatial practice, rooted as it is in ‘perceived’ real-life territorial fixities and fluidities (Lefebvre 1994: 38–40). It is my assessment that the public art process offers one window into these disjunctions. The use of certain key terms employed in this book must be clarified. By state, I refer loosely to a range of entities charged with carrying out official agendas using some measure of public funds. These primarily include government departments and statutory agencies, elective bodies such as legislative assemblies and district councils, government-initiated public-private urban development corporations, publicly supported regeneration groups

Introduction

11

and transnational confederations, such as the European Union (EU). While recognizing that the ‘state’ – particularly in the virtual ‘laboratory for experiments in transterritorial governance’ (McCall 2001: 2) that is Northern Ireland – is a problematic concept and far from monolithic, it remains a useful point of reference for assessing the ‘official’ production of symbolic landscapes. Likewise, public space, a similarly slippery concept, is broadly understood as those physical spaces under public ownership or oversight that are ‘open to greater or lesser public participation’ and social mixing (Smith and Low 2006: 4). These are spaces in which, at least ostensibly, those allowed entrance ‘are not pre-selected’ (Bauman 2005: 77). Public art is defined as any ‘permanent, static and object-based’ work, such as memorials, murals, monuments and site-specific sculpture, that is ‘freely, physically accessible’ to all (Selwood 1995: 7–8).

Setting the Stage: Visual Culture in a ‘Troubled’ Northern Ireland While the push to reinvent the visual culture of Northern Irish public spaces has no doubt benefitted from peace process developments as well as from an infusion of lottery money for Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) projects from 1995 onward, an official focus on image as antidote to social strife can be traced back to the direct-rule6 policies of British government ministers intent on highlighting the province’s ‘normality’ as a means of improving its economic situation, and, in turn, its political stability (Rolston 1991: 54–55). In 1976, as part of ‘Operation Spruce-Up’, the Northern Ireland Office (NIO), in conjunction with Belfast City Council (BCC), acquired two moveable murals completed by students at the Art College, which were subsequently displayed in prominent, if blighted, areas, including a major gateway into the city (Rolston 1991: 55). Deemed a success by government, this initial move spurred the establishment the following year of a community murals programme, jointly administered by the city council’s Community Services Department, the Northern Ireland Office’s Department of the Environment (DOE), ACNI and the Art College (Watson 1983; Rolston 1991). Under the scheme, which ended in 1981, Art College students were paid to paint murals in working-class neighbourhoods during the summer months. The murals, executed after consultations with pre-selected residents’ groups, were placed on gable walls. These were sometimes designed or painted with the help of local youth, and were intended to provide a more attractive aesthetic for the city’s deprived areas (Rolston 1991). For the most part, however, mural themes ignored the conflict and actual conditions of life in such neighbourhoods, preferring ‘non-aligned’ (Watson 1983: 6) imagery, including a disproportionate number of references to ‘circus and

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The Great Reimagining

jungle scenes’ (ibid.: 7). Reception of the programme was mixed. Prominent community members on both sides of the sectarian divide rejected the effort as little more than window-dressing that suppressed community issues in favour of John Travolta and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ imagery (Redpath 1983) and offered little more than an ‘escape … into a world of fantasy which someone has created for us’ (D. Wilson 1983: 21). Rolston (1991: 66) notes that ‘as the summer of 1981 approached, it was clear there were no applications for murals from any community’ organizations. Though a few groups were eventually convinced to participate, it would be for the last time. (Ironically, a quarter century later, a government-funded mural reimaging programme created to paint over the unofficial sectarian wall murals that proliferated in working-class communities from the 1981 republican hunger strikes onward would reflect many of this earlier programme’s concerns, including desensitizing the environment and promoting a positive local image.) However short its tenure, the community mural programme represented an important development in the state’s emerging involvement in urban visual culture. In Belfast, this initial focus on environmental improvement as a driving force for public art, though clearly limited when the city was engulfed by violence, has continued until the present, as has a tacit (and sometimes not-so-tacit) aversion to potentially controversial or unsettling projects. Moreover, from the outset, multiple, and sometimes contradictory, layers of jurisdictional oversight have dogged the realization of some artworks. For instance, in the late 1980s, the DOE, in partnership with the Art College, initiated an Art in Public Places Research Group charged with identifying locations for potential artworks in city-centre developments (U. Walker 1998). Their inaugural ‘test case’ was an effort to regenerate Belfast’s Blackstaff Square, a prominent plaza not far from the city’s famous Europa Hotel (Hill 1989: 27). A former haunt of local prostitutes, the square was envisioned as the site of a sculpture that would represent this social history, and artists were invited to submit proposals. But after the public art research group and the project landscape architect recommended the selection of Louise Walsh’s Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker (a recommendation they believed was all but a final decision), the DOE’s Belfast Development Office delayed its approval, shifting the decision to the city council’s parks committee (Hill 1989; Odling-Smee 1989). Despite Walsh’s assertion that her proposal, featuring two bronze cast working-class women, ‘was not intended to be a monument that glorifies prostitution, but a carefully thoughtout tribute to all of Belfast’s women’ (quoted in Odling-Smee 1989: 27), the tone of the ensuing debate failed to reflect this nuance. Heated council discussions followed as well as salacious media headlines related to the ‘sex

Introduction

13

and politics’ theme (Odling-Smee 1989: 27). In the end, the proposal was soundly defeated by the unionist majority council and ‘banned from public property by Belfast City Council’ (Walsh 2012). Nevertheless, it did receive support from the republican Sinn Féin Party, and ultimately led to calls by one prominent Democratic Unionist Party member, Rhonda Paisley, for the establishment of a city council art committee and a full-time arts officer (Odling-Smee 1989).7 A few years later, a private developer (assisted by funding from the Arts Council) recommissioned the work, which features symbolic tokens of women’s life and labour, including clothespins and colanders, ‘embedded … into the surface’ (Walsh 2012) of the statues. Situated just off Great Victoria Street at the entrance to the Great Northern Mall, the monument stands as a prominent and rare example of socially conscious, permanent public art in Belfast civic space. McAvera (1990: 32) attributes a general lack of coherent policy guidance and disassociation from social context and politics to ACNI’s ‘passive role’ in visual culture development as well as its insularity at the time. Notably, a substantial portion of the public art that did occur during the conflict was placed in hospitals or other highly protected environments such as the Arts Council’s erstwhile sculpture park in Belfast (U. Walker 1998; McAvera 1990). The situation was slightly different in Londonderry, where the institutional support provided by that city council’s Orchard Gallery, established in 1978, allowed for a more experimental approach to the urban symbolic landscape. Under the vision forwarded by the Orchard’s founding director Declan McGonagle, who also served on the executive of the public art research group in Belfast, the city was to be reimagined as gallery. With an organizing principle to ‘bring a larger dialogue at play in the international field of contemporary art in direct confrontation with the Derry context’ (Gee 2013: 6), the Orchard, until its closure in 2003, showcased prominent Northern Irish artists such as Dermot Seymour and Willie Doherty, as well as facilitated the globalization of visual culture, through such ventures as the TSWA 3D project. Liam Kelly (1996: 16–17), who also served as an Orchard director, has attributed Derry City Council’s earlier support for public art programmes such as TSWA, which placed temporary public art at nine sites in Britain and Northern Ireland as a means to explore notions of meaning and place, to the nationalist city’s greater degree of political consensus. In 1987, that initiative, co-organized by Television South West and South West Arts, famously led to the gallery’s invitation to the English artist Antony Gormley to realize his Sculpture for Derry Walls, a three-part work featuring ‘two identical cast-iron figures joined back to back’ in a cruciform pose (McMenamin 2001: 14), which were placed along the walls at three critical locations. As former Orchard director Brendan McMenamin (2001:

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The Great Reimagining

14) writes, ‘[I]t can be said that the sculptures represent Derry’s two dominant religious communities, turning away from each other but paradoxically joined’. If Derry exhibited more openness to globalized art discourses and aesthetic experimentation, Troubles-era public art projects such as the Gormley work also prefigure an early propensity towards a civic identikit approach to public art, namely, its focus on abstract form and language to mediate relationship to people and place. Despite the lofty rhetoric heaped on the project, which praised it as an example of the ‘emancipatory power of art’ to connect people and place (McGonagle 2001: 24), the most striking aspect of Gormley’s artwork is arguably its essential versatility. McAvera (1990: 113, emphasis in original) noted that ‘[t]he whole point about Gormley’s work is not that it is site-specific but that it is site-general. The concept is so vague that it will take the imposition of almost any roughly analogous situation where there are two sides plus a christian [sic] element.’ Indeed, since the early 1980s, Gormley’s featureless iron casts of his own body have appeared in all manner of contexts and locations, from plazas and motorways to New York City skyscrapers and even the Austrian Alps. McAvera also contends that the English artist’s approach to the walls, a highly contested space then under the jurisdiction of the British military, carried a whiff of colonial arrogance alongside a rather obvious distillation of the political context into neat binaries. This disconnect is manifest in the artist’s language. Indeed, according to Gormley, the installation was to serve as ‘a sort of poultice, drawing out what was already there’ (quoted in McGonagle 2001: 25). Vandalism, Gormley reportedly stated, would only help to complete the work (McGonagle 2001). He got his wish. The Janus-faced men were stoned, graffitied and on one occasion surrounded by bonfires and even necklaced with a burning tyre by residents who apparently misunderstood, or felt threatened by, whatever meaning they chose to project onto the figures (McAvera 1990; McGonagle 2001; McCann 2011). One of the statues, which had been positioned in front of a small church on the walls, was also moved after the dean of the church compared it to an idol (McGonagle 2001: 30). Whether the installation resonated with ordinary residents other than as an ambiguous and potentially threatening imposition on public space is debatable, though the publicity no doubt helped launch Gormley, who would go on to win the Turner Prize and was recently knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. One of his three original statues now stands outside Derry’s Millennium Forum at the east wall, where it continues to be subject to all manner of rude anatomical inscriptions. The tense relationship between contemporary arts practice and local communities resurfaced during the TSWA’s 1990 event, when two of the works presented in Derry by American artists Dennis Adams and Nancy

Introduction

15

Spero triggered fundamental questions about what constitutes ‘community’ and who has the right to speak for it (Barber 1990). Spero’s work featured female images reflective of both a Northern Irish and international context transposed onto a working-class gable wall in the republican Bogside – a wall that had reportedly previously displayed a political mural (Barber 1990). Meanwhile, Adams’s Siege used Gaelic football goalposts (associated with Catholics or nationalists) to frame a photograph of a demolished republican working-class tower block. The work was placed near the city walls at the Butcher Gate along a prominent sightline to the former location of the demolished flats. Both projects generated considerable backlash from local community members and led to a heated public meeting at which the artists defended their right to make a statement about the communities in question (McMenamin, interview 2010). According to McMenamin, now arts officer for the Derry City Council, the discussion proved beneficial and helped to foster community understanding and support for the works. As he relayed it, once Adams ‘engaged people in conversation, people didn’t have a problem. People actually says [sic], “Well, that’s ok. Yes of course you have the right to make a comment.” … And then the conversation started with Nancy Spero. “Well, what was your work about anyway?” And she started talking about the issue base of the work, and people were going, “I like that.” So there was a huge education going on there both for the artists and … for the community’ (McMenamin, interview 2010). Such episodes as these reflect an enduring communal resistance to official interventions in contested or residential areas, as well as a pervasive perception (real or imagined) that these interventions are imposed on the communities involved. Sometimes, as was the case in 1990, such resistance can be negotiated after the fact. Nevertheless, as the following chapters will elucidate, this dynamic continues in various forms in the post-conflict era. Indeed, some of the most prominent features of Northern Irish urban visual culture, the political murals in working-class areas, are elements that have historically existed outside of the state’s imprimatur. Notably, in Derry, since the start of the peace process in 1994, an independent group calling itself the Bogside Artists has decorated no fewer than a dozen gable walls along the central Rossville Street artery with iconic images of protest and violence from the civil rights struggle. Known as the People’s Gallery, the artworks have become a major tourist draw for the city, though the initiative has historically had a tense relationship with the local political establishment and council (People’s Gallery n.d.). The essential independence of republican neighbourhoods such as the Bogside, a key no-go area for state security forces in the early days of the conflict, is further crystallized in the famous ‘You Are Now Entering Free Derry’ gable wall, which also stands at a prominent location on Rossville Street. First painted in early 1969 after an attack

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The Great Reimagining

on civil rights marchers, the wall has become a key and evolving element in the area’s identity.

Methodology: Towards a Framework for the Analysis of Transitional Landscapes Official discourses offer insight into the state’s ‘attempts to shape and regulate ways of life and identities’, in effect to ‘determine the sorts of statements that can be made’ in public space (Ogborn 2003: 10–11). This book presents a conceptual framework for considering the spatialization of official discourses in landscape. While any number of discourses are potentially present in a given landscape (Schein 1997), the quintet examined here was selected to reflect a mix of global and local trajectories. In this way, it presents a model for assessing the ways in which universal, top-down discourses, e.g., ‘globalization’ and ‘consumption’, closely aligned to the ‘space of flows’ (Castells 1989), and those discourses more closely associated with ‘place’, e.g., ‘community’ and ‘reconciliation and/or troubled history’, are ‘materialized’ (Schein 1997: 663, emphasis in original) in the landscape through public art processes. At the same time, an ambiguous ‘culture’ discourse (neither solely artistic nor anthropological in definition) is considered as one bridging discourse for the state as it seeks to civilize urban space for its purposes. All of these discourses are present to varying degrees in the public art case studies examined, but in each instance, one case study emerged as best-positioned along a continuum to tell the story of how a particular discourse or strategy for reconstructing space was reproduced in landscape. Each site, then, serves as a microcosm of the wider public sphere, the discourses and ideologies the state forwards there and the ways these objectives are empirically spatialized. Like all categories, these discourses represent a simplification that is problematized in practice. After all, globalization and consumption only become real in local contexts, while so-called localized discourses such as community or the troubled history/reconciliation of specific places are just as easily influenced by activities elsewhere (note, for instance, Irish American funding for the Provisional IRA). Meanwhile, the culture discourse occupies a unique position on the global-local spectrum. On one hand, a culture discourse has been used to facilitate political resistance (Abner Cohen 1993) and personal cultivation or empowerment (Williams 1976, 1982). But scholars have also explored its role in piquing desire for the purposes of global capitalism and the consumerism that fuels it (Bauman 2011; see also Sack 1988, 1992; Zukin 1995). They have assessed its role in effecting state spatial strategies to exert control over particular landscapes for economic ends (Ren and Sun 2012). Such work has exam-

Introduction

17

ined the ‘degree to which the commodity has become integral with culture’ (MacCannell 1999: 21), as well as the increasing interest of all forms of government in ‘controlling cultural production’ (ibid.: 25), which, I suggest, in the present globalized context, has contributed to the expansion of civic identikit landscapes. Due to its inherent multivalence, the culture discourse is positioned simultaneously to seduce for the demands of global capital (Bauman 2011) and also to fulfil the ‘aesthetic-expressive dimension of the modern self’ (Lash and Urry 1994: 32) and the ‘identity-building’ (ibid.: 57) this requires. It is, quite conveniently, all things to all people. Taken together, these discourses provide a useful organizational matrix for investigating the production of transitional urban spaces, and the comparative role of various forces in delimiting spatial practice. Therefore, with some modification, the framework (see Figure 0.1) has application for a range of post-conflict and/ or post-industrial societies.

The Reimagined Landscape

The Civic Identikit of Flows

Consumption

Globalization

Culture

Community

Troubled History/ Reconciliation

The Civic Identikit of Place Figure 0.1. A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Transitional Space.

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The Great Reimagining

The five public art case studies examined in-depth in subsequent chapters were arrived at after much consultation with local scholars, public officials, regeneration workers, artists and community leaders in Northern Ireland. Those selected do not claim to represent the full spectrum of Northern Irish public art in the post-conflict period. Rather they provide sightlines into the post-conflict, global-local dialectic in theory and practice. Because my focus is the material mediation of urban life and the mixing of difference cities require, I identified artworks explicitly commissioned or reconceptualized to inject a sense of civicness or ‘shared space’ into landscapes undergoing significant transition. As noted, each artwork tells the story of how one of the dominant discourses considered in the above model – globalization, consumption, community, troubled history/reconciliation and culture – has been materially mediated in urban space. In selecting the public art case studies, commissioning briefs and project documents were also reviewed to determine the norms and values shaping the production process. The five case studies selected include Rise, a large-scale gateway piece intended in part as a global branding device for Belfast on the world stage; the Spirit of Belfast, a contemporary city centre installation commissioned to complement a major shopping centre development and promote consumption in the retail circuit; Hewitt in the Frame, a community project undertaken along a peace line to facilitate positive expression and identity building for a working-class Protestant neighbourhood in West Belfast; the Diamond War Memorial in Derry, a focal point for anti-British sentiment among the city’s Catholic majority that became the subject of efforts to redeploy history in the service of reconciliation; and Mute Meadow, an abstract work located in a former Londonderry army barracks that aimed to produce ‘new meaning’ for a contested site and city via innovative engagements with local culture and community groups. The fieldwork this book is based on took place in Belfast and Derry/ Londonderry primarily between May 2010 and December 2011. Roughly 60 semi-structured interviews were carried out with individuals involved in the public art process in these cities. Formal interviews were weighted in favour of those with an official role in shaping the space in question, through the funding, selection, design or consultation process. The interviews typically occurred at the individual’s place of work and lasted from 45 minutes to two hours. These conversations focused on the stated objectives of the artwork and the normative policy context that backgrounded the commission, as well as symbolic content and spatial considerations. The data used in this analysis was also informed by archival resources, such as government planning strategies, tourism and culture frameworks, commissioning briefs and media reportage. Public reception was primarily gleaned through hundreds of informal vox-pop interviews, which took place in or

Introduction

19

near the spaces where the art was located.8 Additional fieldwork included participant observation of public spaces in both cities, as well as attendance at public art unveilings, conferences and community art workshops. Finally, the ‘text’ or actual artwork was a critical third component – in addition to producers and audience – in assessing these visual geographies (Rose 1996: 284). After all, the materiality of art invests it with agency (albeit secondary and inherently contingent), which, in turn, allows it to amplify the agency of ‘intentional beings’ (Gell 1998: 20) in the public sphere. As such, I recorded human interactions with the artwork as well as any alterations to its physical form, such as graffiti or other material additions. In one instance, a passerby was able to provide additional iPhone photographic evidence of interactions with a public art monument that had occurred in the early hours of the morning. Taken together, this data fed into my understanding of whether the art and its associated symbolisms accomplished what the officials, commissioners, artists and community facilitators responsible for its existence intended. It also helped suss out the meanings projected onto it by different publics, and the many ways individuals experienced space in concert with, or in opposition to, official discourses.

Plan of the Book Chapter 1 reviews the role of public space in the Northern Irish conflict and its relationship to the province’s sectarian geographies. It examines the postGood Friday Agreement policy push to reshape public space as shared and open for business and the implications this has had for the visual culture of the built environment. Chapters 2–6 are organized to represent one of the dominant discourses considered in this framework and assess the extent to which the official discourse is upheld or constrained, effectively gauging the degree to which state objectives are carried out or contradicted by spatial practice. Chapter 2 looks at the globalization of Belfast’s Broadway Roundabout through the lens of Manuel Castells’s ‘dual city’ (1989) as the space of flows and places intersects and diverges in the effort to build Rise, a massive geodesic sculpture meant to symbolize the city’s re-emergence on the world stage and contribute to the global marketing of the provincial capital. The project is considered representative of the opportunities and limitations of civic identikit art as spatial strategy, as well as the tensions inherent in processes of glocalization. Here, the globalization discourse is paramount. Chapter 3 builds on the theme of glocalization and adaptation in the examination of the regeneration of Arthur Square in Belfast City Centre. It considers the role of the public art sculpture Spirit of Belfast in the promotion of a consumerist ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 2002). But the sculp-

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The Great Reimagining

ture, part and parcel of a public policy environment aimed at promoting the consumption of multinational goods, has also precipitated unintended reappropriations and counterappropriations in the ongoing struggle over space there. The ways in which landscapes of consumption, and the material artefacts that define them, are susceptible to multiple ‘consumptions’ is explored. Chapter 4 shifts attention to a peripheral, inner-city urban space, a sectarian interface and peace wall in West Belfast that has recently been the focus of competing efforts to create an outdoor art gallery on the Protestant side of the wall. While pointing to the limitations the ‘community’ discourse exerts over official goals to redevelop the site for cultural tourism through a form of community theming, this chapter also traces the influence of extra-local forces in the symbolic construction of the Protestant community. The myth of community as a coherent social entity amenable to visual representation is problematized. Chapter 5 looks at the reconciliation discourse’s impact on a space of troubled history, Derry’s Diamond War Memorial, which has been reconceptualized as a shared monument to joint Catholic-Protestant First World War military sacrifice, a popular trope in the post-conflict public sphere. While the cognitive ‘recasting’ of the memorial indicates an acknowledgement of a mutual right to civic space in Derry, a closer reading of the ‘public’ and ‘hidden’ transcripts (Scott 1990) surrounding the memorial sheds light on the resilience of existing social division. The memorial’s reconceptualization further elucidates the ways civic identikit spatial strategies are glocalized to reflect local histories, thereby contributing to the civic identikit of place. Chapter 6 explores how an ambiguously defined culture discourse obfuscates (and mediates between) the top-down and bottom-up discourses considered in the previous chapters. Like many cities, Londonderry, which in 2013 assumed the mantle of inaugural UK City of Culture, has turned to culture-led regeneration as a catalyst for urban renaissance. This chapter posits that the culture discourse offers the Northern Irish state a strategy for neutralizing the divisive spatial politics of the past, but contains its own unacknowledged elisions and may ultimately prove unsustainable, as developments in 2013 and early 2014 suggest. This assessment is carried out through a critique of Mute Meadow, the first major artistic intervention at the former Ebrington Barracks, a symbol of erstwhile British Army domination that was a central focus of the City of Culture year. At the redeveloped Ebrington site, the evolving Northern Irish public sphere and the vision of citizenship it may encourage come into sharp relief. Here, the culture discourse emerges as the key mediator of local-global urban space in Northern Ireland, a dynamic that underscores the province’s contingent position in the global order. Finally, the conclusion reiterates the importance of urban imagery and artefacts in assessing state objectives and power, and untangling the web of influences that shape official spatial

Introduction

21

policy. It also underscores the disjunctions between image and reality across the symbolic landscapes of a ‘new’ Northern Ireland. The chapter speculates on the end point of ‘city as civic identikit’ visual trajectories and considers what these might mean globally for subjectivity and citizenship in increasingly postnational urban milieus defined by transnational flows and capital pressures. It recognizes, however, that the outcomes of material interventions in public spaces are difficult to predict, and remain hostage to a host of volatile forces. Notes 1. Peter Robinson, personal communication, 9 December 2011. 2. The ‘post-conflict’ term poses obvious problems. Binns (2009) points out that a body of literature has critiqued the notion of Belfast as a ‘post-conflict’ city on the rise. Such work has examined the continued existence of sectarianism, violence and social exclusion in the ‘new Belfast’ (see Neill 2006; Shirlow 2006; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006; B. Murtagh 2008). The term ‘post-conflict’ is used as a matter of shorthand to refer to the state of Northern Ireland after the approval of the 1998 Belfast Agreement and is not meant to suggest the absence of conflict in Northern Irish society. 3. The 1998 multi-party peace agreement, which created new power-sharing political institutions and led to the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, is typically referred to as the Good Friday Agreement in Catholic, nationalist circles and the Belfast Agreement among Protestant unionists. These terms for the Agreement are used interchangeably. 4. Disagreements in the Northern Irish landscape are evident at every level, even in the names of cities. While Catholics tend to prefer the name Derry for the province’s second city, Protestants often favour Londonderry. Here again, both appellations are used interchangeably. 5. ‘Creative industries’ is a broad umbrella term that takes in everything from film and traditional arts to e-learning and gaming (Northern Ireland Assembly 2011). 6. Direct rule, which ended unionist control in Northern Ireland, was first introduced in March 1972 in response to the province’s worsening security situation. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to the creation of the Northern Ireland Assembly in December 1999. The assembly has been suspended four times since its inception. The most recent period of direct rule came to an end in 2007 after multi-party negotiations at St. Andrews resulted in an agreement to devolve policing and justice issues, and restore power-sharing between unionists and nationalists. 7. Despite her support for the project, Paisley, daughter of the prominent unionist politician Ian Paisley, ultimately was forced to abstain from the final vote. In an email message, Paisley recalled that ‘had I voted in favour I was told that I would have had the party whip withdrawn’, meaning she would have been removed from DUP meetings and decision-making processes. Nevertheless, in the wake of the controversy, Paisley asserts that ‘unionist minds became a little less closed from that point on, and there was a little mustard seed of realisation as to how important a role the Arts play especially in a situation involving conflict’ (Rhonda Paisley, email message to author, 18 January 2014). 8. See the Appendix for a breakdown of interviews by case study and subject profile.

1 A Place Apart? Sectarian Geographies, Shared Space and the Material Production of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland

S

[H]e had the sense of names in the air, of ghosts at the windows, of signs and tokens, a whole range of expression, all about him, too thick for prompt discrimination. —Henry James, The Ambassadors (1960: 125)

On some level, public space in all societies is contested. In Northern Ireland, however, where the legitimacy of the state and an enduring legacy of a violent conflict bedevil inter- and intra- community relations, contestation over public space is particularly dramatic. After all, it was in public space, and in urban space specifically, where the preponderance of violence in Northern Ireland occurred. The sparking of the contemporary conflict, also known as the ‘Troubles’, in the late 1960s was linked to battles to gain access to and recognition for political identities and demands in public space (Bryan 2009; Nagle and Clancy 2010; Prince and Warner 2012). Indeed, the unionist regime’s ban on the proposed route for the first civil rights march in Derry and the heavy-handed security response to the flouting of the ban are viewed as a key early event in the conflict (Gillespie 2010; Prince and Warner 2012). While the complexity of the Northern Irish Troubles belies easy summarization, the basic dynamic is rooted in ‘an enduring ethnonational dispute’ (Coulter 1999: 3; Wright 1987), the fault lines of which sharpened after Great Britain’s partition of Ireland via the 1920 Government of Ireland Act.

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This resulted in the creation of Northern Ireland, comprising the six unionistdominated counties of Ulster, as a distinct political entity with its own parliament (Gillespie 2010). After the conclusion of the Irish Republican Army’s war of independence from Great Britain in 1921, the remaining 26 counties became the Irish Free State,1 declared the following year. Northern Ireland, which remained within the United Kingdom, existed as ‘a place apart’ defined in the crudest terms by the enduring conflict between its two primary community groupings: the Catholic/nationalist/republican population who historically have favoured Irish unification, and the Protestant/unionist/loyalist population who assert that Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom (Coulter 1999).2 The ongoing struggle between these two groups, manifest in episodic rioting, murder, residential evictions and other intimidation between their affiliated working-classes, was exacerbated by a unionist regime widely viewed by the Catholic minority to rule in favour of its coreligionists in everything from jobs to housing (Coulter 1999; Gillespie 2010). The unionist-dominated Northern Irish state demonstrated its political preferences in the material organization and symbolic construction of key civic spaces (Neill and Schwedler 2001; Rolston 1991). From the nationalist perspective, ‘the very existence of the [unionist] symbols as civic ones inevitably represented the triumph of unionism and the suppression of nationalism in the North of Ireland’ (Rolston 1991: 18). A cursory survey of Northern Irish civic space under the unionist-dominated Stormont regime reinforces such claims. The approach to Stormont Parliament Buildings, opened in 1932, features a monumental statue of the fiery unionist leader Sir Edward Carson standing atop a plinth decorated with scenes of Ulster unionist history. The actual building, seat of the provincial assembly, is crowned by the watchful figure of Britannia, and was ‘deliberately conceived to physically constitute a grand symbolic demarcation of difference’ (Neill 2001a: 16) from the Irish state and to bear testament to ‘unionist self-assertion’ (Neill 1999: 273). Likewise, the grounds of Belfast City Hall, ‘a symbol of unionist power and Protestant Culture’ (McIntosh 2006: 73), were surrounded by statues of leading Protestant civic and business figures, British war memorials and an imposing sculpture of Queen Victoria (see Figure 1.1). Similarly, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second city, the symbolic landscape was defined by ‘icons of the Protestant ethos’ (Cohen 2007: 956), such as the city’s historic seventeenth-century walls, to this day owned by The Honourable The Irish Society in London, the spire of St. Columb’s Cathedral and the Diamond War Memorial. Eamonn Deane, a prominent activist and community worker who grew up in the Catholic Bogside in the years prior to the outbreak of the conflict, paints the unionist spatial hegemony of the city in stark terms:

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Figure 1.1. Early twentieth-century statues on the Belfast City Hall grounds reflect an era of unionist hegemony. All of the centre of the town was perceived as their territory. … You think the valley of the Bogside, right? And you are looking up at all sorts of overlordship: the walled city, Walker’s pillar, the Apprentice Boys hall, First Derry School, First Derry Presbyterian – all these essentially colonial buildings overlooking the swamp as it were. The Bogside was a swamp. (Deane, interview 2010)

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Catholic access to public space was further constrained by a variety of legal proscriptions, such as the 1922 Special Powers Act, the 1951 Public Order Act and the Flags and Emblems Act of 1954, which taken together, were frequently and disproportionately invoked by officials to jettison Catholics’ ability to demonstrate, march and display nationalist-oriented symbology (Bryan 2006b, 2009; Nagle and Clancy 2010; Prince and Warner 2012). At the same time, similarly contentious Protestant manifestations in public space, such as loyalist Orange Order parades and Apprentice Boy marches, were less likely to be banned. In Belfast, under the unionist regime, the city centre was largely considered the preserve of ‘civic unionism’ (Nagle and Clancy 2010: 81), though this was hardly left unchallenged by Catholic nationalists.3 Nagle and Clancy (2010: 88) observe that ‘from the late 1960s onwards [the centre] became a central crucible for testing claims to civil rights’. Likewise, in Derry, a key tactic of the early civil rights movement was to ‘attack … the spatial order of the city’ by contesting ‘Unionist monopoly on marches within the walls’ (Prince and Warner 2012: 87). To these ends, a planned route for one march that was banned would have taken nationalists into the unionist sacred space of the war memorial (Prince and Warner 2012). Subsequent civil rights manifestations in unionist preserves were also resisted by some loyalists (Prince and Warner 2012). From the outset, the right to symbolic expression in public space was inseparably linked to contention over the wider constitutional issue. For instance, the threat of violence in Northern Irish urban space escalated rapidly after an Apprentice Boys march in mid-August 1969. The annual loyalist order parade, which marks the lifting of the Catholic King James II’s Siege of Derry by forces loyal to the Protestant King William III in 1689 during the Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland,4 triggered a wave of rioting across the province. In Londonderry this culminated in the Battle of the Bogside, between nationalist/republican residents there and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Meanwhile, in West Belfast the upheaval was marked by the burning of Bombay Street and other Catholic areas by loyalists from the Shankill Road (Gillespie 2010). Unlike previous outbreaks of Protestant– Catholic violence in the North of Ireland, the period after August 1969 witnessed a marked ‘rigidification’ (Feldman 1991: 30) of spatial boundaries. No-go zones were erected in working-class neighbourhoods to protect against incursions by ‘the other’, and specifically to keep the police and security forces out of Catholic areas. Peace lines and security barriers were erected by the British Army – deployed on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry in response to the August rioting – to separate the two factions and contain interface violence. In the absence of strong state authority, vigilante groups flourished and wide-scale population evictions and intimidation occurred in places where ‘small ethnically homogenous groups …

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bordered on the larger sectarian enclaves of the opposing ethnic group’ (Feldman 1991: 23). An upsurge in the organization and clout of paramilitary groups, such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), as well as the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA), also occurred. After 1969, Feldman (1991: 36) asserts, Northern Irish ‘[u]rban space was reinscribed as a radicalized historiographic surface, a terrain of representation that determined the conceptualization of political interest’. In Derry alone, during the conflict, roughly 15,000 Protestants fled the Catholic-majority west bank, known as the Cityside, for the then-Protestant majority Waterside (BBC News 2006a). The enduring legacy of segregation in Northern Ireland is so deeply ingrained in the local population’s consciousness that one Catholic housewife from Derry with whom I spoke at a celebration to mark the launch of the city’s new Peace Bridge in June 2011 delivered a detailed, street-by-street breakdown of the Waterside’s religious makeup when asked about the residential proclivities of its Catholic and Protestant populations.5 The symbolic-material impact of the conflict on spatial geometries and identities is well documented by social scientists (see Feldman 1991; Boal 1994; Jarman 1997; Murtagh 2002; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006; Brand 2009; Bryan 2009). The intensity of violence and the fear this imprinted on urban space led to the rapid securitization and balkanization of the public domain. For instance, the PIRA’s use of the car bomb to project physical terror onto the population (particularly in Belfast) and assault the city centre’s economic viability precipitated the construction in the early 1970s of a security perimeter with military checkpoints – known as ‘the ring of steel’ – around the Belfast city centre (Nagle and Clancy 2010: 90). For the duration of the Troubles, the city centre became a virtual dead zone outside of working hours.6 Sectarian killing on the streets amplified the terror of the era, marked by the rise and fall in the 1970s of the Shankill Butchers, a UVF-linked murder gang, which targeted Catholics – and those Protestants they believed to be Catholics – in a gruesome manner that included the use of ‘cleavers, axes and butchers’ knives’ (Gillespie 2010: 78). From the start of the Troubles to this day, the spatial response to violence, e.g., residential segregation, has been further reified in the urban landscape by an attendant visual demarcation of space (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). This has taken the form of an array of symbolic-cultural markers such as flags, murals and painted kerbstones (red, white and blue for Protestant areas; orange and green for Catholic ones) and is also evident in the use of material culture to draw links to the past in Protestant parades during the summer loyalist marching season (Jarman 1997). The early twentieth-century loyalist tradition of mural painting on gable walls was appropriated by nationalists during the republican hunger strikes of 1981 to broadcast their

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political support for republican prisoners. This triggered an outpouring of murals in Catholic working-class housing estates throughout Northern Ireland (Rolston 1991). Similarly, an uptick in loyalist mural production followed the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, opposed by unionists and loyalists on grounds that it gave the Republic of Ireland a say in Northern Irish affairs (Rolston 1991). Jarman (1997) has characterized murals as a key means for both loyalists and republicans to establish their presence in public space. He writes: ‘Such paintings have been used to situate and legitimize the two movements historically and symbolically within the wider nationalist and unionist communities. They have been used to display explicitly the case for paramilitary action in support of political ideals. … [They] are an integral part of’ the process of commemoration (Jarman 1997: 249). As boundary shapers, some murals have become so associated with the identity of one ethno-national community as to make any association with the images depicted – even if the image has no specific Northern Irish reference – unacceptable to members of its antipodal group. One Protestant mother of three who lived on the Shankill Road said she refused to let her son wear a Che Guevara T-shirt that her husband had brought back from a holiday to Cuba because at the time the Argentinean revolutionary’s visage was featured on the prominent ‘International Wall’ of murals on the Catholic Falls Road. As a result, the woman was concerned her son might be vulnerable to attacks within his own residential community were he to appear in public wearing what she deemed ‘an IRA symbol’.7 In a similar, if more ephemeral manner, parades that mark key dates in each community’s commemorative calendar have also been used by Protestants and some Catholics to ‘reaffirm territorial identities, confirm boundaries and demonstrate collective rights of way’ (Jarman 1997: 258), even, and sometimes, especially, if this means passing through the ‘territory’ of the opposing community. Early clashes over loyalist parades (such as those held by the Protestant Orange Order8 and the Apprentice Boys of Derry), as well as nationalist-affiliated civil rights marches, underscore the role of public space both as a key arena in which the Northern Irish conflict has been fought and as a symbolic bellwether for broader shifts in the political environment. Northern Ireland’s worsening security situation led to strict limits and tighter police controls over loyalist manifestations in public spaces, including the Apprentice Boys’ annual march around the Derry walls in commemoration of the 1688–1689 Siege of Derry. But with the easing of the security climate after the 1994 PIRA and loyalist paramilitary ceasefires, conflict reverted to contestation over public spaces and the control of their symbolic mediation. Disputes over Orange Order parades once again took ‘centre stage’ (Bryan 2006b: 124). The July 1995 standoff at Drumcree, triggered by the RUC’s attempt to block the Orange Order returning to Portadown from the Drumcree Church

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of Ireland via the Catholic Garvaghy Road – where republican protestors had assembled – occurred just one year after the ceasefire. This march would prove tumultuous throughout the 1990s, and precipitate greater oversight of parades, including the 1998 formation of a Parades Commission, invested with authority to make rulings on parades and their so-called ‘traditional’ routes. Bryan (2006b: 135) has speculated that increased republican demonstrations against loyalist marches ‘became easier’ in this period with the ‘removal of threats of violence’ in public space. At the same time, the state’s reaction to the Orange Order’s demands on public space, and its restrictions on Orange routes, prefigures post-Agreement debates over the need to make public spaces ‘shared’, and how this occurs in practice.

The Good Friday Agreement, Shared Space and the Visual Cultures of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland The conclusion of a negotiated multi-party peace agreement in 1998 ushered in a new era for Northern Ireland, including the eventual establishment of a devolved power-sharing assembly, which after some initial false starts has functioned continuously since 2007. It also authorized a Northern Ireland Executive (NIE) under the auspices of the Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister (OFMDFM). While it did not contain specific provisions to address the deep-seated spatial segregation of Northern Irish society (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006), the Good Friday Agreement made clear that such values as ‘parity of esteem’ and ‘mutual respect’ for ‘both communities’ should be at the centrepiece of the new Northern Irish state (NIO 1998). It acknowledged the acute ‘sensitivity of the use of symbols and emblems for public purposes, and the need … to ensure that such symbols and emblems are used in a manner which promotes mutual respect rather than division’ (NIO 1998). Under Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act of 1998, the implementing legislation of the Agreement, all public bodies are legally bound to consider equality of opportunity in policy decisions having an impact on a range of social groups, and good relations between them must be promoted (OFMDFM 2005b). An Equality Commission has oversight to ensure these legal demands are implemented at each level of government, and will soon also take on good relations enforcement responsibilities under the government’s most recent community relations strategy (OFMDFM 2013). These public values have repercussions for how authorities approach social and, by association, spatial policy post-Good Friday Agreement. Both Belfast City Council and Derry City Council (DCC) have issued Good Relations strategies laying out their respective visions for promoting tolerant and pluralistic societies in which diversity is respected and celebrated (BCC 2003;

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DCC 2011b). Likewise, in response to the Section 75 statutory requirement to promote ‘good relations’, OFMDFM issued A Shared Future, which underscored the need to reclaim ‘shared space … for meeting, sharing, playing, working and living’ and to free ‘the public realm from threat, aggression and intimidation while allowing for the legitimate expression of cultural celebration’ (OFMDFM 2005a: 21). Belfast’s Good Relations Plan specifically advocates for a shared, peaceful, welcoming and open Belfast where ‘the public places of the city … should be accessible to and trusted by all’ (BCC 2007: 8). The challenges of implementing a shared space agenda, however, are evident in the fraught negotiations over the executive’s follow-up community relations strategy. Initially released in draft form as Cohesion, Sharing and Integration (CSI), haggling over the final document dragged on for nearly three years before its final release in May 2013 as Together: Building a United Community. The release of the new community relations strategy, driven by negotiations between the primary nationalist and unionist parties, respectively Sinn Féin and the DUP, came in the wake of months of loyalist street protests over the Belfast City Council’s vote to limit the flying of the Union Jack at City Hall in December 2012. Prior to its release, both the non-aligned Alliance Party and the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) walked out of negotiations over contentious symbolic issues such as flags and parade routes (BBC News 2013c), issues that were avoided in the final document and delegated to an independently chaired All Party group. Led by former U.S. diplomat Richard Haass, the subsequent talks focused on resolving contentious issues of identity, parading and the legacy of the conflicted past, but failed to reach an agreement by the 31 December 2013 deadline. Haass’s draft proposal, calling for, among other things, the replacement of the Parades Commission with a new devolved mechanism for adjudicating disputes and the creation of a Commission on Identity, Culture and Tradition, has informed further talks among Northern Ireland’s political parties, which continue as of this writing in early 2014 (Belfast Telegraph 2014). The shift from A Shared Future, written by British ministers during a period of direct rule from Westminster when the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended, to the new community relations framework features some important changes in how community relations policy is conceptualized, including the previously mentioned expanded Equality Commission responsibilities. Among the strategy’s highlights are its commitment to create antisectarian educational modules, cross-community primary school ‘buddy’ programmes, thousands of job placements for youth and a programme that would bring about the removal of all peace walls by 2023 (OFMDFM 2013). Like its predecessor, however, the new strategy is notable for its emphasis on using the arts as a non-threatening means by which to explore cultural identity, directing additional funds to ACNI to promote cultural

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diversity and charging it with shaping a Cultural Awareness Week to ‘encourage cultural celebration and exploration for cultures and identities’ (OFMDFM 2013: 7). The shared space policy agenda, envisioned to varying degrees by these strategies, has been incorporated into a number of regeneration programmes intended to resuscitate the post-conflict, post-industrial landscape. As Feldman (1991: 6) has noted, the high levels of violence experienced during the conflict ‘accelerated’ the ‘transformation of the public sphere of urban social life into a postindustrial wasteland’. In Northern Ireland, the conflict coincided with the decline of the province’s domestic industries. For Belfast, this meant the end to its days as a titan in the businesses of shipbuilding, linen mills and rope works. Derry’s dominance in the shirt-making and textile industries also faded. In the aftermath of the Troubles, the state has attempted to promote the production of what Graham and Nash (2006: 256) term ‘“normal” capitalist material space’ through large-scale urban development interventions. Many of these schemes have also benefited from the largesse of the European Union, which, in addition to funding provided through the INTERREG programmes for underdeveloped border regions, has channelled roughly 2 billion Euros in peace and reconciliation monies to more than 20,000 different projects in Northern Ireland and the border counties from the mid-1990s through its PEACE programme, according to Pat Colgan, chief executive of the Special EU Programmes Body (Colgan, interview 2011). PEACE III, the name of the fund that supported peace and reconciliation efforts from 2007 through 2013, embraced the specific themes of building ‘positive relations’ at the local level and ‘creat[ing] shared public spaces’ (SEUPB 2007). This has included substantial investment in the built environment, which Colgan said is viewed by EU officials as ‘extraordinarily significant in terms of the statements you can make’ (Colgan, interview 2011). He added that iconic art and architecture are ways of delivering a message of change ‘in areas where there was conflict’ (Colgan, interview 2011).9 A policy focus on the built environment as vehicle for social uplift gained currency with the creation of the public-private Laganside Corporation, formed by government in the late 1980s as a means to ‘use publicly visible schemes to show people that something different was happening’, according to Peter Hunter, a London-based architect who helped launch the corporation and served as an adviser on its projects (Hunter, interview 2011a). Laganside, the initial remit of which was to carry out the physical regeneration of a mostly derelict and polluted 4.8-kilometre-stretch along Belfast’s Lagan River (OECD 2000: 32), oversaw the construction of such prominent post-conflict symbols of city-centre revival as the contemporary glass Waterfront Hall and the Odyssey Arena sports and dining complex, as well as

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the redevelopment of Custom House Square and the former gasworks at the foot of the Ormeau Road. Before dissolving in 2007, Laganside also broadened its portfolio to include the overhaul of the arts-focused Cathedral Quarter on the edge of the city centre. The opening of the upscale, domed Victoria Square shopping centre and the launch of the still-under-construction Titanic Quarter waterfront scheme at the city’s former Harland and Wolff shipyards have further bolstered the city centre’s reputation as a ‘neutral’ space for ‘shared’ consumption and leisure. Meanwhile, in Derry, the urban regeneration company Ilex was formed by government in 2003 to head up far-reaching revitalization plans. These have included the overhaul of two former British military bases on the banks of the River Foyle – Forts George and Ebrington – both of which were closed not long after the conclusion of the Belfast Agreement. These are to be transformed into mixed-use developments. Fort George, the management of which was transferred to the Department for Social Development (DSD) in April 2013, recently opened the new North West Regional Science Park. It is also the site of the Project Kelvin exchange centre, an access point to highspeed submarine telecom connectivity with North America. Meanwhile, Ebrington’s central parade ground inside its historic Star Fort has been envisioned as an arts and culture cluster with further commercial and residential developments beyond the walls (Ilex 2006; SQW Consulting et al. 2008; Ilex 2011). However, recent consultations have floated the possibility of alternative trajectories for the overall site (Ilex 2014). As of this writing, what form this development will take is still unknown. The Ilex-initiated, citywide One Regeneration Plan – with its conspicuously post-conflict subtitle ‘One City One Plan One Voice’ – has offered vague promises to ‘deliver Renewal – Economic, Physical and Social’ (Ilex 2011: 5) through ‘transformational approaches’ (ibid.: 20), which touch on everything from expanding the city’s digital capacities to promoting ‘[p]lace-making and [s]patial clustering’ (ibid.: 21). Already, Derry has witnessed a prominent addition to its civic image with the June 2011 unveiling of the EU-funded Peace Bridge, a sweeping, s-shaped, foot-and-cycle bridge intended to project a symbolic handshake over the River Foyle, the city’s historical dividing line between Catholics and Protestants. As officials seek to reposition Northern Ireland as ‘open for business’, with its cities ready to join the ranks of their modern, peaceful European cousins, public art is cited as one means of changing attitudes towards public space internally and projecting a message of modernity and normality externally. In this way, the state seeks to project itself onto a representational palimpsest that has been plagued by symbols of sectarianism and exclusion. The Arts Council’s Re-Imaging Communities programme, which facilitates the replacement of ‘aggressively sectarian and racist images’ (OFMDFM

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2006: 82), mainly murals, in public housing estates (Harron 2006), grew out of A Shared Future’s vision for ‘freeing the public realm … from displays of sectarian aggression’ (OFMDFM 2005: 18). By 2012, the programme, now funded by the Arts Council, the EU and the International Fund for Ireland (IFI), had carried out more than 100 projects in conjunction with community groups. Moreover, former Belfast Lord Mayor Naomi Long has asserted that the city’s ‘remarkable regeneration in recent years owes much to an ever-increasing variety of public art’, which among other things, ‘has helped create shared spaces in the city centre’ (Long 2009: 2). One of Belfast’s earliest artistic interventions in public space, the Laganside public art trails, features more than thirty artworks within the corporation’s riverside development area, explicitly cultivated as a ‘neutral’ place, where ‘all groups will feel comfortable’ (Laganside, n.d.b). In addition to the popular Bigfish, located near the Lagan Weir and reproduced en masse on the Belfast edition of Starbucks’ Global City Mug Collection, the public art trail features a mix of nostalgic figurative images, such as the Ulster Brewer and Sheep on the Road, and abstract works that claim to reference the city’s industrial heritage, such as sculptures of portholes and brick pillars topped by interlocking rings (DSD, n.d.). Most of these pieces were erected in the immediate aftermath of the peace agreement. Meanwhile, Titanic Quarter’s first public art commission, a bronze sculpture called Kit, based on a model toy ship kit and built by Harland and Wolff, the company responsible for the real RMS Titanic ocean liner, was described in one press release as ‘designed to offer a sense of shared ownership’ (Arts & Business 2009). Additionally, Ilex, which commissioned the contemporary art sculpture Mute Meadow at the former Ebrington Barracks, has also viewed public art as a tool with which to counteract conflict-related perceptions of public space. As Mo Durkan, an Ilex communications official, noted, ‘The difficulty this city has had with public space is that largely due to the Troubles … areas like the Guildhall Square and Waterloo Place [in the city centre] were seen to be hostile, unfriendly, unsafe.’ Public art, she added, could help ‘break them down and make them more people-friendly and certainly more open to multipurpose use’ (Durkan, interview 2010). The quantity of schemes incorporating public art that are aimed at counteracting the combined effects of deindustrialization and thirty years of urban conflict bears testament to the perceived potential of the public art process to help reconstruct the post-conflict landscape. In addition to the previously mentioned reimaging programme, other initiatives have included the Arts Council’s Art in Contested Spaces and the Art of Regeneration schemes; Belfast City Council’s Brighter Belfast, Renewing the Routes, Art for Arterial Routes and Creative Legacies programmes; and Derry City Council’s Arts and Regeneration project. The DSD has also

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included sizable public art components in its public-realm work throughout the province. While the overhaul of the built environment has been described as a vehicle for normalization, these spatial interventions are also closely linked to the demands of the province’s ongoing economic restructuring. Just two years after the approval of the peace agreement, the government released the Regional Development Strategy for Northern Ireland 2025, which aimed to ‘establish a worldwide image for Northern Ireland, based on positive images of progress and attractive places to visit’ (Department for Regional Development 2001: 147). Noting the ‘intense competition for mobile investment’ in an ‘increasingly open and deregulated global economy’, the strategy advocated for investment in soft features, such as quality environments, to attract restless investment capital (DRD 2001: 13), and envisioned the expansion of a ‘network of opportunities for tourism’ anchored by the ‘two main cities of Belfast and Londonderry’ (ibid.: 155). As both towns have repositioned themselves as attractive global ‘destinations’, a number of orthodox, culture-led regeneration strategies, including investment in flagship architectural projects, cultural quarters, waterfront development initiatives and arts festivals (Melanie Smith 2009), have been carried out. Each city has jockeyed for titles aimed at bolstering its cultural bona fides (and the presumed distinctiveness on the international stage these bring). Although Belfast lost a bid to become European Capital of Culture 2008, Derry succeeded in securing the designation of inaugural UK City of Culture 2013, after a multi-million pound government investment in cultural capital projects, described by one former culture minister as a move to ‘maximize the benefit from the growth in Cultural Tourism’ (NIE 2007a). Many of the new civic spaces of post-conflict Northern Ireland reflect the features of David Harvey’s capitalist ‘utopias’, among which he situates shopping malls and waterfront developments, where ‘continuous spectacles of commodity culture, including the commodification of the spectacle itself’ (Harvey 2002: 168) dominate what are, for all intents and purposes, depoliticized, though hardly non-ideological, spaces. As places are remade for consumption, with tourism among the forces playing a determinative role in shaping their visual identities, place marketing and branding, and the images required to fuel these processes, have taken on central importance in shaping the built environment (Lash and Urry 1994; Urry 2006). Due to the post-Fordist shift toward a symbolically mediated ‘experience economy’ (Pine and Gilmore 1999) and its elevation of the ‘consumer citizen’ (Lash and Urry 1994), new urban spaces are materially defined by privatized, hyperreal, themed built environments (Urry and Larsen 2011), often characterized by simulation and/or ‘heritagisation’, a process of ‘ahistoric aes-

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theticization’ that produces spaces with superficial references and shallow connection to the place identity or events in question (Walsh 1992). In Belfast, the ultracontemporary Titanic Quarter, an ongoing 185-acre, mixed-use waterfront regeneration scheme along the Lagan River, designed to lure tourists and financial services firms to the east of the city centre (Titanic Quarter 2006, 2008), encapsulates many of these trends. The construction of Titanic Quarter, the first phase of which began in 2006, is the most ambitious of a wider theming of the city that has seen its neighbourhoods recategorized in recent years into an ever-expanding number of distinct cultural ‘quarters’.10 To traverse the sleek, new, nearly antiseptic spaces of Titanic Quarter in 2012 was akin to stumbling onto one of the stage sets in the nearby Titanic Studios, where the popular HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones is filmed. Under the shadow of the yellow Harland and Wolff cranes, one could wander past the ARC development, a hotel, residential and office complex, stopping to chat with skateboarders practicing in the large plaza overlooking the river (at least on days when security personnel had not chased them away). From this perch, the development, billed by backers as ‘one of Belfast’s most sought-after locations’ (Titanic Quarter, n.d.), appeared largely unoccupied, a likely casualty of the global slump in property markets. Still, while there, one might have gazed on Kit, the first installation in a planned public art trail intended to ‘add considerably to the [Titanic Quarter] visitor experience’ (BCC, n.d.b), ‘bring [Belfast] into line with cities such as Vienna and Barcelona’ (Mike Smith 2009) and foster a sense of ‘shared’ ownership.11 One could have also taken in the vibrant images of urban living depicted in the mostly empty ground-floor shop windows of the ARC complex. Capping off this outing, the visitor might duck into the quarter’s crowning attraction, Titanic Belfast (see Figure 1.2), a pseudohistorical museum ‘experience’ and conference centre, to ‘explore the sights, sounds, smells and stories of Titanic as well as the city and people which made her … by foot and by rides’ – as the venue once boasted on its website – in room after room of simulated exhibits. Touted as Belfast’s answer to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Addley and McDonald 2012), the partially publicly subsidized £100 million Titanic visitor centre opened in March 2012 on the very site where the ill-fated ocean liner was built 100 years before. The shimmering, six-storey, aluminium-clad construction, meant to recall a quartet of ships’ prows, ‘evok[es] from above the stellar motif of the White Star Line’ (Neill 2011: 77). Entrance, however, is contingent on the ability to pay a £15.50 admission charge. But even once the fee is paid, parts of the building have remained off limits. Glimpses of the grand oak staircase have been reserved for corporate clients except on some selectively designated days (Houston 2012). The privatization of space in Titanic Quarter also extends to the nearby dry docks, the final launching

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Figure 1.2. Opened in 2012, Titanic Belfast is among the city’s recent ‘iconic’ constructions intended to attract tourists.

place of the Titanic ocean liner, where an entrance fee has been in effect since 2010, as well as to the recently refurbished SS Nomadic opened in May 2013 as a tourist attraction charging £8.50 for admission. And in late 2013, the Heritage Lottery Fund allocated five million pounds to assist in the renovation of the Harland and Wolff headquarter building and drawing offices into a boutique hotel (BBC News 2013a). It has also recently earmarked substantial funds to help turn the HMS Caroline, the ‘lone survivor’ ship from the 1916 Battle of Jutland, into a ‘world-class heritage visitor attraction’ in Titanic Quarter (HLF 2014). Sleek new landscapes such as Titanic Quarter, calibrated to seduce the tourist gaze and attract multinational financial services firms through the ‘consumption of sensation’ (Neill 2011: 78), conveniently sidestep the continued ethno-national contestation that pervades all aspects of Northern Irish society. Exhibit text in Titanic Belfast includes a single passing reference to the rampant sectarianism and social exclusions that existed at the erstwhile shipyard – social exclusions that, ironically, are well on their way to being reproduced in the Titanic Quarter visitor experience.12 Meanwhile, the broader vision for Titanic Quarter, laid out in promotional literature and imagery, has emphasized its ‘newness and neutrality’ and celebrated a cultural mixing ‘unconnected’ to the two predominant Catholic and Protestant communities (Etchart 2008: 35; Neill 2011). Rather, promotional images

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have embraced the aesthetic of contemporary, upscale urban lifestyles (Neill 2011).13 This focus avoids the political problematic of reconciling or confronting opposing political identities in civic spaces, therefore ceding such territory to the ‘ordering’ influence of capital. Similarly, in Derry, officials have emphasized that the high-profile regeneration of the former Ebrington Military Barracks, examined in closer detail in Chapter 6, should ‘not have particular resonance for either community’ (Durkan, interview 2010) but would seek to ‘open up the site to full market potential’ (Mullan 2013b), with arts venues considered one means to attract ‘the high spending segment of [the] destination tourism market’ (SQW Consulting et al. 2008: 9), though this strategy has more recently shown signs of fraying. This proclivity to cede the visual mediation of urban landscapes to socalled neutral market forces and their globalized symbolic signifiers has particular implications for memory, history and identity in a divided society. Peter Hunter, the former adviser to DSD and the Laganside Corporation, recalled that after the Belfast Agreement, ‘I think people suddenly thought, “Ah yes, we should have some symbols”’ (Hunter, interview 2011a). Hunter said the desire for peace process symbols precipitated the creation of Thanksgiving Square, a public-private development inspired by a similar space in Dallas, Texas. Located along the Lagan River, the square features a 19.5-metre-tall metal Belfast Thanksgiving Square Beacon of an abstract figure atop a globe presenting a garland to the river (see Figure 1.3). Hunter, a member of the commissioning panel, said the artwork, completed in 2005 and known locally as the ‘Nuala with the Hula’, was conceived of as ‘celebratory’, a means to say ‘thank you for the peace process’ (Hunter, interview 2011a). But altering the symbolic landscape is particularly fraught when the political change that occurs is far from decisive, or where opposing constitutional views and symbolisms coexist (Levinson 1998: 25). As Hunter also noted, plans to add conflict-related ‘texts and artistic illustrations’ to Thanksgiving Square, located in what he classified as a ‘neutral’ part of the city, were subsequently scuttled due to lack of funds as well as to a pervasive ‘nervousness about … what are we going to put in there’ (Hunter, interview 2011a). In the end, an informational board offered only the vaguest nod to the political situation. It states somewhat euphemistically that the sculpture was intended to ‘make bridges across the divides in our community’ and goes on to emphasize the artwork’s universal themes, such as ‘celebrating the diversity of culture that exists in our global village’ and working ‘towards a peaceful, happy existence for everyone on this planet’. Such language reflects late capitalism’s embrace of ‘abstract ideologies of liberalism, equality and progress’ (Lash and Urry 1994: 15), ideologies whose very ambiguity is often at the heart of their appeal in the public domain. As Lash and Urry

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Figure 1.3. The Belfast Thanksgiving Square Beacon is one of the city’s most prominent post-conflict symbols.

(1994: 16) contend, postmodern symbolic domination ‘is effected through forms which are characterized by very little meaning’. Thus, despite a government-established commission’s recommendation in 1998 that an official memorial to the victims of the Troubles be constructed in Northern Ireland,

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none has been forthcoming. Efforts by Relatives for Justice, a nationalist-linked victims’-rights NGO, to secure public funding from ACNI for a Troubles memorial have been unsuccessful (Julianne McCormick, former BCC public art and community coordinator, interview 2010). A notable exception to the dearth of official Troubles-related monuments in Northern Ireland is the memorial to the victims of the 1998 Omagh bomb that killed 29 and injured 220 people. That atrocity, which occurred after the Good Friday Agreement, engendered greater cross-political denunciation. Still, Omagh memorial artist Seán Hillen attributed the project’s extensive difficulties to Northern Ireland’s ‘dysfunctional public culture’, stating that it is ‘a place where, I think, the truth can’t be spoken’ (Hillen, interview 2011). Set against this backdrop, the planned redevelopment of the former Maze prison, which housed republican and loyalist paramilitary prisoners during the conflict, poses particular challenges. Central to the proposed overhaul of the 347-acre site near Lisburn was to be the construction of an ‘iconic’ Daniel Libeskind-designed conflict transformation centre, highlighting the province’s successful path to peace (BBC News 2012a). Situated next to a preserved portion of the former prison, which includes one of the infamous H-shaped cellblocks, the proposed centre had been described by First Minister Peter Robinson as a potential ‘mecca for tourists’ (quoted in BBC News 2012f); deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness called the site – which, in addition to the proposed peace centre and a planned industrial park for high-tech companies, is already home to the Royal Ulster Agricultural Society’s Balmoral Show – ‘the most exciting piece of land anywhere in western Europe’ (quoted in Kilpatrick 2013). But such boosterish comments have come up against continued unionist concerns that the preserved H block, where 10 men died during the 1981 republican hunger strikes, would become a republican shrine (McHugh 2013). After months of outcry from the Orange Order and some PIRA victims groups, Robinson halted the project, and 18 million pounds in EU funding was subsequently withdrawn. Whether the centre will be revived in the future remains to be seen, though reports in late 2013 indicated that the Maze development had proved such a sticking point at that time that it failed to make it into Haass’s draft proposal on dealing with flags, parades and the past (Clarke 2013). Similarly problematic have been attempts to remake unoccupied sites in contested areas located near Catholic-Protestant interfaces, where clashes over territory and housing remain intense. Plans to regenerate the 27-acre former Girdwood army barracks in North Belfast, for instance, have long been deadlocked over the issue of ‘community housing allocations (O’Dowd and Komarova 2009). A mid-May 2012 announcement that the adjacent Crumlin Road gaol in North Belfast would be transformed into a boutique whiskey distillery and visitor’s centre attracted relatively little public com-

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ment. In contrast, the revelation that two separate blocks of housing (one in a primarily Protestant area, the other in a primarily Catholic area) would be created on the Girdwood site, in addition to leisure and educational facilities, has been the focus of ongoing contention (Devenport 2012; Black 2013). The tentative agreement, which has been described by some as residential ‘apartheid’, reflects a broader, citywide clash between republican demands for increased Catholic housing and unionist opposition to residential redevelopment that might precipitate Catholic encroachment into formerly Protestant areas (Morris 2012). Indeed, working-class residential areas continue to provide the clearest material and visual evidence of Northern Ireland’s social divisions. Such neighbourhoods exhibit extraordinarily high levels of segregation by religion, with 98 per cent of Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) estates in Belfast – and 71 per cent in the province overall – posting segregation levels of more than 90 per cent (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 60). The accompanying spatial territorialization is imprinted on the symbolic landscape via paramilitary flags, murals and memorials, and is manifest in persistent demands for such cultural ‘rights’ as incendiary loyalist parades (through Catholic areas) or by the nationalist demand for the adoption of Irish-language signage.14 In the post-Agreement milieu, while art and culture in the aesthetic sense is used as a tool to reimagine cities as shared and progressive, a parallel, ethno-national culture discourse has become a primary arena for contestation between Catholics and Protestants (Coulter 1999; Graham and Nash 2006). The limitations of Northern Irish state authority, evidenced by the lack of police enforcement of legislation and protocols for dealing with contentious imagery, ensure that such boundary marking continues (Bryan 2011). In mid-2011, the reappearance of menacing UVF murals of balaclava-clad gunmen on the Lower Newtownards Road went unchallenged by police, despite their apparent contravention of the Terrorism Act of 2000 (Bryan 2011). Similarly, a 2005 flags protocol has failed to curb the proliferation of paramilitary and other flags on Northern Irish arterial routes, which are rarely removed by police (Bryan 2011; Bryan and Stevenson 2010). Meanwhile, an official commemorative lacuna in public space has been offset by a rash of non-state memorials to victims of the conflict in working-class areas, mainly constructed by loyalist and republican paramilitaries. These have proliferated in recent years despite their apparent illegality (Viggiani 2011). Perhaps most strikingly, the notion of the city as shared space is rebutted by dozens of steel-and-concrete interface security barriers, several of which were constructed by the state after the 1998 Belfast Agreement, a factor Murtagh (2011) suggests is linked to profound economic inequalities and the divisions these reproduce in low-income areas of the city.15 Efforts to re-

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move these have been confounded by continued support for their existence among interface residents (US-Ireland Alliance 2008; Byrne, Heenan and Robinson 2012), as well as by anecdotal political sentiment that the time is not yet ripe to do so. Even some positive steps toward their elimination reflect the ethnic contestation inherent in Northern Irish politics. In September 2011, a divided North Belfast park opened a gate in its peace wall on weekdays, a move heralded by officials as courageous (BBC News 2011d). Importantly, this pilot programme initially limited opening hours of the gate from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., effectively ensuring that schoolchildren from different backgrounds would be unlikely to mix with one another when the gate was open, as presumably most would be in their classrooms – which, despite the existence of integrated schools, remain primarily segregated by religion.16 Earlier that same year, Derry City Council approved the construction of a new 170-metre peace line at a local playing field, the scene of pitched battles between Catholic and Protestant youths. In that instance, politicians from both traditions defended the decision as a necessary security measure (Belfast Telegraph 2011a). This occurred in concert with preparations for Londonderry’s upcoming year as UK City of Culture 2013, a bid that was predicated on the city’s ability to tell a new, post-conflict story about itself (DCC 2010a).

Conclusion This chapter has reviewed the myriad ways the Northern Irish conflict has shaped the visual and material mediation of civic space across Belfast and Derry, and the far-reaching repercussions the conflict has had for the experience and perception of public spaces in the province. Subsequently, it looked at efforts to carry out a shared space policy agenda in the post-Agreement era. This agenda has encompassed large-scale urban regeneration programmes, many of which have used public art elements to help soften or neutralize civic spaces. At the same time, in an ongoing quest to alter Northern Ireland’s post-conflict image in global space, the state has invested heavily in culture-led redevelopment projects aimed at multinational capital and tourists. Such developments, most prominently the Titanic Quarter, have mostly avoided the local political situation, offering a ‘scrubbed and sanitized’ (Neill 2006: 115) version of the past consistent with global processes of heritagization. The result has been an often-jarring visual juxtaposition between ‘spectacle’ heritage/cultural constructions in Northern Ireland’s new ‘landscapes of consumption’ and the residual traces of place that continue to territorialize space in peripheral, low-income districts. The resulting

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clash of old and new, of the space of places and the space of capital flows, is explored from a number of angles in the following chapters. Notes 1. The 1949 Republic of Ireland Act resulted in the withdrawal of the Irish Free State from the British Commonwealth. Subsequently, the state was known as the Republic of Ireland. 2. It should be noted that these umbrella categories – Protestant/unionist/loyalist and Catholic/nationalist/republican – are not all-encompassing or meant to exclude other identities such as gender or class-based affiliations. Notably, there is a strong working-class (and sometimes paramilitary) association with the terms loyalist and republican. In this book, the terms Protestant and Catholic are used to describe members of each respective group, as these were found to be the first or primary identities cited by the majority of research participants. As Feldman (1991: 11) points out, ‘The ethnic designations “Catholic” or “Protestant” are not indicators of religiosity or regular church attendance.’ 3. Not until 1993 was a nationalist parade allowed into the Belfast city centre (see Bryan 2009; Nagle and Clancy 2010). 4. The war pitted the Catholic King James II, deposed during the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, against the Protestant King William III in a contest for the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland. Prince William of Orange, who along with his wife, James’s Protestant daughter Mary, was responsible for James’s overthrow, became King William III in 1689. 5. Interview with Derry resident, 26 June 2011. 6. Roadworks carried out during the Troubles further isolated working-class communities from the urban core in Belfast. The yet-to-be completed Inner Ring Road, begun in the 1970s, effectively vacated the area immediately surrounding the city centre. Connectivity between neighbourhoods, as well as between neighbourhoods and the commercial core, was further compromised by the opening of the Westlink motorway, itself a truncated version of the more ambitious, but unrealized, Belfast Urban Motorway, in the early 1980s. The Westlink is widely blamed for having ‘carved a deep chasm through huge swathes of the north and west inner city’, as well as for separating neighbourhoods in a manner not dissimilar to that of the peace walls (Mackel 2010: 19; see also Forum For Alternative Belfast 2011). Today, even the city’s bus routes, which operate ‘along radial routes servicing the city centre’, reflect the endemic segregation of Belfast’s landscape (Murtagh 2011: 1132). 7. Interview with Shankill resident, 11 October 2011. 8. The Orange Order, a Protestant brotherhood founded in 1795 and organized around a network of lodges, is defined by its annual 12th of July march to commemorate the anniversary of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne. The order has been central to the development of Ulster unionism and a Northern Irish British identity, but its influence has greatly diminished (Bryan 2006b: 124–29). Though membership in the order was de rigueur for the unionist political establishment for much of the Northern Irish state’s early history, by the 1960s, rifts between the unionist political regime and the order had begun to appear, and by the early 1970s, the order’s demands over ‘traditional routes’, due to the tensions they ignited with Catholics, were increasingly problematic for state authorities (Bryan 2006b: 128–33).

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9. Since the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires, the European Union has funded peace and reconciliation programmes for Northern Ireland and the Border Counties of Ireland through its PEACE I, PEACE II and PEACE III programmes (Special EU Programmes Body 2007). A PEACE IV programme will run from 2014–2020. The INTERREG programme has provided additional structural funds to promote economic development, including the promotion of cross-border tourism projects (Potter and Egerton 2011). 10. This Titanic branding has also extended into the adjacent, working-class East Belfast, where Titanic-themed murals and sculptures of ship workers now line the central Newtownards Road arterial route. Much like the ARC complex in the Titanic quarter, empty storefronts along the Newtownards Road received false fronts in mid-2012, suggesting the existence of non-existent cafes, bookstores and grocery markets that must be ‘experienced’ only in one’s imagination (personal observation, 29 July 2012). 11. The unveiling of Kit, a work funded by Titanic Quarter, Belfast Harbour Commission and the partially publicly funded Arts & Business NI, took place in an unfinished room in the adjacent condo development and featured speeches by officials, wine, well-heeled patrons, glossy promotional material and a roving Ulster Tatler photographer. It was a decidedly chic affair, for an upscale demographic that bore scant socioeconomic resemblance to the surrounding working-class residents of East Belfast (personal observation, 29 October 2009). 12. Personal observation, 31 March 2012. 13. Despite having attracted 800,000 visitors from 128 different countries in its first year of operation, it was rare during that same time period to talk to Belfast locals who had actually visited the site, a major draw for increasing numbers of cruise ships docking at Belfast Harbour. By the end of 2013, however, 1.3 million people had visited Titanic Belfast, 29 per cent of whom were reportedly from Northern Ireland (Belfast Telegraph 2013b). 14. In December 2011, a row erupted over nationalist demands for an Irish-language ‘Merry Christmas’ sign at Belfast City Hall. After a Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP)/Alliance Party/Sinn Féin coalition passed a city council measure allowing for the placement of the donated Irish-language sign (a first) on the eastern facade of the building, unionists declared that the move contravened an all-party agreement to delegate sensitive symbolic issues to a specially set-up working group, and as such was an ‘act of bad faith’ (BBC News 2011b). The row capped a year in which a number of symbolic issues, such as the then-Sinn Féin Lord Mayor’s removal of British royal portraits from his office in City Hall (BBC News 2011c) and his refusal to give an award to a British army cadet (BBC News 2011g), had also attracted headlines. 15. According to some estimates, in Belfast alone, the number of barriers grew from 18 in the early 1990s to roughly 88 by 2008 (Community Relations Council 2009). The plurality of Belfast security barriers is maintained by the Northern Ireland Department of Justice, which inherited responsibility for these from the NIO in 2010. Others are under the purview of city councils, the NIHE and private landowners (CRC 2009: 11). 16. The vast majority of Northern Irish primary and secondary school students attend state (i.e., Protestant) or Catholic schools. Roughly 6 per cent of students attend integrated schools, meaning at least 30 per cent are drawn from the opposing community (Department of Education 2012).

2



From ‘Gunland’ to Globalization The ‘Space of Flows’ Meets Place in a City ‘on the RISE’

The landmark status of the proposed Public Art Sculpture will provide a memorable icon that will stand out both nationally and internationally and that can contribute to the marketability of the city for tourism. —KPMG, Green Book Economic Appraisal for a Public Art Sculpture at Broadway Roundabout on behalf of Belfast City Council (2010: 22)

On a wet day in mid-September 2011, a small group of suited Northern Irish officials hunkered under umbrellas in the middle of Belfast’s Broadway Roundabout on the M1/Westlink, the key southern gateway into Northern Ireland’s capital and a prominent unofficial interface separating Catholic and Protestant residential areas. The occasion was the unveiling of the monumental Rise (see Figure 2.1), a 37.5-metre-tall geodesic artwork meant to evoke a new chapter in the city’s history and hope for the future. While the rain bucketed down, the assembled bureaucrats waited for their photo-op and thrust of the shovel as a time capsule was buried under the sculpture. Across the carriageway, at the edge of the predominantly working-class Protestant neighbourhood known as the Village, two young men hung back, smoking and surveying the scene with a sceptical eye. ‘Waste of money’, said one of the youths, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. Not only did Rise make the area look ‘worse’, he declared, but it was only a matter of time before someone would use ‘that there ball to hang themselves’.1 ‘Scrap metal’, his mate interjected, referencing the artwork.

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Figure 2.1. Rise, a 37.5-metre-tall geodesic artwork, located at the Southern gateway into Belfast, is intended to symbolize hope for a better future.

How could the sculpture represent ‘hope for the future’, the boy asked, when it is ‘just a big ball?’ Both teenagers were school leavers and unemployed. They said they had not been invited to the city council-sponsored luncheon at a nearby leisure centre to mark the event earlier that day – nor, to the best of their knowledge, had any of their neighbours.2 Had they been present, they would have heard a message that stood in sharp contrast to their take on Rise. As speaker after speaker took to the lectern in the gymnasium, the narrative on display was decidedly upbeat. ThenLord Mayor Niall Ó Donnghaile, a member of Sinn Féin, heralded Rise as symbolic of ‘a new dawning for Belfast’ and ‘the coming of a new hope and confidence in our city’. The head of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Roisín McDonough, lauded the work as ‘a talisman of monumental scale that shouts loudly from the rooftops that Northern Ireland has a big vision and big ambitions’. Rise, she went on to assert, would tell ‘tourists’ and the ‘potential investors and businesses that we are trying to attract’ that ‘Belfast has become a truly international, cosmopolitan city with all the associated artistic trappings, and that’s really important’. After acknowledging some local resistance to the sculpture, which he dubbed his ‘most beautiful’, the artist Wolfgang Buttress declared himself satisfied that reaction had moved from ‘hostility to acceptance to now … hopefully pride and enjoyment’. The speeches ended, dignitaries were whisked away on a private coach to the

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roundabout photo-op, while the remaining guests were treated to song and dance numbers by Catholic and Protestant primary school children, as well as to a performance by a cross-community adult choir eager to promote its latest CD. The CD had recently been launched at the sculpture, and was fittingly titled Going Global.3 At last, Belfast had its monument to normalization, a tangible icon of its aspirations to throw off past sectarian baggage and provincialism and enter the deterritorialized, international economic arena. As officials seek to position Belfast on the world stage as a progressive European capital, the Broadway Roundabout is but one of many spaces in the city undergoing redevelopment. Its high-profile location between two historically violently divided neighbourhoods makes it a particularly compelling microcosm of the proxy battles waged when the global and the local collide in spaces in the process of ‘becoming’ (Schein 1997). In The Informational City: Economic Restructuring and Urban Development, Castells (1989) conceived of the emerging ‘dual city’ in which the ‘space of flows’, or power, defined by rapidly moving and changing information and production networks, comes to dominate the ‘space of places’, the actual physical communities where people live and work. This chapter seeks to engage with Castells’s heuristic model in the context of the Broadway Roundabout. The Rise public art process is then critiqued as an example of how official discourses around globalization, particularly its economic demands, are expressed in the ‘space of places’.

Building a ‘Global City’: Space, Symbols and Capital For Castells (1989: 228), the ‘dual city’ connotes a ‘spatial restructuring through which distinct segments of labour are included in and excluded from the making of new history’. Castells describes a widening gap between an interconnected global ‘space of flows’, inextricably linked to the information technology and service sectors and helmed by a ‘professional managerial class’ (1989: 348), and the ‘space of places’, characterized by relative marginalization and attachment to issues of identity and localism. In Castells’s view, the ‘space of places’ is in danger of obliteration by the cosmopolitan, global ‘flow’ economy (1989: 348). He writes: ‘The new international economy creates a variable geometry of production and consumption, labor and capital, management and information – a geometry which denies the specific productive meaning of any place outside its position in a network whose shape changes relentlessly in response to the messages of unseen signals and unknown codes’ (Castells 1989: 348). The ‘space of flows’ is especially dominant in ‘global’ cities such as New York, London and Tokyo,

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which represent ‘command points’ for the world economy and banking system (Sassen 2001: 3). According to Sassen, global cities serve as key producers and consumers of financial services and innovations, and exert control over the ‘the urban social and economic order’ (Sassen 2001: 3–8) as it replicates itself in lesser cities around the world. Belfast, post-conflict, has hardly been immune to the wider restructuring of global capital, and appears to be in the nascent stages of becoming what Sassen (2001: 8) terms ‘a regional subcenter’. Northern Irish leaders have aggressively sought investment by global business interests, the symbolic high watermark of which occurred in 2008 when then-First Minister Ian Paisley (a unionist) and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness (a republican) travelled to Wall Street. There, the former enemies joined together in ringing the Nasdaq Exchange’s trading bell (McDonald 2009c), thereby signalling their apparent intent to renounce past strife in the interest of joining the global capitalist ‘space of flows’. The province’s reentry into the global order was further cemented in June 2013 when the G8 chose the exclusive Lough Erne golf resort in County Fermanagh as the site of its annual summit of leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations – a first ever for Northern Ireland. Multinational financial services, technology and insurance firms have taken note. Since the arrival of U.S. banking conglomerate Citigroup in 2004, a number of entities have opened offices in Belfast, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a leading global derivatives marketplace and NYSE Euronext, operator of the New York Stock Exchange until its November 2013 acquisition by Intercontinental Exchange Group (ICE). U.S. insurance giant Allstate and the London-based professional services firm Deloitte also pledged significant expansions to their Belfast operations in 2013 (Mulgrew 2013; Invest Northern Ireland 2013). The changing employment landscape has precipitated the creation of an industry-funded ‘First Derivatives Trading Room’ at Queen’s University, set up to ‘transform a corner of the Management School into a financial hub reminiscent of Wall Street or Canary Wharf’ and simulate a ‘busy stock exchange’ dealing in ‘equities, bonds, foreign exchange and derivative instruments’. This development, it was promised, would make ‘Northern Ireland a more interesting proposition to international companies’ (Queen’s University Belfast 2012). The post-Fordist restructuring of global capital has had profound implications for the production of urban space (Castells 1989; Harvey 1989, 2002; Soja 1989; Zukin 1993; Lash and Urry 1994; Urry 2006). Visually, the spaces of the postmodern city reflect the dynamics of the global marketplace, defined as it is by volatility, consumption, disposability, harmonization and instantaneity. Within this context, image production serves a key role in maintaining and reinforcing power structures, as well as in identity construction (Harvey 1989). Harvey argues:

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Insofar as identity is increasingly dependent upon images, this means that the serial and recursive replications of identities … becomes a very real possibility and problem. … We not only possess, therefore, the capacity to pile images from the past or from other places eclectically and simultaneously upon the television screen, but even to transform those images into material simulacra in the form of built environments, events and spectacles … which become in many respects indistinguishable from the originals. (Harvey 1989: 289–90)

For Harvey, iconic architecture, among which public art may be classed, serves as one identity-building tool for public authorities seeking to define place and attract the restless investment capital of the global economy (Harvey 1993: 8). In turn, such cultural or symbolic capital is seen as key to place-branding strategies, which attempt to market and ‘brand’ the city much like any other commercial product (Julier 2005: 871). Similarly, at the Broadway Roundabout, the structural and symbolic demands of the global economy hold particular sway over the materiality of the landscape. While acknowledging that space is co-constituted by a ‘plurality of trajectories’ (Massey 2005: 12), none of which is strictly global or local, the Rise public art process sheds light on the inherent power of global capital, as mediated by the state, to shape place. Despite undergoing processes of glocalization, the Rise sculpture is visually and aesthetically emblematic of a global trend that has witnessed the reconstruction of large swathes of the built environment into sites of civic identikit. Here, the globalization discourse of the international economy underpins the symbolic reimagining of place along the lines of global capital flows. At the same time, as is also evidenced throughout this case study, ‘place’ both abets and constrains official goals.

The ‘Space of Places’ and the Broadway Roundabout Despite its key gateway location, the panorama circling the roundabout bears witness to the effects of urban blight and deindustrialization. In 2013, it looked out on working-class housing estates, two large empty industrial sites (formerly home to a commercial laundry and a metal recycling facility), the gated and heavily fortified Park Centre strip mall, a trio of partially vacant, dilapidated tower blocks, the Royal Victoria Hospital and a small lot hawking gravestones. Indeed, the cheeriest aspect of the scene may be the grinning mug of Colonel Sanders beaming down from the KFC at the entrance to the nationalist side of this interface. Though the military surveillance post that once sat atop the tower blocks has been removed and the security gates on the Falls Road side of Broadway long excised (Daniel Jack, republican community worker, interview 2011), visible markers of Troubles-

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era conflict continue to dot the landscape. Loyalist paramilitary graffiti, murals and the occasional memorial can be found amongst what is left of the Village-area housing estates. (As of early 2014, the area’s Protestant population had been significantly reduced due to a DSD-funded housing redevelopment scheme that has removed many residents while new houses are built. Whether all of these residents will return remains to be seen.4) Likewise, on the nationalist side of the roundabout, a large republican memorial garden and a mural to two dead PIRA ‘volunteers’ are prominent markers in the landscape. During the month of July, when tensions are traditionally high in Northern Ireland, towering bonfires bedecked with incendiary antinationalist and republican slogans and symbols have been viewed from the roundabout. The origins of the Broadway area hark back to the nineteenth century, when the farmland and Bog Meadows (at one time constituting some 400 acres of the floodplain of the Blackstaff River) first underwent development. The growth of a residential community, albeit a highly segregated one, occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. The surrounding Greater Village area became ‘an industrial hub with linen mills, factories and good railway links’ (Melville and Graham 2011). But for residents, the ‘place’ of Broadway was still largely defined by water meadows. One 60-year-old woman crossing the roundabout on a spring day in 2011 recalled that up until the 1960s, the area was a ‘gunland’, where ‘people used to come … and shoot birds’. There was ‘no motorway. … It was all bog and swamp’, she said.5 Similarly, the long-time unionist city councillor in the Village, Bob Stoker, remembered the place as ‘an adventure playground’ of ‘red hills’, where as a child he would spend hours frolicking in the open waterways and red sand of the Bog Meadows (Stoker, interview 2011).6 The opening of a stretch of the M1 motorway in 1962 marked a significant shift in the area’s evolution. In addition to the motorway and the culverting of the Blackstaff River, the area witnessed the launch of the Boucher Road industrial estate, as well as plans for the ambitious Belfast Urban Motorway (Jewesbury and Porter 2010; BCC 2005). While never fully realized, a truncated version of the motorway was opened in the early 1980s as the Westlink, a dual-lane road that ‘carved a deep chasm through huge swathes of the north and west inner city’ (Mackel 2010: 19). A roundabout was built at the point where the Broadway Road intersected the Westlink. The roundabout was situated between the mainly Catholic and nationalist St. James/Falls Road neighbourhood to the northwest and the predominantly Protestant and loyalist residential area to the southeast, now collectively known as the Greater Village, although in interviews residents there point to the existence of multiple micro-neighbourhood or community identities in addition to the central Village core. The Catholic and Protestant communities surrounding Broadway

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clashed almost from their inception. According to background information provided to shortlisted artists who applied for the Broadway commission, the Village was ‘purposely’ divided from nationalist West Belfast by the Westlink and the roundabout in order to form what the document asserted was a sort of a ‘natural peace line’ (BCC 2005). By the time the Westlink opened in 1981, Belfast had become a very different sort of ‘gunland’, a militarized urban landscape caught up in political violence. The newly created roundabout, though ‘deliberately’ overgrown with shrubs and fenced (Roy Spiers, Roads Service official, interview 2010), soon became a ‘flashpoint’ between Catholic and Protestant youths. Trevor Greer, an ex-UDA prisoner and lifelong resident of the Village area, noted that in the 1980s, ‘fist fights’ and ‘bricks battles’ were a near-nightly occurrence there during the summer months when sectarian, recreational rioting is common (Greer, interview 2011). Ironically, if until recently the area exhibited a sense of settledness or immunity to the pressures of globalization, this may be attributed in part to the security constraints the conflict imposed on the landscape. The deindustrialization and violence of the 1970s and 1980s in Northern Ireland meant that the area was a place that Castells’s ‘space of flows’ appeared to have bypassed. Today, the electoral wards that converge at the roundabout rank low in nearly every indicator of social and economic well-being, suffering from high levels of unemployment, in addition to what is classified as ‘economic inactivity’, and low educational achievement (KPMG 2010: 31).

The Broadway Roundabout and the ‘Space of Flows’ The Northern Irish peace process created the political backdrop for a return to ‘“normal” capitalist material space’ (Graham and Nash 2006: 256). As Shirlow (2006: 101) asserts, ‘The key ideological message driven by both the Irish and British states is that peace dividends are to be achieved through conventional economics’. The project to construct a large-scale public artwork at Broadway Roundabout emerged from a regeneration policy intended to improve and facilitate the ‘space of flows’ in its most literal sense. In 2004, the Northern Ireland Roads Service initiated an upgrade of the Westlink/M1 junction. At the time, the roundabout was still fenced off and filled with shrubbery and an electricity pylon. The art commission was conceived by a group of bureaucrats7 formed to consider the aesthetic impact of a £104 million public-private road works scheme for the Westlink/ M1,8 which was to widen the motorway and cut an underpass beneath a reconstructed Broadway roundabout. In addition to facilitating ‘the effective and efficient flow of both people and freight’ (Barbara Anderson 2006:

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6), the road works upgrade was promoted in government publications as crucial to ‘increased prosperity’, improving access to key economic drivers such as the City Centre, the Port of Belfast and the City Airport, as well as to the island of Ireland as a whole (Jennings 2006: 4–5). The road works scheme was one of many projects promoted under the city council-chaired New Belfast Group’s ‘Belfast Better Believe It’ campaign. The campaign had been launched to highlight ‘one of the most expensive facelifts in the city’s history’, what then-Lord Mayor Wallace Browne described as a £2 billion package of public-private investment (Browne 2006: 3). Roy Spiers, the Roads Service official who headed the Westlink aesthetic review group, said the Broadway Roundabout’s position at a ‘major gateway’ into the city presented an ‘opportunity to make … an impact, do something different’ (Spiers, interview 2010). Despite the roundabout’s interface location, Spiers said the group ‘tended not to dwell on the differences between the two communities’ on each side of the roundabout. At the time we were doing this, which would have been about … 2004, 2005, kind of around that time, we would have been moving into our peace programme or moving along that. I think as we came to the end of that, we tended not to dwell on the differences between the two communities but sought to try and develop something that would represent Belfast, rather than deal with issues that we deemed to be in the past. (Spiers, interview 2010)

But privately there were concerns that clearing such a large space could precipitate greater conflict between nationalists and loyalists at the roundabout,9 and therefore the space needed to be claimed for the city as a whole, according to Ed Carpenter, the artist initially selected for the commission. He said the sculpture was seen by officials as one means to stake this claim (Carpenter, interview 2009).10 While the Roads Service review group initiated the idea for the artwork, with DSD to fund the bulk of the then-£400,000 project, the responsibility for overseeing its physical construction was shifted to Belfast City Council because the council was considered in ‘the best position to take forward a project of this type because of their community responsibilities’ (Spiers, interview 2010). After an international competition in 2005, Carpenter’s abstract, floral-inspired Trillian sculpture was selected. Carpenter, an American known for his large-scale architectural artworks and infrastructural projects, described Trillian as symbolic of regeneration and of ‘a delicate ecosystem’ in the natural sense as well as in the sense that Belfast as a city ‘is a delicate ecosystem’ (Carpenter, interview 2009). But Trillian was never executed. The process dragged on for nearly three years before the rising cost of steel forced it to be abandoned in July 2008, just one month before

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the underpass at Broadway was completed. In August of that year, the competition was relaunched. In between the competitions, the identity of Belfast’s built environment underwent further changes that brought it closer into the fold of the ‘global city’ (Sassen 2001). These included the realization of several projects promoted by the New Belfast Group, such as the Victoria Square shopping mall, opened in March 2008, as well as the launch of phase one of Titanic Quarter, East Belfast’s ultra-modern waterfront regeneration initiative with its aspirations to become ‘a 21st century icon supporting the financial services industry on the island of Ireland’ (Titanic Quarter 2008; BBC News 2005a). By the end of 2006, the travel guide Lonely Planet had declared Belfast a city ‘on the rise’ (BBC News 2006b) – and the point did not go unnoticed when a major rebranding of the provincial capital was carried out shortly thereafter (Northover 2010: 106). Unveiled in 2008, the city council’s new Belfast brand, conceived of by the London-based consultancy Lloyd Northover, offered a fresh logo – the heart-shaped B to replace a smiley face – and was accompanied by a motivational, if generic, set of brand identity guidelines that heralded the ‘new Belfast’ as a ‘beacon for positive change … alive with fresh opportunities for citizens, visitors and investors’ (BCC 2008a: 4). Deirdre Robb, a former city council staffer who took the lead in writing the second artist’s brief and sat on the selection panel, said the relaunched Broadway art commission was more focused on how ‘Belfast is viewed externally’ (Robb, interview 2011a). The artist’s brief specifically cites the ‘Belfast Brand’ as part of the context in which potential themes for the artwork should be considered, and frames the commission as an opportunity to shape the ‘new face’ of Belfast and create an icon that would become ‘synonymous’ with the city (BCC 2008b).11 According to Robb, the increased emphasis on the city ‘brand’ emerged from discussions between herself and Tim Husbands, then-Head of Service for the city council. Likewise, the new brand is part of Belfast’s push to cement its status as a ‘major tourism city’ (BCC and NITB 2011: 7) with ‘iconic features or landmarks’ (ibid.: 8) and reinvigorated public spaces playing a role in this objective (ibid.: 11). An increased investment in public art was viewed as a way to help Belfast play ‘catch up’ with ‘the European capital cities’, according to Ronan Corrigan, who represented DSD on the selection committee (Corrigan, interview 2010). Befitting the ‘space of flows’, which Castells describes as predisposed to bureaucratization or what he defines as ‘a growing independence of the organizational logic from the societal logic’ (1989: 170), the decision to construct the artwork was ‘100 per cent the bureaucratic process’, according to Stoker (Interview 2011). It occurred during a period of direct rule from

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late 2002 to May 2007, when spying allegations against Sinn Féin Party members resulted in the Northern Ireland Assembly’s suspension and a return to provincial administration via Westminster. While three city council members, including Stoker, Bernie Kelly and Marie Moore, were included on the final selection panel (Moore died shortly thereafter), civil servants and council officers set the project in motion, wrote the brief and shortlisted the artists. Not only did such individuals have ultimate control of the process, said Stoker, but they also constituted the majority of members on the panel (Stoker, interview 2011). In the divided city of Belfast, ‘whose representational landscape incorporates an ethno-national fault line’ (Neill 1999: 272), symbolizing the civic, or that which purports to represent the city as a whole, is problematic. According to Robb, ‘there was complete understanding’ that the selected artwork would not recall symbolic associations with either residential community (Robb, interview 2011a). Comprised of representatives from the key government funders (DSD, ACNI and BCC) as well as from Roads Service, the selection panel engaged in what Corrigan referred to as a ‘great debate’ (Corrigan, interview 2010). At issue was whether a proposal called The Angelic, a concept for a large steel prow evocative of the Titanic and encircled by ‘a halo of birds’ (Iain Davidson, interview 2011), or Buttress’s Rise, an abstract sun hovering over a field of reeds, were more appropriate as a symbol for Belfast. Rise won out because it represented ‘something a wee bit different’ (Corrigan, interview 2010) in a city already peppered with shipbuilding imagery. Then-ACNI representative Iain Davidson, another selection panel member, noted that The Angelic didn’t have an appropriate connection to place, whereas with Rise, at least there ‘isn’t a dissonance’ (Davidson, interview 2011).12 Referencing the ship’s title and halo imagery, Eleanor Wheeler, an advisor to the selection panel who served as the council’s artist-in-residence, added: ‘In a city with religious differences, we didn’t want anything that smacked of even a remotely religious connotation’ (Wheeler, interview 2010).13 Wheeler also asserted that the panel simply wanted the space be ‘clean and tidy’ and was looking for the ‘least offensive’ piece (Wheeler, interview 2011). Consequently, the actual symbolism of the artwork did not appear to be a primary focus of the decision-making process. Most emphasized was the need for the artwork to make a bold, large – and this is the key word – statement about Belfast’s future potential. Nearly all those interviewed about the work cited the scale of Buttress’s nearly 38-metre-tall, silver-and-white steel globe-within-a-globe as one of its determining attractions, making it easily seen by the roughly 65,000 motorists estimated to pass by each day, not to mention air passengers and pedestrians.14 Davidson asserted, ‘It had to have physicality, it had to have volume, it had to be capable of being visually read

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at 50-miles-an-hour’ (Davidson, interview 2011). Spiers also stressed the need for the work to be seen at a distance, noting that the actual roundabout was not to be ‘a public park’, but a space through which people moved (Spiers, interview 2010). Even the pathways were designed to create ‘an easy flow’ (Robb, interview 2011a). The rebranding of the city necessitated ‘making an image of place, making a gateway to place, commissioning a piece that was of an international standard and that would get international attention’ (Davidson, interview 2011). In particular, Davidson noted the importance of such goals to himself, Robb and Husbands, who also sat on the panel and would subsequently be tapped as chief executive of Titanic Belfast, the province’s much-touted signature tourist attraction. Underscoring the global, contemporary aesthetic of Rise and its centrality to this ‘image of place’, Davidson asserted: ‘It is an interface site and you can put something on it that is big, impressive, globally featured. … It says ‘confidence’. It says ‘outward looking’. It says ‘international’. It says ‘not self-obsessed’ … with something Irish or Celtic or whatever. It’s not introverted’ (Davidson, interview 2011). Along with this objective was a desire to select a piece of ‘iconic’ status, criteria cited by several panel members. Robb, who continued to work on the project after moving to the Arts Council, pointed to its ‘pure form’ which could be ‘read at many, many levels’ (Robb, interview 2011a). This follows what Young (1993: 10) has described as the usefulness of abstraction as a public art strategy, which offers the appeal of accommodating ‘many meanings’. Likewise, those involved with the project used positive, open-ended language – so-called empty signifiers – to describe Rise as comment on the city. These signifiers include ‘hope’ and ‘peace and stability’ (Kelly, interview 2010); ‘Belfast saying yes’ (Robb, interview 2011a); ‘Belfast can deliver’ (Spiers, interview 2010); and ‘confidence’ (Davidson, interview 2011). This affirmative, multivalent language is in line with the political-economic underpinnings of both the project and the road works scheme, which underscored normalization, openness and movement – virtues practically demanded by the global economy. In particular, Corrigan saw Rise as a clear statement of Belfast’s arrival on the international stage, asserting: ‘We’re starting now to put ourself [sic] on the world market and we are starting to get there and progress’ (Corrigan, interview 2010). Robb also said the Rise selection process was influenced by Belfast’s ‘change in economy … [and] industry and the move toward looking at … tourism, never mind cultural tourism’ (Robb, interview 2011a). The potential for Rise to initiate a process of regeneration akin to what Antony Gormley’s 20-metre-tall steel Angel of the North, with its impressive 54-metre wingspan, is credited with accomplishing for Gateshead in northeastern England is reflected in official discourse. This model of culture-led regeneration and tourism promotion

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– the sculpture sits on a prominent perch overlooking the A1 – was cited on some level by nearly every individual interviewed about the project (see Corrigan, interview 2010; Davidson, interview 2011; Kelly, interview 2010; Robb, interview 2011a; Spiers, interview 2010; Stoker, interview 2011). In March 2009, when Belfast City Council convened a conference to look at the ways in which culture could contribute to the city’s regeneration, the commissioner of the Angel of the North was among the featured speakers (Collard 2009).

A Collision of Trajectories? Global Space and Place on Broadway The physical reconstruction of the MI/Westlink as a ‘space of flows’ set in motion a series of dislocations in the ‘space of places’ that reactivated existing contention between some Catholics and Protestants and fuelled claims that local sensitivities had been ignored by bureaucratic processes. A new, repositioned pedestrian footbridge over the Westlink at the junction of Mulhouse Road and Roden Street, ‘designed by a foreign engineering consultancy’ (Brand 2009: 2687), created an easy perch for youths to launch paint bombs and stones at each other and ‘run back into their areas’ (Jack, republican community worker, interview 2011). The underpass’s construction also reduced the flow of traffic at the Broadway Roundabout, making it easier for people ‘to dart back and forth and carry out attacks’ (Jack, interview 2011). Though the space had served as a flashpoint for sectarian clashes since its inception, the revamping of the roundabout as an open area with bike and pedestrian pathways transformed it into a virtual ‘riot ring’ during the summer months, according to Kerry Melville, a former Village regeneration official (Interview 2010). As the roads project neared completion in 2008, loyalists and republicans fought the bloody ‘Battle of Broadway’ in and around the area, after an 11th of July bonfire was attacked by nationalists and rioting ensued. In addition to ‘hand-to-hand’ combat, steel rods used to reinforce concrete for the road works were ‘getting flung like javelins’, observed Jack, who was present that night (Interview 2011). Subsequently, the area, due to its interface location, has become ‘one of the [July period’s] most heavy hotspots’ (Jack, interview 2011). In 2010, police were attacked with petrol bombs, bricks, iron bars and even an axe (BBC News 2010). And on the night of 11 July 2011, in the midst of ongoing rioting, a hijacked bus was driven into police lines and a van set on fire not far from the roundabout (BBC News 2011a, 2011e). The announcement of the proposed artwork at the Broadway Roundabout also roiled Greater Village community members who had long lobbied for improved housing conditions in a neighbourhood where some

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houses at the time still lacked indoor toilets, heating, hot water and electricity (Henry 2007). Local community leaders and politicians used the proposed £400,000 sculpture as a ‘weapon’ in their campaign for rehabilitated housing stock, said Stoker (Interview 2011). Newspaper headlines such as ‘How many loos does £400,000 buy?’ (Belfast Telegraph 2008) and ‘A Monumental Misuse of Valuable Resources?’ (O’Hara 2008) publicized the perceived hypocrisy of erecting expensive contemporary art just across the road from what a Belfast Telegraph reporter had earlier characterized as ‘Dickensian conditions’ (Henry 2007). By 2009, when Belfast City Council convened one of the first public meetings in the Village to discuss the Rise artwork, officials confronted angry residents venting their displeasure with the lack of progress on housing, despite an announcement in 2008 by thenDSD Minister Margaret Ritchie pledging £100 million for redevelopment in the area (BCC 2008b). Work on the housing issue had been ongoing since 2004, but had been delayed by a public enquiry and a lengthy statutory process, according to Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) official Liam Kinney (Interview 2012). Meanwhile, repeated attempts from council aides to engage nationalist community groups were mostly ignored. At one widely advertised city council meeting on the Falls Road, aside from the local Sinn Féin councillor who showed up for a BBC interview, not a single resident was in attendance.15 Jack, the republican community worker, attributed this indifference to the ‘arrogance’ of the council, which he alleged had presented the project to community leaders ‘as a fait accompli, something that was done and dusted’ (Jack, interview 2011). One woman related at a 19 September 2011 meeting of the Iveagh Residents Association (attended by four residents) that the group had been revived post-commissioning as a forum for the council to discuss Rise and ensure support from people living on the nationalist-dominated side of the roundabout. ‘Everybody in the area was disgusted’, she said of the Rise project. ‘We thought the group was starting up again’ for the concerns of the Iveagh residents. ‘But the point of it was to talk about Rise. It was hijacked by the council’. The context of local dynamics, then, set the stage for a possible collision between the trajectories or goals of the ‘space of flows’ and that of the ‘space of places’, and triggered a process of glocalization whereby representatives of the ‘space of flows’ took on the language and concerns of the locality to ingratiate themselves in the ‘space of places’. At the same time, the ‘space of places’ began to echo elements of the ‘space of flows’, even shouldering some of its objectives, such as creating shared, neutral space. These intersecting discourses shaped (and were shaped by) the other, as the following ethnographic examples detail. Both the artwork, emblematic of the ‘space of flows’, and the local context, or the ‘space of places’, underwent a series of mutual transformations and accommodations.

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Despite claims that there was no initial intent ‘to deal with issues … deemed to be in the past’ (Spiers, interview 2010), the design and symbolism of Rise reflected the roundabout’s interface location. Not only was there an understanding that the artwork for the new roundabout would have no political connection to either ‘community’ (Spiers, interview 2010), but the geodesic form of Rise ensured that the piece would appear the same from all directions and that neither residential community would be privileged vis-à-vis the sculpture (Buttress, interview 2010). Preliminary designs by Department for Regional Development (DRD) landscape architects for seating to be added to the new roundabout were jettisoned, with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) vocal in its assertion that benches would contribute to ‘anti-social and anti-community activities’.16 The reeds that support the globes were constructed of anti-grip steel to discourage climbing (Spiers, interview 2010); some locals had raised the possibility that they might become de facto flagpoles for sectarian marking. Even the pathways were altered to avoid loitering and potential confrontations, which, in turn, had implications for the siting of the artwork (Robb, interview 2011a). The form of community engagement designed for the project was also circumscribed by the perceived sectarian context. Buttress, the artist, noted that an initial idea to chisel individuals’ ‘dreams’ for themselves and Belfast onto the reeds was discarded, as it would raise the question, ‘Who owns the reeds?’ (Buttress, interview 2010). Most of the community art workshops occurred with schoolchildren either in their classrooms or at city hall, locations where the ‘space of flows’ would not be constrained by the actual ‘space of places’. This distanced approach stands in contrast to repeated assertions by officials that it was important to engage the ‘communities’ in order to create ‘ownership’ of the artwork (Spiers, interview 2010; Corrigan, interview 2010). In reality, interaction between officials and ordinary residents was limited, and characterized by explicit and implicit tensions. As the public art process moved from the offices of bureaucrats to the working-class streets of South and West Belfast, the language used to describe and justify the sculpture took on a decidedly pragmatic tone. While the initial official narrative around the artwork had centred on Rise as a transcendent, post-conflict symbol of hope and renewal that loosely recalled the sun rising over the Bog Meadows,17 such language was soon complemented by official narratives – on display at public meetings, on the city council website and in fliers – casting the piece as evocative of the city’s industrial heritage and engineering acumen and highlighting the economic benefits its construction would have for the provincial economy. The artist’s presentation to a small group of Village residents in late November 2010 provides an example of this narrative.18 Just before the meeting began, organizers moved the seating from the standard row-and-aisle configuration and

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arranged the chairs in a cozy semicircle around Buttress, who sat on a chair next to a table with his laptop. After a brief summary of the inspiration and meaning behind Rise, Buttress shifted focus, raising the importance of ‘how it’s kind of procured’. Referencing the city’s engineering and shipbuilding heritage, he asserted that Rise was ‘like a showcase really [of] what can be done still in Belfast’. He noted that 140 people had worked on the sculpture’s construction and that ‘eighty-five per cent of the actual kind of build is actually going back into Northern Ireland to create 140 jobs’. Buttress, an Englishman from Nottingham, continued: It’s a real celebration of kinda what’s going to happen. … I’ve had the Independent, the Guardian, the BBC in contact. They are all really excited about this because of, I think, how it can be seen … not just [for] Belfast but for Northern Ireland as a symbol of what’s going to happen. … It’s a brave thing, I think, for a city this size to be doing something this kind of monumental.

As Buttress talked, he leaned forward intently, earnestly, projecting an air of self-effacing humility. When he finished the presentation, his voice trailed off, becoming progressively fainter. ‘Any questions?’ he practically whispered. The local audience, roughly a half-dozen working-class individuals, including three middle-aged women, a male pensioner, a handicapped youth and a community worker, appeared initially unreceptive. (Three city council aides were also present that night.) ‘I’d rather see money spent on the housing in the area’, one woman volunteered. ‘I feel that lovely big sculpture is going up in the middle of … two slums’. Her views were echoed by the other women. She proceeded to raise the issue of the site as a ‘flashpoint’, and Buttress assured her that ‘if you look at those kind of reeds … you can’t hide behind them, they are at slight angles so it’s very difficult to climb. It’s very difficult to kinda put flags or anything’. He then brought the conversation back to ‘concerns about the money’ and pointed out that funding for the artwork – the cost of which had grown in the intervening years to £486,000 – had been set aside in ‘better’ economic times. ‘If that money wasn’t going into local business, it probably [would] go to a banker’s office’, he told them. ‘It’s a great thing that it’s still happening, and if it wasn’t that money … you wouldn’t see it anyway’. But the women remained unconvinced. There was more discussion about poor housing conditions. So Buttress brought up the increased ‘focus’ the art could attract to the area and its potential for ‘bringing extra revenue … [i]f people kinda come down, come look at this piece of work, people drink in the bars, go into the local kinda shops, use the local post offices, the local garages’, he said. Buttress called it ‘a step in the right direction’ that might ‘bring sort of things up’. He appealed to the higher realm of human nature – ‘we are not just animals’ – and made passing references to the imperial splendour of the Victorians, the Greeks and

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the Romans, and their respective artistic legacies, before pointing out that the Ballymena-based firm, Hasson & Sons, that constructed the artwork, was ‘doing it basically for nothing’ because it is ‘the biggest advertisement for themselves they can ever possibly make’. This time, his emphasis on the artwork as economic stimulant appeared to strike a chord with the three women, and the tone of the ensuing conversation became markedly positive. The residents and council aides even joked about the off-colour nicknames – e.g., ‘The Clinks on the Links’, ‘The Balls on the Falls’ – the yet-to-be built artwork had already acquired.19 A community regeneration officer mentioned efforts to manage the site during the tense summer months, and Buttress underscored the centrality of openness and the need to ‘make it as transparent as possible’. By then, the three women, the most vocal members of the audience, had become active champions of the themes Buttress articulated. The artwork, they agreed, offered a glimmer of hope for a better future. FIRST WOMAN: There could be another side of that, too, whereby it goes up and people might have a wee bit of pride in it, where they stay away. SECOND WOMAN: There’s no pride in the area really. FIRST WOMAN: There’s nothing to be proud of.

By this point, Buttress had taken on the role of their trusted interlocutor, a sympathetic figure in rolled-up sleeves who could empathize with their problems. THIRD WOMAN: We’ve never really had an awful lot of anything in the area. Nobody has ever took an interest. Even our politicians don’t take an interest … BUTTRESS: You’re just left here. SECOND WOMAN: You’re left to fend for yourself. BUTTRESS: On both sides, you’re here, and it’s kind of … THIRD WOMAN: This place has been left to rot. As I said, it was the money issue that got a lot of people. BUTTRESS: Understandably.

As the preceding dialogue demonstrates, when faced with resistance from some residents, project officials embraced a narrative that reflected local concerns over regeneration, the economy and security issues to justify or explain the artwork’s construction. The artwork was cast as ‘a system of action’ (Gell 1998: 6) that would spur all manner of benefits – from jobs to tourist influx to civic pride. In this instance, Buttress’s personal charis-

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matic powers were also employed to persuade locals that Rise was ‘a good news story’ that was ‘creating jobs’ and ‘keeping companies kinda going’ in Northern Ireland. (Subsequent printed council materials, including fliers distributed at meetings, would state more obliquely that the artwork had helped to ‘sustain 140 jobs’.) But the reality of the ‘space of places’ at the time, which at least on the Protestant side of the interface was visually dominated by derelict shop fronts, blocked-up houses and obscene graffiti directed at a convicted child molester, was incongruent with Buttress’s suggestions that tourists would spend time in the area, sending letters, shopping and drinking (see Figures 2.2a and b).20 Ironically, the only Village ‘bars’ I’m aware of are the heavily fortified Empire Social Club and the Barrington Street Rangers Club, both of which are tucked away off the main road and tend to attract a rather insular, and sometimes paramilitary, clientele. More generally, the Village has suffered from ‘a scary’ reputation at least from the Troubles onward (Kinney, interview 2012). In addition to high-profile attacks on Polish and Romanian immigrants who have moved into the area in recent years (McDonald 2009a, 2009b), the brutal beating of a Catholic teenager working as a film extra there in early 2012 (McDonald 2012a) has further perpetuated the Village’s negative associations, irrespective of more positive moves, such as its 2010 inclusion as part of the Housing Executive’s ‘Shared Neighbourhood Programme’ (Rutherford 2010). Concurrent with the glocalization of the public art process, community leaders representing the ‘space of places’ were drafted to help sell this very ‘global’ project to the surrounding residents, most notably through the Greater Village Regeneration Trust (GVRT), an organization funded by DSD to help deliver the local neighbourhood renewal strategy (Melville, interview 2010), and through the SouthWest Action Team (SWAT), a cross-community group of ex-paramilitary members (and other community

Figure 2.2. (a) A view onto the sculpture from the working-class Protestant Village neighbourhood. (b) In late 2013, much of the area was in the process of a housing regeneration project.

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workers), local politicians and residents that initially came together to help manage the outbreak of violence at the Westlink footbridge and has been supported by the International Fund For Ireland’s Community Bridges Programme (Daniel Jack, SWAT member, interview 2011). While individuals from both these groups criticized Rise due to its cost and/or the alleged lack of community consultation before the artwork was announced, they were also involved behind the scenes. These individuals affiliated with the ‘space of places’ walked a fine line in their involvement in the project. Paula Bradshaw, the director of GVRT, sat on the steering board for the artwork (BCC 2010b), but complained to the Belfast Telegraph that the project represented a ‘missed opportunity’ to create a ‘shared space’ (Lovett 2009). GVRT also took the lead in writing an unsuccessful PEACE III funding application for a community landscaping project at the roundabout related to local identities (Melville, former GVRT official, interview 2010), and distributed fliers about the artwork locally. Likewise, Stoker, the city councillor, offered both supportive and critical comments on the project at various stages (see BCC 2008c; O’Hara 2008; Lovett 2009; Henry 2011). While Stoker sat on the selection panel, he did not show up at the unveiling ceremony as a personal protest over the way the process had been conducted (Stoker, interview 2011). Meanwhile, both republican and loyalist members of SWAT criticized the council’s handling of the project, accusing its representatives in interviews of ‘telling lies’ about the degree of community support the project had (Trevor Greer, SWAT member, interview 2011) and of arrogantly foisting the art on the area (Jack, interview 2011). Nevertheless, SWAT was part of the ‘Rise Monitoring Group’, which included PSNI and city council representatives. The monitoring group, according to loyalist SWAT member Trevor Greer, had been formed in the final months of the project ‘to make sure that there’s no hassle’ at the roundabout (Greer, interview 2011). SWAT members have taken measures to make sure the new roundabout is a ‘neutral space that one side or the other doesn’t try to take ownership of’ (Jack, interview 2011). To these ends, SWAT obtained cross-political party agreement that election posters would not be placed in the roundabout (Greer, interview 2011). The group has also worked toward a flags protocol that would have banned ‘flags of any description’ at the roundabout, though these efforts have been compromised by loyalists from the Village area.21 On the night of the 11 July bonfires, SWAT has further helped to ‘alleviate’ conflict ‘by taking some of the kids away from the interface’, who might otherwise be involved in rioting, to out-of-town ‘residentials’ (Greer, interview 2011; Jack, interview 2011). SWAT has also staged events that frame the space as shared and normalizing. For instance, the first major post-unveiling event at the roundabout – a Christmas gift exchange between Catholic and Protestant schoolchildren – was described

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as a ‘symbol’ of community work by a council officer present that day,22 and later heralded in a Belfast Telegraph (2011b) editorial as ‘a sign of the new climate in Northern Ireland’ and an example of ‘how people are working on the ground and with the coming generations of children to change attitudes and cement peace progress’. The reality was slightly more complicated. The event, organized by SWAT, brought eight local primary school children from Catholic and Protestant schools to the roundabout to ‘exchange’ gifts. The gifts they presented each other, however, had been brought ahead of time by organizers and were paid for by the city council, according to the council officer.23 The entire event lasted roughly 20 minutes, during which the children and their handlers – in addition to SWAT members and council staff – posed with Santa Claus as two PSNI officers looked on. Photographers then had the children stand in a variety of positions, as if they were exchanging gift bags and getting to know each other. When the photos concluded, a luncheon was provided in the Park Centre offices. But instead of getting acquainted, the children from Donegall Road Primary School were taken back to their school by a community worker to attend a Christmas party there. Likewise, the students from St. Paul’s Primary School left with their teacher. This meant that only the two Gaelscoil Na BhFál primary school students – a city councilman’s daughter and a young boy from Michigan – attended the luncheon, which consisted of eight people (the teacher and the two schoolchildren, two council aides, the mall manager, the community worker and this author).24 Even so, the ‘image’ projected by the newspaper coverage was one of shared, post-conflict activity. According to the narrative embraced by officials and their community liaisons (as well as by the mainstream newspaper’s editorial board), the ‘space of places’ had become more shared by the activity surrounding the artwork. On the symbolic level, the ‘space of places’ had been appropriated by the ‘space of flows’ to enact a performance of normalization. In this way, Rise, the artwork, acquired a ‘secondary agency’ (Gell 1998) as a theatre of reconciliation. The image of happy holiday cheer created that day further supported the official goal that the space signal Belfast’s status as a reconciled, modern European city. While the Broadway Roundabout to date represents an instance in which the ‘space of flows’ visually predominates, it must also be pointed out that the adjacent ‘space of places’ in the Greater Village neighbourhood exhibits a different balance of power. There, the NIHE has struggled to retain the neutrality of a publicly funded community garden on Roden Street, has confronted widespread looting of brick and copper from the houses undergoing demolition, and has held talks with paramilitary members who have demanded that the ‘sentiment’ of gable paramilitary murals destroyed during the redevelopment programme be reproduced on some of the older

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housing stock and in new artworks planned for the neighbourhood (Kinney, NIHE official, interview 2012).25 A community design team that includes paramilitary members has also been set up to facilitate local input into plans for a proposed Village park (Kinney, interview 2012).

Conclusion: Globalization, Civic Identikit and ‘Post-conflict’ Constraints Not long after Rise was inaugurated, Wolfgang Buttress, the artist, posted a video on his website of the Broadway Roundabout. Titled simply Rise: Belfast 2011, the one-minute, 35-second film by Stephen O’Kane homed in on the underpass approach to the sculpture at twilight. As melodic music by the indie rock band Tindersticks played, the motorway’s white centre-line dashes were illuminated by a flow of light, making them appear to be in a state of constant motion. The hypnotic tones continued, and the sky darkened, blotting out the surroundings, save for the river of light emanating from the underpass and the glowing sphere above it. This was the ‘space of flows’ incarnate. There were no people in sight, no identifiable features, not even a hint of urban traffic. The image was mesmerizing, but also slightly disorientating. You might have seen it somewhere before, although precisely where it would be difficult to say. As scholars have noted, the postmodern condition is marked by simultaneity and seriality, what can seem like an endless repetition of places constructed to look like, and merge with, other places in the ‘space of flows’ (Eco 1985; Harvey 1989; Soja 1989, 1997; Baudrillard 2010). Umberto Eco juxtaposes this ‘aesthetics of seriality’, a defining feature of the postmodern era, with modernism’s preoccupation with inventiveness and originality (Eco 1985: 161–84). The proclivity for sameness may seem counterintuitive, but it also serves a purpose. Boyer asserts that ‘the reiteration and recycling of already-known symbolic codes’, such as street furniture and other ornamentation, ‘contain a schema or program that generates a narrative pattern, a kind of memory device that draws associations and establishes relations between images and places, resemblances and meaning’ (Boyer 1992: 188). In Belfast, the embrace of a contemporary, abstract symbol was intended to attract tourists to the area and provide a signal to investors that the post-conflict city was, indeed, a safe place to do business. For Corrigan, who represented DSD, the primary funder of the project, on the selection panel, Rise showed Belfast as a ‘modern, cosmopolitan-type city’ that embraced the global marketplace. ‘We move with the modern world now,’ he said (Corrigan, interview 2010).

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Ironically, when Stoker, the local city councillor, was asked if Rise suggested any comparison, he said, ‘[T]he only thing it reminds me of’ is ‘Epcot in Florida’ (Stoker, interview 2011). That landmark’s proper name is ‘Spaceship Earth’, a term first coined by the twentieth-century engineer and designer Buckminster Fuller to conceptualize the planet as a self-contained, interdependent community with limited resources, but which Harvey (1989) uses to refer to the condition of postmodernity and its ‘time-space compression’. Indeed, Rise was in part based on Fuller’s geodesic dome design, realized most famously at Disney World’s Epcot Center (Buckminster Fuller Institute 2010).26 As such, Rise is firmly embedded in a network of globalized imagery that is part and parcel of the postmodern condition of ‘nonplaces’ (Augé 1995) and ‘hyperreal’ landscapes defined by their ‘empty form of representation’ (Baudrillard 2010: 45, emphasis in original). In contrast, Belfast City Council’s promotional materials and commissioning documents for the artwork centred on the sculpture’s ability to create a new identity for Belfast, not simply make it the same as everywhere else. As previously noted, Rise was bestowed with local resonances – from economic development to shipbuilding and engineering heritage to inspirational device – designed to conjure ‘buy-in’ from the ‘space of places’. In this way, Rise represents one example of the civic identikit of flows, characterized by universal ‘grobalized’ (Ritzer 2003) aesthetics, but overlaid with location-specific, ‘glocalized’ (Robertson 1992) narratives to add an element of site-specific civic flavour. Tellingly, a few months after Buttress unveiled Rise in Belfast, he went Down Under to launch an abstract spiralling steel sculpture titled Venus Rising in Brisbane, Australia, which was lauded as a ‘beacon’ for that city (Queensland Government Department of Public Works 2012). The conceptual flexibility of civic identikit public art cannot be overstated. Carpenter, who won the first Broadway Roundabout art competition, maintained that his second submission, Aguila, an abstract eagle, was ‘the same kind of symbol that Wolfgang is doing. … It was meant to be an inspiring symbol … simple enough visually to be distinctive and unforgettable’ (Carpenter, interview 2009). Had he ‘allowed it to be seen as a sort of bird-like creature,’ instead of giving it the specificity of an eagle, with its distinctly American associations, Carpenter felt he might have won the competition. ‘I could have even titled it Rise, you know. That would have been better’ (Carpenter, interview 2009). This flexibility is further evidenced by the shifting, multi-vocal narratives that officials have continued to project onto the sculpture. In February 2012, the city council launched the first of what it hoped would be several post-unveiling Rise educational outreach events at the W5 science centre in the Odyssey Arena. Engineers were on hand to answer questions as children whose parents had paid the entrance

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admission to the science centre (£23.50 for a family of four) attempted to make their own miniature ‘Rises’ out of cocktail sticks and marshmallows. There, near the emerging Titanic Quarter, a city council officer drew a link among the setting, Rise and the new Northern Irish economy. The workshop, she stated, was a way to ‘reconnect people with pride in their abilities’ as well as ‘encourage ownership’ of the sculpture. Referencing the Titanic Quarter’s shipbuilding legacy as well as its role in the filming of HBO’s Game of Thrones, the officer asserted, ‘Our future is about creative industries and tourism,’ the ‘drivers’ of the economy, and, as such, the council was keen to cultivate skills that would be beneficial to this economy.27 As for the actual Broadway Roundabout space, its physical appearance provides a comment on the meaning of citizenship and identity in the ‘new’ Belfast. Much as its commissioners had envisioned, the roundabout evinces a pristinely ‘neutral’ space, devoid of all markings of ‘place’.28 To ensure it stays that way, the council has a twenty-four-hour call-out service to remove graffiti ‘immediately,’ according to local police officers, and as of the end of 2011, they said, the space had remained relatively untouched.29 However, the effort to curb flags and election posters there also implies a depoliticization of space in which one of the few acceptable symbolic occupiers is the abstract aesthetic of international contemporary art. In the absence of an agreed constitutional position, and with the persistence of cultural segregation in the city, the global ‘space of flows’ and its postmodern aesthetic conveniently transcend issues of local identity, making its appeal in the post-conflict city substantial. That said, it is also possible that Rise’s open-ended aesthetic may potentially support a sense of civic identification for the area’s growing ethnic Eastern European minority and university student population, groups that do not necessarily conform to the traditional two-community paradigm upon which much discussion of identity and meaning there has focused. Conversely, spaces such as the roundabout that have ‘ownership from nobody and ownership from everybody’ (Robb, interview 2011a) may remain ‘neutral’ simply because no one actually relates to them. One of the drawbacks of civic identikit public art is its frequent inability to resonate with the places it references. Dozens of street interviews in both the roundabout and the nearby Park Centre, before and after Rise’s construction, suggest a general disassociation from the artwork, a sentiment that came across strikingly in discussions with Catholic and Protestant working-class individuals. Such people were most likely to consider it a ‘waste of money’ or quip that it was just a ‘football’ or ‘climbing frame’.30 Rise’s most enthusiastic support came from some university students as well as from individuals from professional backgrounds, who were more likely to be predisposed to like it, and felt that it was ‘helping to make us a lot more cosmopolitan’, in the words of one secondary school teacher.31

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Given its genesis in a bureaucratic policy process, the artwork’s relational gap is hardly surprising. As Castells (1989: 227) writes: ‘The dual city opposes, in traditional sociological terms, the cosmopolitanism of the new informational producers to the localism of the segmented sectors of restructured labor.’ That only two city council members appeared to be present at the unveiling of Rise – an artwork meant to symbolize the post-conflict city’s renaissance – is telling. As Stoker asserted, ‘elected members’ were keenly aware of the lack of ‘community ownership’, and as a result stayed away from the opening (Stoker, interview 2011). Nevertheless, the ‘space of flows’ is privileged in the materiality and monumentalism it projects there. Passersby may ignore Rise or bestow it with irreverent nicknames – one visiting English journalist quipped that it might be used in the future as a ‘bomb catcher’ – but its actual existence has not been significantly challenged as of early 2014. ‘You are not rioting against the sculpture, you are rioting against the Protestant community, that’s why you get the police over there,’ said a loyalist resident in the Village, pointing to a handful of PSNI Land Rovers stationed on the nationalist side of the roundabout on the night of 11 July 2012. This resident, who did not like the sculpture, said then that there was no desire among Catholics or Protestants to attack it. Likewise, while Village residents have staged a series of protests near the roundabout related to the December 2012 limitations on the flying of the Union flag at Belfast City Hall, they have largely maintained their distance from the sculpture itself, apart from crossing the roundabout to patronize shops at the Park Centre. In this respect, Rise’s very blandness emerges as one spatial strategy for a divided city, and an ideal totem of globalization, defined, as it is, by ‘form not content’ (Eriksen 2007: 11). ‘The message behind, you know, the Rise – a new beginning, new dawn, call it what you want – that message hasn’t got out yet’, Stoker asserted. ‘People just see it as a blob on the landscape’ (Stoker, interview 2011). At Broadway Roundabout, the globalization discourse, like Rise’s large, ‘iconic’, ambiguous ‘statement’, has been adapted to the ‘space of places’. In practice, this embeddedness plays out through shifting official rhetoric and various degrees of engagement and disengagement among the local population. Still, the ‘global’ unified image Rise projects on a macro level dissolves upon closer examination of the narratives and counter-narratives surrounding the public art process. Notes 1. As of 2013, such fears have proved unfounded. Interestingly, similar concerns had circulated across the interface among Catholic working-class youth in the Falls Road neighbourhood. One youth worker in West Belfast noted that Rise was frequently mentioned as a likely future site for suicide attempts by the low-income adolescents she worked with (interview with youth worker, 13 January 2012).

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2. Interview with two Village residents, 16 September 2011. 3. Personal observation, 16 September 2011. 4. To wander the streets of the Greater Village in 2011 and 2012 was to traverse a veritable ghost town, with lanes of blocked-up brick terraced houses surrounding large central tracts of cleared land. DSD’s £100 million housing regeneration project has targeted 580 houses for demolition, many of which were already unoccupied. These are to be replaced with 87 units of social housing and an undetermined number of private and intermediate dwellings (Liam Kinney, NIHE South Belfast district manager, interview 2012). Prior to the redevelopment, the area was said to have a population of roughly 5,000 people, according to Kerry Melville, a former Greater Village Regeneration Trust official (Melville, interview 2010). In late 2013, a Housing Executive official told the Belfast Telegraph that an additional phase of social housing consisting of 27 dwellings would begin in early 2014. Residents complained that the area had become a ‘wasteland’ (quoted in Stewart 2013). 5. Interview with Belfast resident, 25 March 2011. 6. Today, the remains of the Bog Meadows, in the form of a 47-acre nature preserve, are located next to the M1 motorway in West Belfast. 7. According to Spiers, the Westlink/M1 aesthetic review group included officials from the Roads Service, ACNI, DSD, and BCC, but no elected members of the council (Spiers, interview 2010). It represented a classic top-down approach to planning. 8. The Westlink upgrade was Northern Ireland’s first privately funded roads project. Under the scheme, a consortium of private contractors agreed to design, build, finance and operate the upgrade in exchange for service payments for maintaining the road during the period of the contract (White 2006: 8). 9. Police representatives were concerned about the potential for the cleared roundabout to create a space of conflict, and these fears were related to shortlisted artists in the initial background packet provided by the city council (BCC 2005). 10. Indeed, security concerns were apparently so intense that Peter Connolly, the area crime prevention officer, initially urged landscape architects ‘that the roundabout be without any public space’, and recommended that it be ‘fully planted out with low-growing, thick, thorny planting such as berberis or firethorn’ (Officer Peter Connolly, letter to Silole Menezes, 11 August 2006). 11. One city council tourism aide allegedly proposed a large ‘B’ for the roundabout, a suggestion that was swiftly quashed (Robb, interview 2011a). In an interview, Wolfgang Buttress, the artist selected for the commission, said he was unaware of the branding context (Buttress, interview 2010). But the brief clearly states that the ‘submissions should … be influenced by the context’ of the brand (BCC 2008b). The title of Buttress’s work, Rise, is also suggestive of Lonely Planet’s earlier description of Belfast as a city ‘on the rise.’ 12. But according to the artists’ brief, the nature of the Broadway roundabout artwork was to be ‘clearly related to Belfast’ (BCC 2008b). 13. Other shortlisted designs included a large steel eagle, a glass tower, and a work entitled ‘Moving Stones: Marking the Landscape’, by a sculptor whose web site pragmatically bills himself as ‘offering creative solutions for the private, corporate, and civic world’ (Broadbent n.d.). 14. In one testament to the way in which the ‘space of flows’ supersedes the ‘space of places’, Buttress recounted in an interview how his submission for the first Broadway Roundabout public art competition lost out to Carpenter’s 45-metre-tall Trillian. Buttress’s first proposal, for a 20-metre-tall abstract tree ‘fabricated from every street in Belfast, all the street names … etched and then turned into a ring … looped into

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

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each other … 10,000 of them’ – would have formed the ‘shadow’ of ‘a unified Belfast’ when the sun shone on it. While arguably more reflective of the city as ‘place’, the piece didn’t win because, according to Buttress, ‘I think at that time they wanted the biggest, the boldest’ (Buttress, interview 2010). Notably, Rise, his successful submission for the second competition, was nearly twice as tall. Personal observation, 19 January 2011. Officer Peter Connolly, letter to Belfast City Council aide Marian Clarke de Monreal, 23 October 2008. Wolfgang Buttress, interview by Marie-Louise Muir, Participate Conference, Elmwood Hall, Belfast, 25 March 2009. This Belfast City Council-sponsored meeting was held on 25 November 2010 at the Richview Regeneration Centre on Donegall Road. All quotes are taken from an audio recording of the meeting, which was also attended by the author. While nicknames and jokes directed at monuments are often seen as a sign of resistance ‘from below’ – see Svašek (2007: 47) on the ‘subversive’ Czech response to the Stalin monument in Prague – in this instance, public authority appeared to encourage the quips as a way to foster community affection or ‘buy-in’ for the sculpture. Indeed, the jokes were frequently repeated by officials, in a number of contexts, during this process. The scene on the nationalist St. James and Falls roads is more vibrant. In addition to the Park Centre shopping centre and a KFC restaurant, located just west of the roundabout, the Falls Road area features a mix of bars and restaurants, including the Cultúrlann, an Irish cultural and language centre with a popular cafe. Trevor Greer, email message to author, 19 September 2011. Interview with council officer, 19 December 2011. Interview with council officer, 19 December 2011. Personal observation, 19 December 2011. In an example of residual paramilitary influence on the symbolic landscape, when one large tract of Village houses was demolished in preparation for the redevelopment of the area as a park in 2012, a lone blocked-up house was left standing. That house was notable for the large UVF paramilitary memorial garden attached to one end. Its destruction had been delayed due to the ‘delicate issue’ of the memorial. But plans for the house to be demolished and the memorial ‘relocated in a softer form’ through the Arts Council’s Re-Imaging Communities programme were in the works at the time, Kinney said in a telephone interview on 28 August 2012. While Fuller patented the geodesic design in 1954, see Sorkin (1992b) for a discussion of the historical evolution of the ‘geodesic sphere’ across time and space as a symbol of ‘universality’ (ibid.: 225). Interview with council officer, 11 February 2012. In a further attempt to exploit the sculpture’s pedagogical potential, a teacher’s educational resource pack, addressing the sculpture’s artistry and engineering, was posted on the city council website in late 2012. This is not the case with the brick walls on either side of the Westlink, which, despite graffiti removal efforts, frequently sport vulgar sectarian messages and acronyms. Interview with two PSNI officers, 19 December 2011. Interviews with Belfast residents occurred on 25 March 2011, 16 September 2011, 16 November 2011 and 19 December 2011. Interview with Belfast teacher, 16 November 2011.

3 Neutral Space is Shopping Space. Or is it?



The Choreography of Consumption in Belfast City Centre

‘Make it new’ is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image. —Christopher Lasch (1986: 26) Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power. —Gregory Corso, ‘Power’ in Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (1998: 87)

Walking home late one night along Royal Avenue in March 2010, I nearly stumbled upon a collection of poppy wreaths clustered around the trunk of a well-manicured tree just across the street from the glass-and-steel facade of the CastleCourt shopping centre, an early symbol of Belfast’s anticipated rebirth when it opened in 1990. The wreaths, accompanied by hand-scrawled tributes, marked the spot of a PIRA bomb that had killed two Ulster Defence Regiment officers in 1988. This unofficial memorial had been left as part of an annual Orange Order march in honour of the dead officers (Belfast News Letter 2010). At the time, it was a somewhat startling encounter, seemingly out of step with the landscape’s gleaming, consumerist milieu. Most days, the contemporary visitor to Belfast, strolling past the city’s revitalized High Street facades, would be hard pressed to find much evidence of the Troubles, or even its political legacy. The public spaces of the central business district bear little acknowledgement of the conflict that consumed

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the provincial capital for three decades and left a devastating imprint on the city’s residents as well as its commerce.1 Rather, since the late 1970s, when government first embarked on a project to create a ‘new Belfast’ and reimage the bombarded city centre, at the time fortified by a security perimeter known as the ‘ring of steel’, a variety of regeneration schemes and developments have been carried out to signal the city’s renaissance (Neill 2001b). Ironically, a shift in PIRA strategy to targeted killings and mainland UK bombings in the 1980s assisted in the promotion of the centre as a site of consumption (Bryan 2012). The boosterish slogan ‘Belfast is Buzzing’ was coined at the same time as the 1989 Belfast Urban Area Plan to cast the city centre and its shopping venues as ‘a symbol for a normal Northern Ireland’ (Neill 2001b: 47). As Neill writes: The appearance in force, in publicly pump-primed developments, of the multiple retailers and their corporate logos came to symbolise normality. The new city centre shops were marshalled like icons to oppose the array of images painted on the gable walls of housing areas in the city, which portray divisive identity symbols of the past. (Neill 2001b: 47)

This framing of the city centre as a ‘“neutral” non-sectarian commercial space for those who [can] afford it’ (McEldowney, Sterrett and Gaffikin 2001: 107) has continued into the post-Agreement era. In this context, consumption is inextricably linked to the construction of a post-conflict society. The presumed neutrality of the global marketplace is expressed in official discourse that consistently casts the city centre as ‘shared’ due to the perceived absence of sectarian markers of identity or symbolic territorialization.2 This chapter considers the implications of a consumption discourse through the prism of Cornmarket, a key ‘crossroads’ square, situated to the east of Donegall Place – Belfast’s de facto main street – and adjacent to the upscale Victoria Square shopping centre with its distinctive glass dome. In September 2009, an abstract public artwork known as the Spirit of Belfast was unveiled in the square as part of Phase One of Belfast: Streets Ahead, a £28 million public-realm redevelopment initiative. While the official government producers of the space have sought to promote the city centre as shared for shopping, the subsequent reclamation of the rehabilitated square by users for both old and new purposes has broadened the meaning of consumption there to comprise a menu of reappropriations that engage with and serve as platforms for multiple identities and economies. As Belfast’s city centre’s built environment continues its aesthetic transformation into a site of civic identikit, Cornmarket and the public artwork that anchors it offer insights into how a consumption discourse, while inevitably excluding some, may also to some extent accommodate the diverse identities endemic in pluralist society. Here, the Spirit of Belfast sculpture assumes the role of

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‘a point of spatial articulation for the intersection of multiple forces of economy, society and culture’ (Lawrence and Low 1990: 492).

Redirecting the Public Square: The Capitalist ‘Habitus’, Consumer Citizenship and the Role of Public Art The ‘myth’ of the capitalist marketplace as an ideologically neutral force has been problematized by scholars who contend that the twin forces of capitalism and consumerism shape preferences and mould value systems just as surely as any political or religious ideology (Nitzan and Bichler 2009). Doran argues: Expertise has forged alignments between broad socio-political objectives, the goals of producers and the self-regulating propensities of individuals. A complex economic terrain has taken shape, in which the success of an economy is seen as dependent on the ability of politicians, planners, and manufacturers and marketers to differentiate needs, to produce products aligned to them and to ensure the purchasing capacity to enable acts of consumption to occur. (Doran 2012: 10, emphasis in original)

With consumption venues a defining feature of place-making (Sack 1988, 1992), of landscapes on which the ‘monadic consumer’ (Sorkin 1992b: 217) may graze, government discourse has increasingly emphasized a conception of the citizen as consumer. As Doran also puts it, the ‘advanced industrial state’ demands ‘a set of co-dependent subject-object relations, with individuals located in, moving between and, latterly, conflating the roles of “citizen” and “consumer”’ (Doran 2012: 9). In the ‘more or less cosmopolitan’ (Hebdige 1990: 20) populations of the West (and the global cities of the East), consumer citizenship as expressed in the individual’s right to acquire a seemingly limitless menu of goods, services and experiences across space and time has also redefined spatial relationships (Lash and Urry 1994; Urry 2006), with tourists, or what Boyer (1992: 188) has called ‘the new public of the late 20th century’, a key component of this reconceptualization. The implications for the appearance of the built environment are profound. For instance, places designed to attract tourists or entrepreneurs are often remade into ‘tame zone[s]’ (Lash and Urry 1994: 326), bland and homogenized, unlikely to offend. While consumer citizenship appears to allow for an unprecedented degree of choice, consumption practices, including those of tourists, cannot be considered apart from the ‘social relations within which they are embedded’ (Urry 2006: 129). The range of consumer choice, and even the decision of whether to consume, is largely ‘shaped by the power institutions and organizations of capitalism’

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(Doran 2012: 10). Indeed, the organization of space to enhance consumption constitutes one ‘system of dispositions’ or ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 2002: 27, emphasis in original), which, in turn, promotes a consumer citizen vision. An attendant privatization of public space for the purveying of multinational capitalism’s ‘goods’ is an offshoot of this dynamic (Sorkin 1992a). The result has been the expansion of consumerist landscapes in which ‘public ways and communal spaces [are] designed by the private sector as interior shopping streets within large corporate skyscrapers, or festival markets where public admittance is carefully controlled’ (Boyer 1992: 204) and ‘speech itself is restricted’ (Sorkin 1992a: xv). In light of these trends, a body of work has critiqued public art’s role in supporting urban restructuring and regeneration programmes, which result in ‘uneven development’ and gentrification (Deutsche 1996: xv). Most prominently, Deutsche (1996: xv) has argued that the ‘new’ public art from the 1980s onward is one tool that has been used to alter space in the interest of ‘the late-capitalist city’ to produce a veneer of acceptability for the social injustices and economic contradictions it accompanies (Deutsche 1996: 61–79). Public art may also project images of unity and coherence onto landscapes that remain fundamentally dissonant. As Zukin (1995: 270) posits, ‘Culture … has a political value. It offers a seemingly neutral language to maintain social hierarchy in a polarized society’. Public art may also be included under Foucault’s classification of architecture as a political ‘technology’, used by officials to subdue and route the human body through space (Foucault 1991). In his work on the prison, Foucault maintained that the ultimate aim of such technologies was to create a ‘docile’ body (Foucault 1991: 231) that conforms to prescribed organizational objectives, an assertion to which I will return when discussing the public art programme for Belfast: Streets Ahead. This spatial ordering, however, can be contested through a range of spatial practices, which reappropriate space (de Certeau 1984: xix–xx). Taken together, these add up to a sort of ‘localized discourse’ (Low 1996: 863) that interacts with the dominant (usually globalized) consumerist discourse on multiple levels, though such binary distinctions are increasingly blurred. It is within this dialectic that the possibility of a more expansive definition of consumption is made possible. Miller (1988) and Hebdige (1979, 1988) contend that mass-produced goods may be transformed through multiple acts of consumption and creative reappropriation. Moreover, the central role of ‘habitus’ as a ‘structuring structure’ (Bourdieu 2002: 31) that exerts sway over (and is swayed by) subjectivity has resonance for the experience of space. Leach notes that people ‘mirror’ their material surroundings as well as subjectively project themselves onto the spatial environment in a number of ways (Leach 2002: 281–89). For instance, a busker may reflect

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the discourse of consumption by soliciting donations for his ‘product’ or music. By the same token, the busker may embody an identity (e.g., poor, young, transient) that stands in contradistinction to the type of citizen, as defined by purchasing power, that the landscape favours. Habitus, then, provides a means for considering how theoretical concepts such as ‘lived’ or ‘representational space’ (Lefebvre 1994: 38–40), as well as spatial ‘tactics’ (de Certeau 1984), may help forge alternative social constructions of space (Low 2000: 127–28) for different groups of users, thereby allowing for engagement and contestation in an increasingly homogenized consumerist landscape.

‘Consumerist’ Belfast Gets an Upgrade The post-1998 Good Friday Agreement period has witnessed a ‘visible transition in the urban fabric of Belfast from a city physically scarred by decades of violent conflict to a consumerist city characterised by renovated retail, office and recreational spaces in the city centre and along the waterfront’ (O’Dowd and Komarova 2009: 3). This government-backed ‘attempt to reposition the city as a neutral, modernising place that has left its parochial sectarianism behind it’ (Murtagh 2011: 1119–120) has precipitated a range of retail-oriented regeneration projects dating from the effort to establish the CastleCourt shopping centre on Royal Avenue in the 1980s. Since then, the city centre ‘shop window’ has undergone further transformations aimed at ‘restor[ing] the City as the primary retail and leisure destination in Northern Ireland’ (DSD 2006c: 1). Two of these, the Victoria Square regeneration initiative and Phase One of Belfast: Streets Ahead, formed the policy context for the creation of the Spirit of Belfast public artwork that stands in Arthur Square, or Cornmarket,3 as it is widely known (DSD 2007a). Opened in March 2008, the Victoria Square shopping centre flows directly into Cornmarket via South William Street. Intended to ‘establish a new retail destination to counterbalance Castle Court’, the flagship shopping centre was described as a catalyst for the ‘increased attraction and enhanced circulation of shoppers throughout the City Centre’ (DSD 2002: 10). Along with CastleCourt and Donegall Place/Royal Avenue, Victoria Square was to form the third point in the city centre’s ‘retail triangle’ (DSD 2006a: 47). To accomplish this, DSD teamed with Multi Development UK, an arm of the Netherlands-based Multi Corporation, one of the largest developers of inner-city retail space in Europe and Turkey, to redevelop 4.5 acres of city-centre space, ‘previously used for open car parks and low grade retail and offices’ (RTPI 2010). According to the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), the area, prior to its redevelopment, ‘contributed little to city centre

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life and was a barrier to the expansion of the city’s primary uses’ (RTPI 2010). Heralded as ‘one of the most luxurious shopping destinations in the UK’ (Go To Belfast, n.d.), the new Victoria Square is Northern Ireland’s largest shopping mall, comprising 55,000-square-metres of retail space, with more than 50 stores, including a range of international brands such as Fossil, Apple and Calvin Klein. The glass-domed, five-level, open-air venue also features restaurants, a cinema, residential apartments and underground parking. The strikingly globalized retail space of the Victoria Square shopping centre marks a sharp departure from the ‘shabby down-at-the-heels’ independent shops that formerly dominated the area, one local man remembered in a street interview. As this man asserted, prior to the redevelopment, the area ‘was comfortable. … None of the shops felt overt pressure to perform or succeed’. The old Victoria Square’s most notable tenant, he said, was the historic ‘original Kitchen Bar’, relocated to a nearby site as a result of the centre’s construction. A classic ‘old man’s pub’ where one could find locals ‘hanging about to tell you about the heyday’ of the shipyards, the Kitchen Bar ‘was the last remaining pocket of age and experience and old men drinking whiskey with a little jug of water and a pint of Guinness at the same time’, this man recalled.4 While contested, the bar’s demolition, along with that of a handful of other buildings vested by the government, was cast as a clear victory for consumerism (McDonald 2004). As the old streetscape gave way to the new, a representative of Multi Development UK told the BBC that such moves epitomized ‘a new beginning in Belfast … which will promote a new image of [the city] as a thriving, high-quality retailing centre’ (BBC News 2004). The official narrative linking normality and retail-based consumption was further evidenced by planning documents asserting that the shopping mall would ‘encourage all citizens and sections of the community to use and enjoy Victoria Square as a shared City Centre space for employment, living and … leisure’ (DSD 2006c: 5). Cultivating a shared appreciation and interest in the centre would be accomplished in part through public art projects,5 according to a report by DSD and the private developers (DSD 2006c: 5). In a nod to social responsibility, DSD, in conjunction with Belfast Metropolitan College, launched a fifteen-slot pilot retail training programme aimed at giving ‘the unemployed a chance’ (NIE 2007b), though this did not apparently include a commitment to offer any of the projected 3,000 retail positions to these potential workers. Still, DSD maintained that Victoria Square ‘has been promoted for the good of the public’ and not for any particular ‘community or private concern’ (DSD 2002: 11). Concurrent with plans for the Victoria Square redevelopment, DSD embarked on a regeneration scheme to promote ‘an aesthetically inviting’ over-

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haul of city centre public-realm space, deemed at the time to project an insufficiently ‘positive image’ (DSD 2007a). Phase One of the Belfast: Streets Ahead initiative aimed to transform the look of fourteen key streets and public spaces in Belfast’s retail core through new street furniture, lighting, paving and public art (DSD 2007a). As DSD’s vision for the city centre public realm made clear, ‘the designs for the surrounding streets and squares should work in harmony with those within Victoria Square’, in order to optimize potential ‘synergy between Victoria Square and [those] streets’ (DSD 2006a: 55). To these ends, DSD contracted with EDAW, a San Francisco landscape architecture firm with an international practice, whose wide-ranging credits included involvement in the controversial figurative addition to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (Menand 2002: 275– 76). EDAW advised DSD on the overall design of the streetscape, and determined the locations for the potential public art commissions included in the initiative (Ronan Corrigan, DSD Belfast City Centre Strategy Manager, interview 2010). The same year that EDAW was appointed to undertake the master plan for the city centre public-realm strategy, the firm merged with the global design conglomerate AECOM to form a multi-billion-dollar urban planning, infrastructure and regeneration consultancy (AECOM 2005), which has clients in more than 150 countries and is responsible for helping shape the face of cities around the world. 6 Their critical role in redesigning Cornmarket suggests that the upgraded space reflects a globalized design discourse adjusted somewhat for a local context, and supports the analysis of the artwork commission as part of a trend toward city as civic identikit. At the time of the public-realm work, Cornmarket, which had previously featured a red, canopied bandstand and clock, was associated with a range of ‘inappropriate behaviour’, and Corrigan said the department was keen to counteract this association based on the ‘broken windows scenario of regeneration’ (Corrigan, interview 2010). The ‘broken windows’ theory of law enforcement, a concept pioneered by the American sociologist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George L. Kelling, asserts that maintaining the appearance of an area by eliminating low-grade disturbances, such as panhandling, graffiti and street drinking, also reduces the rates of more serious criminal offenses (Weber 2012).7 As Corrigan further noted: There would have been problems with the down-and-out people, maybe, who would congregate and drink in that particular area because it was, sort of, a wee bit rundown. The shop owners wouldn’t have been happy about that. … When it was a bandstand there was a shelter there, you see, and they would have used that space to … sleep in, they would have used that place to drink in. … We had the shops complaining about undesirables in the area. (Corrigan, interview 2010)

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Though the project was slated for a public space and funded through the public purse, the Victoria Square shopping centre developers were granted a degree of influence over the new artwork. Corrigan asserted: That was going to be a good, nice upmarket shopping centre. … I think in discussions with the developer, right, on that, they wanted the Cornmarket area to be a new public realm. … They wanted it to be a much more attractive space because it was a civic space, because it was a meeting-point area. … They loved the idea of a piece of public art going there. (Corrigan, interview 2010)

Improving the space for the benefit of this ‘good, nice upmarket shopping centre’ (see Figure 3.1) was a clear priority of the art commission. The artists’ brief, written by DSD and the Department of Finance and Personnel’s Central Procurement Directorate, stated that any proposed artwork for the space should reflect the ‘aspirations and expectations of the people of Belfast as well as the commercial considerations of the developers and operators of Victoria Square’ (DSD 2007a: 4; emphasis added). The overall refurbishment of the square, a primary access point to the planned shopping centre, was to be ‘strongly influenced by the adjacent Victoria Square development’

Figure 3.1. The construction of the upscale Victoria Square shopping centre precipitated the Cornmarket public artwork.

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(DSD 2007a: 4) with potential submissions advised to ‘look forward in response to the … retail developments and the contemporary function of the square in Belfast’ (DSD 2007a: 5). Multi Development UK was represented on the commissioning panel ‘to make sure nothing was proposed which would perhaps in their view cause offense or be controversial in a bad way for the project’, according to Peter Hunter, a former DSD advisor and selection panel member (Hunter, interview 2011b). In shaping the space, DSD, the project sponsor, wanted an ‘iconic piece’ that would ‘resonate with people in the area … the passersby, the shoppers, the visitors’ (Corrigan, interview 2010). It also envisioned that ‘people could sit’ and have their lunch in the square during the warmer months, as well as take in some entertainment, as they had done when the bandstand had been there (Corrigan, interview 2010). Much like the Broadway Roundabout commission, specific symbolic content did not appear to be a priority of the commission, beyond its outlined preference for a ‘contemporary’ approach, with ‘[k]inetic and interactive elements to the Work’ considered ‘beneficial’ (DSD 2007a). However, Hunter noted, there was ‘a slight anxiety’ among panel members that there was ‘too much figurative sculpture in Belfast’ (Hunter, interview 2011a). Indeed, the three finalists for the commission – Spirit of Belfast, Dancing Tree and Phoenix Rising – were all metal abstract works. Curiously, the name Phoenix Rising, the only potentially controversial aspect of this group, did not appear to worry selection panel members. Corrigan asserted that his boss, who sat on the panel, ‘loved it and liked the name’ (Corrigan, interview 2010). This stands in marked contrast to the angry response elicited in loyalist East Belfast when a proposed artwork was merely compared to the general form of a ‘Phoenix Rising’, due to the mythological creature’s symbolic association with the PIRA. In that instance, further consultations and redesign were necessary after paramilitary members threatened to destroy the artwork if it was built (Eleanor Wheeler, former city council artist-in-residence, interview 2010). In a first for Belfast, these three final designs for Cornmarket were put to public vote, a move earlier mandated by the then-Minister of State for Northern Ireland, David Hanson, during a period of direct rule. Hanson allocated the public art budget within Belfast: Streets Ahead on the condition that the public ‘vote on the piece’ as a way to generate ‘buy-in’ from ordinary residents (Corrigan, interview 2010). From 22 October to 4 November 2007, individuals could vote online at DSD’s website, or in person at the Lagan Lookout. More than 3,000 votes were cast, with Spirit of Belfast, the piece that came closest to replicating the functional purpose of a bandstand, obtaining 46.6 per cent of the votes, followed by Dancing Tree at 28.8 per cent and Phoenix Rising at 24.6 per cent (DSD 2007b). Panel members were ambivalent about the outcome of the public vote. Some of

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those interviewed mentioned preferring either Dancing Tree or Phoenix Rising, and nearly all of those interviewed expressed disappointment with the submission pool as well as the public’s ultimate choice. Deirdre Robb, who represented the city council on the panel, said, ‘It’s a bit of nothingness, it could be anyplace, anywhere … it’s such a neutral piece’ (Robb, interview 2011a). Meanwhile, Geraldine Duggan, an official with Belfast City Centre Management (BCCM), a public-private partnership that represented the local business community, said the goal was for the artwork to ‘make a statement’ and ‘stand out’, to create an ‘identity’ for Cornmarket (Duggan, interview 2011). But when pressed about what sort of statement the Spirit of Belfast contained, Duggan began to laugh and drum the table nervously with her fingertips. ‘What does that piece of art say about the city to me? … I would have to be making something up there’ (Duggan, interview 2010). Duggan’s inability to comment on the meaning of the artwork is in line with a theoretical assessment of the emerging new Belfast as a site of civic identikit, with abstract public artwork and other ‘iconic’ constructions infused with local resonances, histories or titles in an attempt to establish ‘a sense of place’ using artwork invoking global prototypes. The language of the artist’s statement, with its generic references to the city’s industrial past and its gestures to an open-ended and (essentially) meaningless future, further supports this assessment. According to Dan George, the artist: The Spirit of Belfast is a timepiece – a focal point in Arthur Square for celebrating our present and integrating our future with our past. It is a unique work of art with the textural beauty and lightness of linen molded to the structural power and curvilinear grace of an ocean liner. These are but two of many metaphors the citizens and their visitors might create for its meaning. The Spirit of Belfast symbolically registers those universal and personal metaphors for both the individual and the community as they look up and pass by. (George, n.d.)

Notably, Corrigan said the Spirit of Belfast name was ‘important’ and that the selection committee had particularly ‘liked’ the artist’s interpretation of the piece. He asserted: I think it had to have strong interpretation, right, of what the piece meant, and we got that from the Spirit of Belfast. And I think the name did sort of suggest that Belfast is now really turning right: A new public realm going in, right, there’s a buzz about the place, there is a spirit about the people – that all resonated well with the name. So Spirit of Belfast was a fairly attractive name to pick. (Corrigan, interview 2010)

Unveiled in September 2009, the contemporary artwork was praised by then-DSD Minister Margaret Ritchie as a symbol of ‘a shared future in the heart of the city’ (quoted in NIE 2009). Her language echoed the govern-

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ment tradition of underscoring the connection between peace and material well-being in consumerist spaces. Where once ‘a tired and decaying band stand greeted shoppers, it [has] now been transformed into a colourful sphere of light and prosperity for the enjoyment of tourists, shoppers and the people of Belfast,’ Ritchie reportedly said at the time (quoted in NIE 2009). During the unveiling, Ritchie also underscored the ‘key role’ public art could play in ‘providing attractive landmarks and contributing to positive memories of Belfast for visitors’ (quoted in NIE 2009), thereby facilitating the burgeoning tourist economy and the consumerist spaces it required. But once in situ, Spirit of Belfast, a seven-metre-tall quartet of interlocking stainless steel rings situated on an elevated granite plinth, generated a lacklustre response (McCreary 2009). Dubbed ‘the onion rings’ locally, the Spirit of Belfast has been criticized by everyone from street performers to passersby, some of whom have complained of its imposition on public space, its ‘cold’, abstract aesthetic and ‘waste’ of public resources. Reviews of the piece tend to be more positive in the evening hours when it is illuminated. However, with the exception of weekends and Thursday ‘late-night’ shopping hours, the space, like most of the Belfast city centre during the period of this research, was usually deserted after dark. Apparently sensitive to such criticisms, not long after the unveiling, an unsigned editorial appeared on the DSD website offering a defence of the artwork, on which DSD ultimately spent roughly £225,000 (Corrigan, interview 2010). The online commentary took a dismissive tone toward the traditional ‘culture’ of Northern Ireland, which it characterized as ‘an Ulster Fry and a cuppa tea; a few bets on a Saturday afternoon and fall asleep in front of the tele [sic] after Sunday dinner’ (DSD 2009). ‘Thankfully those times have changed’, the piece went on to aver. With the Spirit of Belfast, the city finally had an artwork that ‘looks different, and modern and futuristic, and … good at night’ (DSD 2009). This government-sanctioned editorial proceeded to assert that Spirit of Belfast would ‘add interest and bring focus to our once boring streets’ – a debatable point in Northern Ireland’s provincial capital where the streets, for all sorts of reasons, have rarely been ‘boring’. According to this government scribe, Belfast streets needed to look ‘pretty and attractive to our visitors from south of the border and overseas’ (DSD 2009).

The Consumer Citizen in Space: Routes and Resistance In 2006, the DSD action plan for the Belfast city centre public realm laid out fourteen bullet points detailing its goals for ‘the sort of place we want [the city centre] to become’ (DSD 2006b: 5). According to this vision, the city centre was to be revamped as an accessible venue where one could ‘walk

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around freely’ at all times (DSD 2006b: 5). It was to be a place of limitless consumer possibilities that one ‘can dine out in and never run out of choice’ as well as ‘shop in and find everything you want’ (DSD 2006b: 5). It was to be a place of spectacle with ‘energy and never a dull moment’ but simultaneously a place of relaxation for ‘enjoy[ing] a coffee’ and ‘public art’ (DSD 2006b: 5). This ideal habitus as imagined by its official producers supports a certain kind of civic life, defined primarily by consumption and geared to a relatively cosmopolitan, middle-class society. Moreover, the language of consumption contained in this ‘vision’ is in line with a consumer citizenship model in which individuals acquire value as citizens ‘by virtue of their ability to purchase goods and services’, to consume rather than exercise ‘political rights and duties’ (Lash and Urry 1994: 309). Consequently, the consumer citizen has a right of ‘access to a wide diversity of consumer goods, services and cultural products’, which is part and parcel of the right ‘to travel within all countries as tourists’ (Lash and Urry 1994: 309, emphasis in original). That officials in Northern Ireland increasingly give tourists equal billing with, or even priority over, citizens when describing the intended audience of a public space is evidence of this trend. Accordingly, the public art programme included in Belfast: Streets Ahead also encourages a consumer citizenship model. By giving residents a say in the selection of one of three pre-vetted designs put forward by a panel of government, business and Arts Council representatives, the retail-oriented regeneration took on a semblance of participatory democracy. In lieu of meaningful political rights or aspirations, civic participation in this context became a matter of expressing one’s aesthetic preferences, akin to voting for your favourite contestant on The X Factor. The vote ensured that the official goal for the space would be endorsed by the so-called public – even if only the tiniest fraction of this community of ‘mythic unity’ (Kwon 2004: 6) participated. This symbolic act was then cast as an articulation of civic pride, albeit emptied of substantive meaning and in support of improvements intended to benefit private capital. Moreover, the art project’s public awareness and community engagement component established a connection between the mall, a centre of privatized consumption and the public space of Cornmarket, through a children’s art competition. Entries from the contest were put on display in an empty unit in the Victoria Square centre to drum up interest among contestants’ parents in the public vote (Duggan, interview 2011). Most tellingly, Spirit of Belfast’s very materiality was designed to establish links between Cornmarket and various city centre shopping opportunities. As the artist’s statement delineates, Spirit of Belfast was to become ‘the hearth of our city centre, drawing people to its robust and interactive character as it joins Victoria Square to Arthur Square along William Street South and the four other spokes to its hub, Castle Lane, Corn Market, Ar-

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thur and Ann Streets’ (George, n.d.). The curvilinear aesthetic would bolster this goal by offering ‘an unfolding spectacle’ that would attract ‘pedestrians to the circular flow of Arthur Square’ (George, n.d.). Corrigan, the DSD representative, explicitly cast the commission as part of a government plan to generate business for the Victoria Square redevelopment: ‘There is a lot of good shops around that area. You have the major new Victoria Square shopping centre there. We wanted it to be an attractive space to entice people into the shops, to entice people into Victoria Square, right, and that has worked based on footfall figures over the last winter’ (Corrigan, interview 2010). The extent to which the Cornmarket art commission was designed to exert a form of benign control over the consumer citizen’s movement through the city centre came into sharper focus following a public controversy related to plans to construct a subsequent Belfast: Streets Ahead artwork. That proposed sculpture, known as the Magic Jug, was to be located on Fountain Street in order to create a direct visual link across Donegall Place down Castle Lane and into Cornmarket, where the Spirit of Belfast beckoned. This was intended to move shoppers through the retail circuit. As Andrew Irvine, the city centre manager, told the Irish Times: ‘Not only are we doing this dressing exercise and giving ourselves something that looks very attractive, actually it has a physical purpose of connecting areas, encouraging people to move around the retail circuit’ (Meredith 2010). But the announcement of plans to construct a five-and-half-metre tall, eighteenth-century-style black water jug drew the ire of a group of local artists, academics and architects. In spring 2010, they launched a Facebook group, ‘No More Public Art in Belfast!’, which at the time attracted more than 200 followers and became a forum for the wide-scale mocking of public art in Northern Ireland.8 A public meeting – ‘Smash or Hug the Magic Jug?’ – was also convened at PLACE, the local architecture centre, to gather input and consider avenues for challenging the artwork’s implementation. The majority of the roughly two dozen people in attendance opposed the work for a range of aesthetic, ideological and processual reasons. They were also sharply critical of Spirit of Belfast.9 Shortly thereafter, a formal protest letter was sent to DSD, attacking the Magic Jug proposal on procurement, sustainability, site and planning grounds.10 A spate of newspaper articles, blog posts and even a BBC programme examining the merit of public art in Northern Ireland, which prominently featured one of the protest organizers, followed this initial meeting. On 27 August 2010, DSD formally responded to the group’s petition, rejecting its concerns as insufficient to halt the project.11 Within a week of the email, however, the new Minister for Social Development, Alex Attwood, announced that the Magic Jug, on which £20,000 had already been spent, was to be cancelled due to budget constraints (Belfast Telegraph 2010a). Though no correlation was officially acknowledged

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between the protest and the project’s elimination, the opposition generated by the Magic Jug proposal was perceived to have at least made the decision to cancel the project easier, according to some members of that commission’s selection panel (Duggan, interview 2011; Robb, interview 2011a). While the intended shopping ‘circuit’ connection was disrupted by Magic Jug’s cancellation, the event demonstrated the extent to which public art can be used as a form of political ‘technology’, employed by officials in an attempt to route people through space and impose control over ‘docile’ bodies (Foucault 1991). Interestingly, a second public art installation for Belfast: Streets Ahead, a series of eight lighted copper masts along Donegall Place emblazoned with the names of the famous ocean liners built in the city, went ahead with little opposition. Entirely conceived by AECOM, the masts are billed as an ‘iconic feature’ and a ‘wonderful tourist attraction’ that will help highlight the city’s ‘maritime heritage’ and provide a ‘visually important connection’ to City Hall (DSD 2011). These also serve an apparent promotional purpose. An article in City Business, published by BCCM, pointed out that the masts’ banners, which bear maritime designs, could ‘be replaced to highlight major events being hosted in the city’ (BCCM 2011: 42). Appropriately, Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB) helped fund the masts’ £373,000 price tag (DSD 2011; BBC News 2010b).12 Street interviews with Belfast residents reflect varying degrees of awareness when it comes to the less-than-neutral ‘designs’ of consumerist space. Discussions with residents also suggest the idiosyncratic nature of the embodied reaction to imposed social landscapes such as commercial retail developments. In Victoria Square, one man said, ‘If you are not in a shop, you’re not alive. That’s what you feel like’. He added that the architectural design of the shopping centre made him feel ‘trapped in space’, bombarded by a farrago of possible social identities on offer for a price. He compared walking into the shopping centre from Cornmarket to entering a modernday cathedral. The dome ‘draws your eyes upwards’, he pointed out, but ‘instead of the Stations of the Cross, you’ve got shops’. As such, this man, a college lecturer, questioned the ideological underpinnings of the Cornmarket and Victoria Square redevelopment schemes, which he interpreted as secular attempts to impose social values onto a post-Christian landscape. In his view, righteousness had been conflated with high-end material acquisition, an assertion somewhat supported by the use of the word ‘good’ by Corrigan to characterize the Victoria Square shopping centre and its establishments. This respondent further posited that ‘these days community is not based on religious ideals, ethics or morality. We do it on social position’, acquired according to consumption patterns.13 In contrast, a female undergraduate student at Queen’s University, strolling through the space on a warm spring night in 2012, was content to revel in the designer goods on display in the

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shopping centre windows. She saw only liveliness and excitement in the refurbished Cornmarket. This young woman had no memory of the space prior to its redevelopment, nor was she bothered by the emphasis on consumerism, which, in her mind, represented normality and fun. ‘Nowhere else in Belfast’, she noted enthusiastically of Cornmarket, was it possible to encounter a similar ‘artistic vibe’, a statement that also reverberates with DSD’s desire for a sense of ‘buzz’ to dominate the space.14

A Neutral Space? God and Man in the Reappropriated Marketplace Not long after the Cornmarket refurbishment was complete, a local pundit penned a nostalgic postmortem for the ‘old bandstand days’ and the area’s history of eclectic political and social expression (G. Walker 2009). According to this Belfast Telegraph opinion piece, the ‘nearest thing we had to Hyde Park’ – with its street preachers and entertainers, socialist workers, choirs and milling youth culture – had been upended in favour of the ‘lonely atomised experience’ of ‘correct “new” Belfast lives’ (G. Walker 2009). The replacement of the clock tower and bandstand – elements of inherent civic function with little specific retail purpose or promotional goals – represented a further shift to a consumer-centric civic conception. Even so, from the moment the Spirit of Belfast plinth was in place, a variety of groups moved in to claim the sculpture and the space around it for purposes not dissimilar to ones that date back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when political and social organizations, religious representatives, theatres and propaganda publishers first filled the area (Patton 1993; Hewitt 2003; DSD 2007a).15 As Low (2000) asserts, the embodied experience of any public space is dependent on a range of factors, including time and day of the week, weather and season. Cornmarket is no exception. During the work week, the square contains a constant flow of mainly well-dressed female shoppers, preoccupied men in suits on iPhones and meandering, camera-toting tourists. At night, when the sculpture is illuminated, it casts a mesmerizing glow over a space that is often deserted. But on Saturday afternoons, activity in Cornmarket is at a premium, offering a vibrant mash-up of African acrobats, buskers, club promoters, youth culture, street preachers, faith healers and occasional, fleeting, political protests (see Figures 3.2a and b). This Saturday-specific ‘sidewalk ballet’ (Jacobs 1962: 50) provides a unique window onto the fluctuating politics, identity and usage of the square, as well as onto the negotiations that, during the period of this research, took place among four key groups of frequent users: youth dancers, acrobats, club promoters and evangelicals. Contrary to the official narrative of the space as

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Figure 3.2. (a) Spirit of Belfast has served as a platform to highlight multiple issues and identities. (b) A group of evangelicals prays in front of the sculpture.

‘always shared’ and ‘neutral’ (Corrigan, interview 2010), sustained observation of Cornmarket and interviews with many of these users reveal a place of contestation, negotiation and reappropriation, a space where the local user is just as likely to represent globalized trajectories as the multinational corporations that visually define the built environment’s symbolic landscape. In this way, individuals establish meaning and connection with the built environment through processes of territorialization, ‘performativities’ or rituals and ‘mirrorings’, as the subject’s activity begins to reflect permutations of the space’s dominant discourse (Leach 2002: 281–89). On a typical Saturday morning, as the business day begins, Cornmarket is a supremely clean space, pure in the new light of dawn, with no rubbish or other urban detritus in sight. The only occupants might consist of a city council street sweeper and a few early-bird shoppers. But as the minutes and hours tick toward noon, the activity in the square steadily builds. While the Spirit of Belfast may have been part of a project to ‘entice’ shoppers from Cornmarket into the Victoria Square shopping centre, its creation has spurred unanticipated consequences. The construction of the sculpture on a large circular plinth meant that it also offered a highly visible platform for a range of users. Its very materiality, then, has exerted a form of secondary agency (Gell 1998: 20) in the space, drawing individuals to it to showcase their talents, ideas, brands and theologies. It provides an elevated perch on which to amplify human agency in space. By mid-day on most Saturdays I was present in the square, roughly two dozen young men, between the ages of 14 and 20, along with their girlfriends and various ‘groupies’, had usually taken up position on the sculpture’s plinth. Nearly all were members of Irish Jumpstyle (IJS), a group formed in Ballymena in 2009 as a means for local youth to ‘express ourselves, dance and have a bit of fun’, as one long-time member said in an interview.16 Jumpstyle, a form of rave dance, which consists of a series of leg movements carried out to electronic music, has been popular in Europe since the late 1990s. The young men who practiced it on

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the sculpture represented a mix of Belfast boys and out-of-towners who arrived via train on Saturday mornings from Dublin, Ballymena, Downpatrick and Lisburn. The majority were Catholic, though religious or national identity was not given much thought, some said, and the group did include Protestants. Unofficial leaders of IJS also claimed that members did not drink or do drugs, and that participation provided them a means to ‘get away from conflict’ and ‘rioting’. Still, their presence on the sculpture, which usually lasted until 7 p.m. or ‘whenever the speakers start dying’, according to one member, generated ‘mixed reactions’ from surrounding businesses, some of which have complained to Belfast City Centre Management. Duggan, the BCCM representative, said the group was working with police to ensure ‘there’s no antisocial behaviours stemming off from’ the youths’ presence there (Duggan, interview 2011). But with the notable exception of St. Patrick’s Day 2012,17 when some jumpstylers said they had been ‘thrown off’ the sculpture by police, the PSNI has largely left them alone since the group first began regularly using the sculpture’s plinth in early 2011. In its short lifespan, the plinth has attracted other youth dancers as well. Prior to the sculpture’s construction, Irish Hardstyles danced on it. As that group ‘grew old and grew out of it’, one IJS member said in an interview, the Irish Jumpstylers, who had been performing in front of CastleCourt shopping centre, took over the space, after a brief interlude during which a group of darkstyle dancers had occupied it. IJS moved to the sculpture because of the visibility it offered. Importantly, many IJS members have continued to refer to the Spirit of Belfast as ‘the bandstand’, a spatial naming ‘tactic’ (de Certeau 1984) that ignores the existence of the sculpture and harks back to the previous use of the space. For these youth, the sculpture’s plinth was its primary appeal. Several said that they wished the actual artwork would just go away. The broader setting was also important to them, as the superior acoustics from Cornmarket’s tall surrounding buildings allowed for more ‘echo’ for the group’s music. As one of two principal Belfast City Centre public spaces where youth have congregated, the upgraded Cornmarket square has also served as a means for IJS members to differentiate themselves from ‘all the other ones’, said one young man, a reference to the ‘skaters’, Goths and other ‘kids drinking’ in front of City Hall. The platform created by the sculpture’s plinth has also appealed to a wide swath of buskers, theatre and street circus groups, and on occasion even a gay men’s chorus and a scrum of Occupy Belfast protestors. When the Jumpstylers were present, other users tended to fill the perimeter of the plinth, while the youth colonized its centre (see Figures 3.3a and b). A duo of East African circus performers, Rahim Saphy and his partner John, have used the space just in front of the sculpture, where they have performed fifteen-minute intervals of acrobatic feats accompanied by flaming limbo sticks and throbbing beats. The duo

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Figure 3.3. (a) An African acrobat warms up for his act on the Spirit of Belfast plinth. (b) In the centre of the sculpture, youth participate in an Irish Jumpstyle session.

also appeared some weekday lunch hours, but their primary performing day was Saturday, when they could be found in the square from roughly 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m., wowing the semicircle of passersby that inevitably formed to take in the high-energy show. Saphy and John, who had previously toured with UK-based circuses, settled on Cornmarket because, as Saphy said, they perceived it to be ‘the most busy place in town’ with ‘big shopping’. Along with a temporary job and intermittent performances elsewhere in the UK, the shows in Cornmarket, according to Saphy, had netted ‘enough to pay the bills’ (Saphy, interview 2011). The increased footfall generated by the shopping centre redevelopment has also brought the city’s nightclub promoters into Cornmarket. On Saturday afternoons, roughly a half-dozen different clubs’ representatives occupied positions radiating outward from the sculpture. ‘You have the type of people around here we want coming to the club’, an El Divino promoter dressed in a skin-tight black body suit and high heels said in an interview. She defined this ‘type’ as the sort who patronized stores such as Topshop, House of Fraser and BANK. Formerly, Donegall Place and the walkways in front of City Hall had been the key places to promote. But now, she said, her ‘upmarket’ nightclub viewed Cornmarket as the place ‘where they get their brand out there’, through fliers, promotional parades and pretty girls in eye-catching outfits.18 Another regular presence in Cornmarket has been

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street preachers and faith healers. At 1 p.m. most Saturdays I was present in the square between 2010 and 2012, a group of evangelical, charismatic church members set out a circle of wooden chairs along with colourful kneeling pads in the space between Starbucks and the Spirit of Belfast (see Figure 3.2b). They hoisted a banner into the air emblazoned with the word ‘Healing’. Part of the Belfast City Vineyard Church’s Healing on the Streets (HOTS) team, the group also began using Cornmarket after the Victoria Square shopping centre opened. ‘We wanted to bring Jesus into the busiest place in the city, into the marketplace. And this felt like the intersection’, said one team leader, an emergency room physician.19 For two hours each Saturday, the healing team passed out cards that offered to pray for people suffering from illness. Occasionally someone would stop and sit on a chair. The group would kneel around the individual, laying hands on the person and beseeching Jesus to relieve his or her pain by healing the ‘root cause’ of the affliction. Afterwards, the person was asked if he or she felt better. Regardless of the response, the person was given information about Christianity, as well as about the church and its services.20 With so many different frequent users inhabiting Cornmarket, at times the competing activity has created sensorial overload. On one Saturday in March 2012, for instance, the Irish Jumpstylers, the African acrobats and a gaggle of promoters for The Factory nightclub were both performing and blasting their music from speakers on – or next to – the sculpture simultaneously.21 Although each user had a roughly set position during the peak Saturday afternoon frenzy, a form of relatively polite territoriality, what Sack (1986: 5) terms ‘a primary geographical expression of social power’, has existed in the square. Territoriality in Cornmarket appears to be a negotiated process – no one group feels it has a right to total dominance and, for the most part, a ‘geography of acceptance’ (Massey 1995: 74) has prevailed, at least among the core groups present on these Saturday afternoons. Still, some conflicts have occurred. When the African acrobats began performing in Cornmarket, this overlapped with the preaching time of a woman named Goodness who has used the sculpture as a base for her street ministry. At first they were ‘a little bit rude’ to each other, remembered Saphy, the acrobat. But then they ‘made friendship’. To accommodate each other, Saphy noted, Goodness began to come earlier, and he and his acrobatic partner later. Saphy also admitted that IJS’s music, which has played at the same time as his, was an annoyance. But ‘the minute you tell them that, that’s when you have a problem’, he said. To counteract this, he made sure his amplification system was big enough so ‘no one can compete’ (Saphy, interview 2011). Similarly, when first asked how they felt about the acrobats, some of the Jumpstylers were peeved. ‘They steal our thunder’, said one dancer. ‘They are annoying. They think we are best friends, but we wish they would

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go away’.22 Four months later, in March 2012, this attitude seemed to have softened. The same dancer contended that while it had been ‘kind of a competition at the start’, the acrobats had asked to be friends, and relations had improved. More problematic to the Irish Jumpstyle members, he added, were other Belfast youth who resented their presence on the sculpture.23 Another member noted that the group doesn’t ‘like hip-hoppers’ and won’t ‘let them on’ the sculpture.24 This was contradicted by yet another dancer who contended that ‘it’s open to everyone to come use it’.25 Nevertheless, IJS has been derided on Facebook by their peers, several members pointed out, and animosity from competing youth cultures has led to physical attack. One afternoon in February 2012, as I walked through the square, a young man hurled a firecracker into the centre of the sculpture, causing a loud bang and acrid smoke. Both dancers and shoppers momentarily scattered. Clearly, the dancers’ physical occupation of such a visible location has riled other youth, who, members say, have also thrown bottles and gravy containers at them in an attempt to clear the space. Meanwhile, the Vineyard Church healing group has been careful to emphasize that ‘everybody owns [the square] equally. … We don’t feel we have any more of a right to this than anybody else’, said the team leader. Not only do the healers ‘move for others out of courtesy’, he said, but they have noticeably refrained from playing their Christian music when it might compete with other amplified music. They have also attempted to befriend some of the Irish Jumpstylers, the team leader said, and have even prayed for them.26 In turn, some youth reported having been healed from dancing-related injuries, and one said he was interested in learning more about God as a result of the healing team’s continued outreach to them.27 Though ‘[l]ocality and agency matter, even in an age subject to sweeping structural change’ (Gaffikin and Morrisey 2011: 46), it is also true that ‘the visible form of the local conceals the reach of influences whose origins often are far removed from the immediately local’ (Schein 1997: 663). The discourses of local agents may disrupt the dominant discourse of the consumerist ‘habitus’, but (at least in Cornmarket) they have also existed in a dialectical relationship with this dominant discourse, feeding off of the audience attracted by the consumerist spectacle and ‘mirroring’ the general globalized ‘disengagement’ (Bauman 2001: 127) of the symbolic landscape there. For instance, the IJS members brought a continental European urban dance form into the Northern Irish public arena via dancers from across the island of Ireland. The African acrobats hailed from Tanzania and Kenya and are among the province’s post-conflict influx of new immigrants in search of economic opportunity. Likewise, Goodness said in an interview that she had come to Belfast from South Africa in 2004, after being recruited for her nursing skills.28 And the Belfast City Vineyard Church is affiliated with Vine-

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yard Churches UK and Ireland, which, in turn, evolved from the Vineyard Movement in the United States. Since its founding in Hollywood, California, in the late 1970s, the Vineyard Movement has grown into a global charismatic evangelical force, with more than 1,500 affiliated churches worldwide (Vineyard USA, n.d.). The model of street healing used in Cornmarket was pioneered by a member of the Causeway Coast Vineyard church in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, and is replicated – down to identical props – in cities across the UK (Healing on the Streets, n.d.). Even the El Divino nightclub is hardly a ‘local’ establishment. Opened in autumn 2011, the Belfast nightclub represented an expansion of the Ibiza-based El Divino nightclub, which lures patrons to its Laganside venue with promises to bring ‘a little piece of the sunshine Isle to Belfast’ (El Divino, n.d.).

Conclusion: Consuming the Public Sphere As Mitchell asserts, the Lefebvrian ‘right to the city’ is contingent on control of public space in which one can be ‘seen (and heard)’ (Mitchell 2003: 129). In Cornmarket, the consumerist ‘disneyfying’ of space, in which ‘every interaction is carefully planned’ (Mitchell 2003: 139–40), has been disrupted by acts of reappropriation. Nevertheless, the public art process there belies the ‘neutrality’ of market forces, with the built environment clearly playing a role in supporting certain official spatial objectives, specifically the promotion of consumption. In this instance, such goals have centred on the effort to transform Cornmarket into an aesthetically pleasing gateway to the shopping centre. Lefebvre’s concern that the ‘abstract space’ of capitalism would eventually devour the urban landscape if not adequately resisted through differentiating activities (Mitchell 2003: 29) is not unfounded. The intended ‘synergy’ between the shopping centre and Cornmarket no doubt has expanded such space by creating a seamless flow between the public space of Cornmarket and the open-air Victoria Square shopping centre, a pseudopublic space governed by a code of conduct for patrons and patrolled by private security guards sporting earpieces. The blurring of lines between public and private space in Belfast City Centre (and elsewhere) is further evidenced by the fact that the salaries of two PSNI officers assigned to police the ‘retail core’ have been paid for by Belfast City Centre Management through funds provided by the Chamber of Commerce. These officers are employed to ‘address business community needs’, and according to Duggan, the BCCM representative, are focused on combating activities such as illegal street trading, drinking and begging (Duggan, interview 2011). As part of a consumerist discourse, the Spirit of Belfast epitomizes a publicly funded artwork used to serve the objectives of state-supported private

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developments. The Cornmarket art commission was intended to generate foot traffic and ‘buzz’ for the retail circuit and enhance cosmopolitan cultural capital. Deutsche writes that ‘the real social function of the new public art’ is to ‘present as natural the conditions of the late capitalist city into which it hopes to integrate us’ (1996: 66). Such conditions, she goes on to expound, involve the state’s acquiescence in promoting particular spatial relationships, which are far from neutral, and which, in her case study of New York City, often have involved extensive public-sector support of ‘luxury enclaves in the city center shielded from areas for the poor and minorities on the periphery’ (Deutsche 1996: 92). Moreover, the inclusion of public art in urban regeneration schemes bestows the ‘affirmative character of culture’ (Marcuse 1968) onto the publicly supported private development, bolstering consumerism’s claims to civic virtue and downplaying questions related to the ethics of restructuring and privatizing space for certain ‘types’ of consumers. The civic identikit of flows also visually mirrors the dominant discourse. Its ambiguous abstract aesthetic is open to multiple interpretations and is as protean and transient as the multinational capital such art hopes to attract. (As of 2013, Victoria Square was owned by the German-based Commerz Real, one of Europe’s largest property funds.) At the same time, Cornmarket is not a simple case of global capital successfully circumscribing the public space of local users, nor has the space unfolded precisely as officials imagined. Rather, the frequent Saturday users of the space demonstrated a remarkable ability to transform it to suit their own ends within the overarching consumerist framework. Although space to express ideas and identities was demanded by some – i.e., the dancers, evangelicals and political groups – for others, such as the club promoters, buskers and African acrobats, the space provides an opportunity to capitalize on the foot traffic of the consumerist milieu and allows room for informal economies to exist alongside those of the formal marketplace. In this sense, civic identikit spaces may be glocalized and adapted to a variety of local purposes that, as has been pointed out, also reflect global forces. Finally, the presence of recent immigrants in the square – in particular, the acrobats and the female street preacher – serves as a visual reminder of the impact of migration on public space and the changing complexion of Northern Irish society. Here, a traditional binary Protestant-Catholic community discourse, considered in the next chapter, is problematic, and clearly does not hold. Notes 1. During the PIRA’s campaign to cripple the provincial economy in the first half of the 1970s, its bombs destroyed some 300 city-centre establishments, as well as a quarter of its retail space (Neill 2001b: 42–43). More than 70 people lost their lives there

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during the Troubles, but aside from memorials to specific groups, such as the RUC or Translink employees, which are tucked inside the City Hall and Laganside Bus Station respectively, official references to the conflict are conspicuously absent from public space (Switzer and McDowell 2009: 344). Gaffikin, Morrisey and Sterrett (2001: 159) point out that, despite the apparently ‘neutral’ reputation, one study found that ‘some young Protestants regard the prestigious shopping mall, known as CastleCourt’, which is located on the western side of the city centre and is therefore closer to nationalist West Belfast, ‘as largely a preserve for young Catholics’. My own conversations with young Protestant women in Belfast have reinforced this finding. As part of the Belfast: Streets Ahead regeneration project, Cornmarket was ‘rebranded’ Arthur Square, its official name (Corrigan, interview 2010). This has not translated into popular usage, however, with the unofficial name Cornmarket, which actually refers to a nearby area, remaining the preferred taxonomy of locals. Here, Cornmarket, the vernacular designation, is preferred. Interview with Belfast resident, 25 March 2012. Victoria Square has since hosted a number of temporary public art installations in the shopping mall walkways. From 2011 to 2012, these included a model Titanic ship made with balloons, a sand reconstruction of the Giant’s Causeway, and a 3D chalk street drawing that doubled as an advertisement for British Telecom. Among AECOM’s more high-profile projects has been its involvement in the effort to rebuild the World Trade Center (including its streetscape) in New York. It also served as the lead cost consultant for the memorial to the victims of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and worked on the reconstruction of the Pentagon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (AECOM, n.d.). The new Cornmarket streetscape has not entirely banished the street drinking that Corrigan described. According to frequent users of the space, inebriated men have periodically entered the square to the dismay of shoppers, performers and preachers and have carried out a variety of aggressive and disruptive activities. On such occasions, the police have been called in to apprehend these individuals. The episodic return of such ‘undesirables’ to the square may be seen as one of many ‘counter-memories’ (Foucault 1977) that interrupt and contest the landscape’s official discourse of consumer-oriented multinational capitalism. ‘No More Public art in Belfast!’ Facebook group. Accessed 5 February 2014 from https://www.facebook.com/groups/110495205642651/. Personal observation, 26 April 2010. Declan Hill and Daniel Jewesbury, letter to Department for Social Development, 21 May 2010. DSD representative, email message to Daniel Jewesbury and Declan Hill, 27 August 2010. Recent public art in Belfast has embraced an explicitly commercial ethos. In autumn 2011, the City Council commissioned a large aluminium mural for the front of a derelict lot along the Lisburn Road, a shopping area and major arterial route into the city centre. The mural depicts a stylish backdrop of cafes and boutiques foregrounded by a large pair of female feet in strappy high heels alongside the imperative: ‘Discover the Lisburn Road!’ According to the city council’s public art directory, the mural ‘has been designed to promote the area’s reputation as an attractive destination for shopping and dining’ (BCC, n.d.a.). A second mural, this one depicting an African saxophonist and the words ‘Lisburn Road: Enjoy great art, fashion, beauty, music, entertainment, food’ was added a few shop fronts down from this mural in May 2012.

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13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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It was funded in support of the council’s Integrated Tourism Framework, according to a council aide (Deborah Mulholland, email message to author, 28 May 2012). Interview with Belfast resident, 25 March 2012. Interview with Queen’s student, 29 March 2012. Over the years, Cornmarket has also been the site of episodic violence. In 1798, the United Irishman Henry Joy McCracken was publicly hanged in the square (Neill 2011). Meanwhile, in 1972, a bomb attack on the erstwhile Abercorn restaurant, then located just off the square on Castle Lane, killed two and injured 130 more (Bryan 2012). As noted in this chapter’s introduction, any trace of this brutal legacy is utterly absent from the landscape. Interviews with members of Irish Jumpstyle were carried out at the Spirit of Belfast sculpture on 12 November 2011, 17 March 2012, 31 March 2012 and 4 August 2012. While Irish Jumpstyle members claim to represent ‘different religions’, it is a majority Catholic group, and on St. Patrick’s Day 2012 some members could be seen wrapped in Tricolour flags, milling on and around the sculpture. However, when questioned if the Tricolours could be perceived as sectarian, one young man shrugged and said simply, ‘It’s St. Patrick’s Day’. The sustained presence of a Catholic majority group in the city centre provides another example of the changing nature and demographics of Belfast City Centre civic space. Interview with club representative, 12 November 2011. Interview with HOTS member, 12 November 2011. Personal observations, 17 April 2011 and 12 November 2011. Personal observation, 31 March 2012. Interview with IJS member, 12 November 2011. Interview with IJS member, 31 March 2012. Interview with IJS member, 12 November 2011. Interview with IJS member, 17 March 2012. Interview with HOTS team leader, 12 November 2011. Interview with IJS member, 31 March 2012. Interview with Goodness, 14 April 2012.

4



Beautiful Barriers Contesting the Symbolic Reimaging of Community along a Belfast Peace Line

[T]he medium is the message. … it mattered not in the least whether it turned out Cornflakes or Cadillacs. … For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. —Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1968: 7–8)

In the spring of 2009, three artworks funded by Northern Ireland’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) were launched along Belfast’s oldest and most imposing security barrier. Mounted on the Cupar Way peace wall in West Belfast, the art appeared on the Protestant side of the roughly eight-metre-high concrete, corrugated iron and weldmesh partition. This wall stretches for 650 metres and roughly separates the mid-Shankill neighbourhood from the Catholic Falls Road. The project was commissioned by the Greater Shankill Partnership (GSP), a local regeneration group that hoped to create an outdoor art gallery and provide a platform for ‘showcasing Protestant culture in a better light’ (Roz Small, then-GSP arts and tourism coordinator, interview 2010). The initial works highlighted themes of history, division and reconciliation and included images of twentiethcentury Shankill Road home life, unionist icons such as Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster Covenant (see Figure 4.1a), as well as references to sacrifices at the Battle of the Somme, traditional loyalist rituals and residents’ personal reminiscences. Since then, additional artworks have been created as part of the ‘If Walls Could Talk’ project, with funding from the European

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Union, the Belfast City Council and an Arts Council of Northern Ireland-led consortium. These have included The Face, a red metalwork relief meant to channel the area’s role in Belfast’s industrial past (see Figure 4.1b); Changing Faces, which touches on the evolution of the neighbourhood’s symbolic landscape (see Figure 4.1c); and a multi-panel piece inspired by the work of the Northern Irish poet John Hewitt. These works were carried out as part of wider efforts by local regeneration officials to transform identity in ways that presented a ‘positive portrayal of what Protestant culture can be’, therefore creating ‘a better space for people to visit’ (Small, interview 2010). The spaces in between the publicly financed panels paint a different picture. This unofficial art, produced during international graffiti jam sessions that also began at the wall in spring 2009, has been organized by Plum Smith, a former loyalist paramilitary member, and the Ex-Prisoners Interpretive Centre (EPIC), where he works (Smith, interview 2010a, 2010b). The graffiti does not have official permission to be placed on the wall, which is under the purview of Northern Ireland’s Department of Justice. A tense relationship has existed between the organizers of the publicly funded art – affixed to moveable panels in the event the wall is ever demolished – and those who have spearheaded the graffiti art. Both sides have claimed that the other’s artistic product fails to truly represent the Shankill ‘community’ and its identity. With the wall functioning as disputed territory, the question

Figure 4.1. (a) Artworks commissioned for the Cupar Way peace wall have highlighted unionist icons, military history and Shankill Road life. (b) The Face references the area’s industrial past. (c) Changing Faces looks at the neighbourhood’s evolution.

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of community and who has the right to define it symbolically becomes an issue replete with all the usual contestation of the ‘political public sphere’ (Deutsche 1996: 291), albeit one infused with a legacy of bloody conflict. At the same time, the discourse of community, ‘a highly charged and extremely elastic political term’ (Kwon 2004: 112), must be problematized as it is employed within post-conflict spatial regeneration efforts. This chapter draws on Setha Low’s concepts of the ‘social production of space’ as the sum of forces shaping the actual ‘physical creation’ of place and the ‘social construction of space’, or how spatial practices, associations and memories produce meaning in the environment (Low 2000: 127–28), to consider the visual representation of a marginally post-conflict community. This dialogical approach allows for an analysis of public space and materiality, which considers people, including the neighbourhood’s burgeoning tourist influx, as ‘social agents’ who, like the capitalist state and its urban designers and bureaucrats, are intimately involved in the symbolic shaping of public spaces (Low 2000: 127–28). After considering the social production of the space through the lens of the two competing efforts to transform the wall during the years 2009 through 2011, the space’s social construction is explored via interviews with residents and tourists. This chapter suggests that ‘community’ both abets and constrains official goals for the symbolic production of space, and also points to the influence of extra-local forces in effecting spatial orders.

The Cupar Way ‘Peace’ Wall: History, Spatial Context and Policy Conceived at the start of the conflict, the first barriers at what is now known as Cupar Way were installed by the British Army after wide-scale rioting between loyalists and republicans in the area on 14 August 1969 led to the burning of nearby Bombay Street in West Belfast (Bryan 2012). This was hardly the first time rioting had occurred at the interface, which had featured prominently in Catholic-Protestant clashes dating to 1886, when gunfire and ‘whistling’ bullets engulfed the area (Boyd 1969: 165). It did, however, mark the state’s first attempt to build an official barrier between former neighbours. In September 1969, the Northern Ireland Office replaced the Army’s barbed-wire partitions with those made of more permanent materials. Intended as a temporary measure, the wall would be lengthened, heightened and reconstructed during the thirty-year conflict. Despite the existence of a peace agreement since 1998, the surrounding Greater Shankill neighbourhood, where, according to the 2008 Small Area Population Estimates, more than 91 percent of the roughly 18,000 residents were classified as Protestant, continues to suffer from the residual effects of conflict and

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deindustrialization (Greater Shankill Neighbourhood Renewal Partnership 2012). In May 2010, a UVF paramilitary member was gunned down in broad daylight along a busy commercial stretch of the Shankill Road. One evening shortly thereafter, part of the Shankill Road was cordoned off by police as throngs of mourners flooded a key intersection, bringing traffic to a halt.1 In addition to the pervasive presence of paramilitaries, the Shankill has high levels of unemployment and poor health, as well as abysmally low levels of residents with educational qualifications (GSP and DSD 2008). It was not uncommon during my period of fieldwork there to find residents at home or en route to doctors’ appointments in the middle of the work day. The space directly across the road from the Cupar Way peace wall features a mix of private and public housing stock, a small locked memorial park to a young victim of suicide, a heavily fortified football pitch and derelict open space, most notable as the scene of an annual 11th of July loyalist bonfire, marking the Protestant King William III’s victory over the Catholic King James II in the 1690 Battle of the Boyne. During this annual ritual, effigies of the pope and coffins draped in Irish tricolours have gone up in flames. More ordinary activity along the wall consists of vehicular traffic, dog walking, occasional runners and low-intensity stone throwing by youths. But mostly residents told me that the primary use of the space is as a ‘back road’ to ‘take traffic off the Shankill’. In contrast, on the Catholic side of the peace line, a prominent republican memorial garden, constructed in 2000, and terraced housing is built up against the wall. These Catholic homes are notable for the cages protecting their back windows from loyalist missiles, as well as for the large trampolines in some of the back gardens, which due to their proximity to the wall would appear to give potential Catholic stone throwers an altitude advantage over potential Protestant antagonists on the other side. Pedestrians strolling along the Protestant side of the Cupar Way peace wall may also catch glimpses of the republican memorial garden’s large tricolour flapping in the breeze. Against this backdrop, tourists – typically ferried there by the city’s black taxis, which offer conflict-based tours of working-class neighbourhoods – are a daily presence. Numbers peak in the summer months, when it is common to witness a cortege of hackney cabs idling along the wall. Drivers stand by with black pens so their clients can add their mark to the countless cliché peace messages that have accumulated there in the years since the peace agreement (see Figure 4.2). Meanwhile, open-topped, double-decker tourist buses fly by, blaring their informational titbits into the atmosphere. For Belfast, the dozens of ‘peace’ walls and other security barriers that separate predominantly Catholic and Protestant working-class neighbourhoods across large swathes of the city are the most troublesome physical reminder that Northern Irish society remains fundamentally divided. They

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Figure 4.2. A hackney cab stands by as tourists sign the Cupar Way peace wall public art in mid-2010.

are also, somewhat counter-intuitively, one of the strongest symbolic and material markers of ‘community’ in its most extreme and exclusionary expression. A number of government strategies and funding schemes have supported the goals of expanding shared space and improving relations at interfaces in hopes of removing the peace lines.2 In May 2013, the Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister released a new community relations strategy calling for their elimination by 2023 (OFMDFM 2013), an objective Downing Street has also supported via increased spending incentives. To these ends, a variety of art and photography-based projects, ranging from the ‘Draw Down the Walls’ programme in North Belfast to InterAction Belfast’s ‘Beyond the Wall’ exhibit and seminar series, have received funding over the years to help encourage the social conditions necessary to precipitate the walls’ removal. But despite these public policy aspirations, recent surveys have shown that the majority of residents in these communities oppose taking the walls down or believe their removal would be premature (BBC News 2012d; US-Ireland Alliance 2008). Indeed, the post-Agreement period has witnessed a substantial increase in the number of security barriers in Belfast (Community Relations Council 2009), with the Cupar Way peace wall actually extended upwards in 2001.3

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In contrast, Belfast’s tourism strategy casts the walls and the ‘outdoor gallery of world class art works’ at Cupar Way as a key attraction in a landscape where ‘memory of the recent conflict is never far away’ (BCC and NITB 2011: 13). In her work on the development of the tourist industry in West Belfast, Wiedenhoft Murphy (2010: 543–44) argues that ‘the [peace] lines have become one of the ‘sites’ that local and citywide tour guides include in their itineraries to visibly express that the peace process is still being negotiated’. She notes that ex-paramilitary prisoner groups on both sides of the sectarian divide have forged partnerships to cash in on the tourist demand to consume these former zones of conflict (2010: 555). As one of the emerging ‘place destinations’ envisaged in the tourism strategy, the ‘Shankill Quarter’ (BCC and NITB 2011) witnessed the opening of its first-ever tourism office in August 2010, as well as the unveiling of a European Union-funded abstract ‘gateway’ sculpture, known as ‘the Angel of the Road’. At the artwork’s unveiling, one local city councillor deemed the artwork, emblazoned with the word ‘welcome’ and located where the Shankill Road crosses the Westlink, an important step in promoting the area’s tourist potential.4 The reconceptualization of the wall as a public art gallery feeds into the broader goals of the Northern Irish tourist industry and the identity this industry projects for the area and its residents. Here, the ‘tourist gaze’, which Urry (2002: 145, emphasis in original) describes as a spatial ordering process that ‘implicate[s] both the gazer and the gazee in an ongoing and systematic set of social and physical relationships’, also has an impact on the representation of the Protestant community at the wall. The tourist gaze, intimately linked to discourses around globalization, mobility and consumption, shapes both what is permitted and perceived in that space, a point I will return to in the following analysis.

The Social Production of ‘Community’: Identity and Division in Contested Landscapes of Meaning The 1998 Belfast Agreement set up a devolved assembly and power-sharing executive for Northern Ireland. But it also created a governance structure, which ensures that political parties aligned with one of two primary ethnonational communities dominate the province’s political process. Not only did the Agreement mandate that members of the Assembly declare themselves ‘nationalist, unionist or other’, but it requires ‘parallel’, cross-community (i.e., unionist and nationalist) consent on all ‘key decisions’ (NIO 1998). For instance, with the exception of the Justice Minister, government ministers and committee chairmanships/memberships are appointed by the D’Hondt system of proportionality, a system that makes circumstances ‘less

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favourable’ for smaller, unaligned parties seeking to attain such positions (Horowitz 2002: 210). The Agreement further cemented a two-community discourse on the broader social landscape through its endorsement of ‘parity of esteem’ and ‘mutual respect’ for ‘both communities’ (NIO 1998). This terminology fails to account for residents, such as ethnic minorities, who hail from backgrounds outside of the province’s traditional Catholic-Protestant binarism, or who opt for alternate identifications. Consequently, in so-called post-conflict Northern Ireland, the discourse of ‘community’ permeates all levels of social, cultural, economic and political rhetoric, including that surrounding the public art process. Bryan observes that ‘culture is sanctified in a “community” that, according to politicians across the political spectrum, needs protecting at all costs’ (Bryan 2006a: 615). Within Protestant circles, the ‘argument that the community lacks confidence’ (Bryan 2006a: 604) is cited by leaders to justify the need for ‘single identity work’ as a means to ‘facilitate peace building’ (ibid.: 604) and eventual reconciliation with the other community. As such, public art projects are often funded as part of efforts to raise community self-esteem and build confidence. Such projects are defended by officials as necessary to help make certain communities feel comfortable working with other communities across the sectarian divide. But the very term ‘community’, which summons notions of collectivity, belonging and identity, is inherently problematic and difficult to delimit (Bryan 2006a: 605; Bauman 2001). Each community contains countless micro-communities and even oppositional communities, which in turn may be part of universal communities that transcend geographic location or ethno-national classification. Hence, the post-conflict invocation of community in Northern Ireland is often little more than a ‘boundary-expressing symbol’ (Anthony Cohen 1985: 15), rarely reflective of these complexities. The duelling ‘imagined’ communities (Benedict Anderson 1983) are nevertheless projected onto the built environment through the visual demarcation of space (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006), most prominently in the form of republican and loyalist murals, which continue to dominate the aesthetics of some working-class housing estates. In addition to serving as a medium for both loyalists and republicans to establish their presence and power in public space (Jarman 1997), such images and emblems mark boundaries, define the ‘identity’ of the community as Protestant or Catholic and provide a means of ‘defending and imposing territoriality on place’ (Peach 1996: 143; Shirlow 2012). The post-Agreement period has witnessed substantial state intervention in working-class areas to transform paramilitary murals along more positive lines, most prominently through ACNI’s ‘Re-Imaging Communities’ initiative (Shirlow 2012: 169). In addition to replacing violent sectarian imagery and improving the look of the neighbourhood, the programme is rooted in an ethos that views public art as a potential public

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policy tool for enhancing social capacity, confidence and civic pride (BCC 2010a). Such art provides the state and its ‘community’ partners with a forum for projecting a ‘common body of symbols’ (Anthony Cohen 1985: 16) onto the landscape. It does not, however, ensure that the meaning will be agreed upon, or that the representations will reflect the full scope of community life. With some notable exceptions – for instance, in parts of the Lower Shankill Road and North Belfast where some murals advocate for social equality and other rights (Shirlow 2012: 167–75) – the reimaged murals are often just as likely to imprint questionable ‘images of [community] coherence’ (Kwon 2004: 153) on the landscape, and potentially, through the repetitive use of a limited menu of community-specific heritage references, perpetuate the very territorialization they were intended to counteract. In this sense, many of the reimaged murals fall into the category of the ‘civic identikit of place’, a designation that belies the complexity of community while simultaneously reifying ‘heritagized’ representations in the landscape and contributing to the wider theming of the city. That said, the subsequent and ongoing ‘social construction’ of space inevitably constrains and alters both the state and community leaders’ visions. The following case studies, examining the ‘social production’ of the Cupar Way peace wall through both officially sanctioned public art and locally organized global graffiti jams, demonstrate the paradoxical outcomes of producing community space for a shared society. They also show the limitations placed on official agendas in such spaces. The John Hewitt Mural It’s transforming that space and in transforming that space you are giving it another expression. … I think it’s a valid and useful and interesting expression of people in that particular area who need to feel comfortable in their own identity and their own background, comfortable in saying that this is who we are and using that as a basis to have the confidence to reach out to other communities. — Special EU Programmes Body Chief Executive Pat Colgan on the Hewitt mural (Interview 2011)

The Hewitt in the Frame mural was carried out as part of Belfast City Council’s Creative Legacies initiative, an EU-funded programme that supported locally proposed public art projects in an effort to encourage ‘shared cultural space’ in some of the city’s toughest inner city neighbourhoods. The overall project was intended to create ‘a more inclusive civic sense of who we are’ and contribute to ‘a civic identity that rejects sectarianism and racism as ways of identifying our culture’ (Wilkins 2011). The Hewitt mural, proposed by the Greater Shankill Partnership, claimed to further these goals by contributing to the ‘vibrant expression of the Shankill and its people’,

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highlighting ‘local hero’ Hewitt (BCC 2011: 8), a prominent socialist poet born near the Shankill, as an inspirational role model for Protestants, enhancing the confidence of art workshop participants and ‘desensitizing the area’ around the wall (Small, interview 2010). That the peace line in the post-Agreement era had become a draw for tourists had not gone unnoticed by the city council, and was another key reason, along with a desire to improve social capacity, that it was ‘important to carry on the work’ of transforming the wall (Julianne McCormick, former BCC public art and community coordinator, interview 2010).5 To accomplish this, the Greater Shankill Partnership teamed with artists from the East Belfast collective Creative Exchange, who convened a series of art and poetry workshops with youth and community groups. They also held a handful of one-off events with Shankill-area primary schools. Over a period from April to June 2010, I observed two of the workshops: one with a youth club from the upper Shankill, the Glencairn Youth Initiative, which was led by artist Deirdre Robb; and another workshop conducted by artist Lesley Cherry with young men from Impact Training, a local jobs skills programme for school leavers on Lanark Way, located just around the corner from the peace wall. I also sat in on one primary school poetry session and interviewed members of Families Beyond Conflict, a community development group initially formed to support those evicted from their homes due to loyalist feuding. Members of Families Beyond Conflict took part in a series of workshops held later in summer 2010. The youth workshops promoted a positive neighbourhood image and reinforced anti-sectarian themes. From the outset, a more pedagogical tone predominated in the Glencairn workshops, attended by about a dozen teenagers from the ages of 13 to 16. There was a trip to the Cupar Way peace wall and informal discussions about the Shankill’s attributes as well as about the peace process. Sessions with five teenage males from Impact Training were less structured and often ended early. The boys frequently wandered off to play pool or smoke, leaving the instructor to finish the art projects, which included painting and gluing bottle caps on large stencilled letters that spelled out the word ‘Impact’. Hewitt and his poetry were mentioned mostly in passing with both groups, and the bulk of the time was spent on the art projects. Robb decided against showing the Glencairn youth a DVD about Hewitt because it was ‘a wee bit boring’ she told them,6 while another instructor, brought in to lead a writing workshop, later noted before the group that Hewitt’s work ‘was not the sort of poetry I would read and not the sort of poetry you would probably read’, although she did give the youth a brief synopsis of his life and work.7 Similarly, Cherry told the training group, ‘I know you guys are not interested in poetry whatsoever’ and thereafter mostly dropped the subject.8 In contrast, according to members of

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Families Beyond Conflict, the adult workshops included a significant focus on Hewitt, in addition to visits to sites that had inspired his poetry (Sharon Bailey, interview 2011; Janis Bell, interview 2011). Meanwhile, a three-hour session at Black Mountain Primary School featured an upbeat presentation on acrostic poetry, with students participating in the creation of verse that emphasized Belfast as Titanic Town, a place that people might like to visit.9 Throughout the sessions, the artists had significant latitude to decide the workshop content. Broadly, the workshops and artwork were intended to be Hewitt-themed and further a celebratory image of the ‘community’ (Small, interview 2010; Robb, interview 2011b). But the adolescents and instructors episodically clashed over what this meant. Cherry pointed out that an early attempt to draw ‘paramilitary symbols and Union Jacks’ by one young man had no possibility of being included in the final artwork (Cherry, interview 2011). At a session with the Glencairn youth, Robb emphasized that ‘we are trying not to do flags’, despite their ubiquitous presence on the Shankill Road, particularly during key times in the loyalist commemorative calendar. When one girl persisted, Robb took a sharper line. ‘We are not doing the Union Jack. We are doing things celebrating the Shankill’.10 Meanwhile, an attempt by another girl to inscribe the letter ‘H’ to represent the Hunger Strikers on a clay plaque was also discouraged by Robb.11 On a subsequent occasion, the Glencairn youths were told ‘nothing negative, nothing sectarian’ and again dissuaded from depicting the Union flag in their artwork but instead encouraged to paint emblems such as peace symbols.12 Robb, a former city council aide who spearheaded the Creative Legacies programme while at the council and now also works for ACNI, said she chose not to allow symbols such as the Union flag because the peace wall was being developed as part of ‘cultural tourism’ and therefore a message of ‘tribalism’ was not acceptable (Robb, interview 2011b).13 For many of these youth, however, the British flag appeared to be a central component of their identity. One girl even showed up to a workshop with the Union banner temporarily tattooed on her left hand.14 Another day, when one young man from the training programme started to paint a stencilled letter with the colours red, white and blue, Cherry called him a ‘chancer’. He proceeded to mix some yellow paint in with the blue and retorted, ‘Look, it’s going green. You can’t complain’.15 In addition to delimiting acceptable communal identity, the workshops also appeared to project certain associations (and even geographical boundaries) onto participants that acquiesced to preexisting social dynamics. In one instance, Robb asked the Glencairn youth what the Shankill was known for. When no response was forthcoming, she averred: ‘Your people. You are very warm and friendly’. She then proceeded to tell the teenagers that ‘the Orange Order is still very much a part of what youse are, and what youse

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are about’.16 Thereafter, Robb said it was OK to depict an Orange Hall in their artwork as well as bonfires, two symbolic expressions she deemed a part of their Protestant culture, though the Orange Order, which bars Catholics, remains a contentious institution within wider Northern Irish society.17 Moreover, on a field trip to photograph key Shankill locales, a group of girls urged the driver to explore a nearby Catholic area of the Oldpark Road but were refused because, according to the driver, ‘we should be doing your area’.18 This comment stood out given that the project was funded through an EU programme meant to open up the city’s spaces to all residents, and these girls appeared genuinely interested in moving beyond the confines of their prescribed community. Interestingly, during an informal discussion about local political representation, several Glencairn youth asserted that their local politicians ‘tell you one thing and do another’ but that Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, then-West Belfast MP, ‘does everything for us’ and ‘does it straight away’. Some kids also indicated that to express such sentiments would be viewed unfavourably by fellow members of their residential community.19 The potentially transformational intercommunity relationship reflected by this conversation, however, was not further explored in the art or workshops. Ultimately, the youth deferred to the instructors on issues of symbolism, but intense negotiations occurred over matters of social class and control. In perhaps the most heated exchange of the workshops, Robb attempted to lead the Glencairn youth to rewrite a poem they had worked on about identity and the peace wall, using text message shorthand.20 But the teenagers, at the urging of one of the club’s staff members, resisted, agreeing that to put such work on the wall would make them and their community look ‘stupid’ and potentially even confuse international tourists unfamiliar with English text speak. Consequently, Robb dropped her idea.21 At the same time, the Hewitt artwork expanded to include images of actual community artwork after workshop participants insisted that their artistic creations be featured in, as opposed to merely influencing, the final mural, as had originally been planned (Small, interview, 2010; Robb, interview 2011b). One evening, the director of the Glencairn Youth Initiative even confronted Robb about how the youth would be represented and demanded that the ‘actual piece’ include their work.22 A similar request was made by members of Families Beyond Conflict (Bailey, interview 2011). Thus, while the panels’ symbolism was heavily influenced by the instructors’ parameters, concessions to the participants were evident on multiple levels. Ironically, although paramilitary symbolism was not allowed in the wall art, actual paramilitary members were given some control over the project. ‘You do have to have their buy-in, it’s just part of the process’, explained Robb, who said that not only were UVF members informed about the art and workshops, but we ‘let them have an opinion’ and sought feedback to

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see ‘if they liked what we [were] doing’ (Robb, interview 2011b). Symbolism included in a mural of Shankill Road sketches – such as the Northern Ireland Supporters Club, which at one point was ‘quite contentious’ among paramilitaries on ‘the road’ – was cleared with local paramilitary members to avoid ‘inadvertently’ stoking tensions (Robb, interview 2011b). An image of a poppy, associated with the British military, and therefore traditionally divisive in Northern Ireland, was also added due to its ‘cultural’ import and presence ‘in a wee pocket area’ on the Lower Shankill Road, which needed to be represented in the piece (Robb, interview 2011b). The Shankill Road has suffered from a fractured internal community identity due to intra-loyalist paramilitary feuding between the UVF, which dominates the Upper Shankill, and elements of the UDA in the Lower Shankill. This has soured relations among residents, and there were concerns that the mural should include symbols of the road in its entirety. Artists incorporated ‘unusual’ symbols (Robb, interview 2011b), such as the peacocks that strut about Woodvale Park in the Upper Shankill and the Canada geese ‘that come and nest’ in the Shankill Estate on the lower end of the road (Cherry, interview 2011). The social and cultural context of the Shankill neighbourhood had an impact on the artwork in more subtle ways as well. The wall behind the artwork was painted a dark aubergine in an effort to mask the graffiti artwork already there and to lessen the potential future impact of tourist markings and other defacements (Cherry, interview 2011). Both artists said they were inspired to create a ‘softer’ feel for the wall, which they attempted through the use of a ‘homely’ background design reminiscent of a popular local fleur-de-lis wallpaper pattern (Cherry, interview 2011; Robb, interview 2011b). The various images in the artists’ panel were rendered in a ‘sketchbook fairy tale-style’ set off by an ornate trompe l’oeil frame meant to recall ‘granny’s pictures’ (Cherry, interview 2011). The overall effect is one of nostalgia, a recurring narrative among the Protestant working class ‘that looks back to a contented time before violent subversion disturbed an ordered and prosperous corner of British society’ (Gaffikin and Morrisey 2011: 228). The nearly thirty-metre-long Hewitt mural (see Figures 4.3a, b and c) was unveiled on a bright, snowy morning in December 2010. In addition to the panel of community artwork, the piece included the artists’ sketches of the Shankill Road accompanied by peace-themed Hewitt poetry, a panel of the youth poetry, a blank framed space in which to sign one’s name and an informational board that explained the project and asked visitors to refrain from writing on the art. The unveiling was sparsely attended (roughly two dozen people were present) and consisted mainly of individuals affiliated with the project or city council staff.23 Of more than a dozen residents interviewed who lived near the peace wall, none reported being invited to the event, despite re-

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Figure 4.3. (a) The multi-panel Hewitt mural at Cupar Way. (b) A panel of artists’ sketches in the Hewitt mural. (c) The community art panel.

peated assertions at the unveiling that it was fundamentally a ‘community’ project. Nor were any of the youth or schoolchildren who had participated present that day, though their work was on display in the local library.24 And while the Hewitt mural is an attractive addition to the wall, whether it contributed to a ‘shared cultural space’ (BCC 2011), as suggested by the funding programme, or is embraced by the wider community is difficult to assess. Despite requests not to write on the mural, within months it, too, had been covered in graffiti and tourist signatures. By April 2011, the sinister imperative – ‘Kill Republicans’ – appeared spray-painted in large letters further down along this same peace wall, raising questions about the overall ‘sharedness’ of the space. An ‘International Meeting of Styles’ Comes to the Shankill During the same period when municipal, provincial and transnational entities began funding the aesthetic development of the wall, Plum Smith, an ex-Red Hand Commando paramilitary member and community worker, and EPIC began sponsoring international graffiti jams along it. Smith, who said he and EPIC had been involved in an earlier effort by the Greater Shankill Partnership to seek public funding for a wall art programme different from the current one, initiated this separate project when the money

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for the joint effort was not forthcoming (Smith, interview 2010a, 2010b). Smith reached out to local graffiti artists who contacted other international artists, and the idea of bringing an ‘International Meeting of Styles’ event to Cupar Way was launched. This global graffiti event, which has occurred in dozens of countries since its 2002 inception in Germany, is aimed at creating an international urban ‘art-community’. The artists were not paid for their work. EPIC subsidized hostel stays and the spray paint was donated by an American company called Blubber Colors (Darrin Finnegan, graffiti artist, interview 2010). Over a two-day period in August 2010, a group of about thirty international graffiti artists held their fourth jam along the Cupar Way peace line. Some said they were interested in creating social change, and even painted cracks around their images to suggest their work was bursting through the concrete or attached explicit messages of peace and encouragement for reconciliation. One artwork, inspired by the Scrabble board game, spelled out the phrase ‘Peace by Piece’ (see Figure 4.4). For other artists, the impact of colour as opposed to specific symbolic content was more important. A Brixton artist said he employed ‘warm’ or ‘loving’ colours in hopes his work ‘draws people into it’ and ‘they forget what the original purpose was, and this becomes a wall of art’ (Solo One, interview 2010). Conversely, some artists were just interested in the ‘huge space’ the wall afforded their

Figure 4.4. A tour bus passes the ‘Peace by Piece’ graffiti artwork.

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work and said they were not there to effect political change (Erin Kirk, interview 2010). These artists’ presence over the two days had an impact, however ephemeral, on the dynamics of the space. The black taxis stopped as usual, but the tourists who emerged from the cabs often interacted with the artists and spent more time there (see Figure 4.5). Some local residents gathered to eat lunch and take in the action. Dog walkers slowed down. The artists cracked beers – mainly Harp and Carlsberg – and the mood was jovial. From my perspective, it was not the art that softened the space so much as the artists themselves. They were outgoing and enthusiastic about what they were doing – blasting music, joking, taking time to involve the neighbourhood children who stopped by, even posing for photos with the tourists – and that seemed to have an impact on the embodied experience of what can otherwise be a rather desolate place.25 As one London graffiti artist put it, ‘The context gives it meaning straight away. … We are not from here. We are not being political. We are not trying to antagonize anyone. There are people from Glasgow, Cardiff, Cork, Limerick. It’s public performance art’ (Stylo interview, 2010). In contrast, a Drogheda graffiti artist cast their presence in a more political light:

Figure 4.5. A tourist takes a photo of a graffiti artist at the International Meeting of Styles event in August 2010.

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In a small kind of way it’s a little bit of peace work because some young kids come … and they get to see some English and Irish and Catholics and Protestants and people of slightly different shades and colours of skin than you normally see in the area. … That maybe in a small way helps toward the big picture of moving forward in this country. … I feel we are taking the wall down. We’re removing the grey concrete. We’re removing the barrier. We’re transforming what obviously is a military installation. (Darrin Finnegan, interview 2010)

The relationship between the organizers of the publicly funded art and those who spearheaded the graffiti work was at times conflicted. While both groups shared broadly similar goals – to turn the space into an outdoor art gallery, to change perceptions of the wall and potentially contribute to its demise, and at the same time increase tourist traffic into the area – they disagreed over the style, symbolism and methods for doing so. To begin with, the graffiti artists did not have official permission to paint the wall. As one artist noted, ‘We speak to Plum and his group. He’s the guy who’s in touch with the locals. When he’s happy, then he does all that work for us’ (Finnegan, interview 2010). Smith, meanwhile, asserted that anyone is free to put art on the wall, but dismissed the publicly financed works as ‘demeaning’ and mostly disconnected from the Shankill people (Smith, interview 2010a). ‘John Hewitt [is] OK, a good thing, but how that’s going to pull people together, how are people going to learn to share space – load of crap’ (Smith, interview 2010b). The graffiti artists also claimed that their international urban aesthetic is more relevant to locals. One artist pointed to a resident who brought them a twenty-four-pack of beer as evidence of the community’s support for their project (Finnegan, interview 2010), though the graffiti artwork, like the official public art, has been the target of vandalism, including the previously mentioned ‘Kill Republicans’ slogan. Smith also suggested that the graffiti’s symbolism, which does not include references to historical identities, was more forward-thinking and post-conflict because ‘it’s neutral’ and ‘doesn’t take sides’ (Smith, interview 2010a). He said the diversity of the artists he has brought into the area – many of the 2010 ‘Meeting of Styles’ participants were from a Catholic background – was more reflective of the cross-community shared space ethos aspired to by the Creative Legacies project (Smith, interview 2010a, 2010b). Nevertheless, individuals affiliated with the publicly financed work have taken a dim view of this competing effort. Roz Small, then-GSP arts and tourism coordinator, said she believed ‘the community isn’t necessarily so enthused about the tagging’ (Small, interview 2010). During the Glencairn youth field trip to the wall, Robb criticized the graffiti artwork. ‘It’s not really thought through. It doesn’t really work, in my opinion’, she told the teenagers. After pointing out that the graffiti was ‘temporary’, Robb added that they were ‘eventually going to have a lot of murals along here’, a ref-

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erence to the ‘If Walls Could Talk’ project.26 Meanwhile, Joe Stewart, a member of the Greater Shankill Partnership board who serves as assistant manager of Impact Training, claimed that the graffiti art was organized by Smith to assert ownership of the wall ‘because he [saw] me as a threat or the partnership as a threat’ (Stewart, interview 2010). Despite this underlying contention, Stewart said that when new artworks go up, he informs the UVF, which in turn informs Smith out of ‘respect’ for his past involvement in the Red Hand Commando organization, which is close to the UVF (Stewart, interview 2010). In a further concession to Smith and EPIC, the original wall location for the Hewitt mural was changed after ‘some newer additions’ by the graffiti artists were placed on the intended Hewitt site. Noting that ‘an ex-paramilitary group was behind’ that artwork, Robb commented, ‘If somebody had just done it, why upset the apple cart? … We had manners’ (Robb, interview 2011b). Smith, who said he had not been informed about the Greater Shankill Partnership’s art projects, noted that the official public art ‘trademarked’ the wall for one part of the community’ (Smith, interview 2010b). But the EPIC name was also featured prominently on one of the graffiti works and, therefore, both groups have ensured that the wall bears their institutional signature. Notably, conflict-based tours of the neighbourhood carried out by former paramilitary members of EPIC have on occasion omitted any reference to the official public art, with one tour guide, who was present at the Hewitt unveiling, telling a group of visitors, ‘We don’t know nothing about it. … They don’t tell us anything about it’.27

The Social Construction of Community Space: Division, Disassociation and Day Trippers As part of this research, more than a dozen in-depth interviews were conducted in October 2011with residents who lived in proximity to the loyalist side of the Cupar Way peace wall. 28 To identify residents most likely to have some familiarity with the art, I interviewed those who could see the art from their windows or from outside their front doors. A handful of individuals were also interviewed at a church community centre that looked out onto the wall. All were Protestants, though a small minority said that they no longer ascribed to any identity or that they considered themselves simply Northern Irish. The intent was to understand how ordinary people act as ‘social agents’ in the construction of space through their spatial practices, memories and associations (Low 2000: 127–28), as well as to assess their response to the visual representation of community in landscape. Discussions centred on the residents’ lives, the peace wall and their reaction to the artworks, including the official artwork’s claims to represent their culture

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and create a positive image for the area, thereby potentially transforming perceptions of the space. Opinion was nearly evenly split as to whether the art was beneficial. However, respondents did not have a clear sense of what the art was about or what it was meant to accomplish, other than it being a possible means to counteract what one woman described as the ‘rude and bad things’ that had been written on the wall.29 Several said they were neither consulted nor notified when new works went up. There was also significant reticence to participate in interviews. Requests to talk about the art were often brushed off with the response that the resident ‘never looked at it’ or [didn’t] go near it’. Assertions that the art was a ‘waste of money’ were also common. Few of the residents who did agree to sit for interviews saw their identity reflected in the art, though more than one said it generally represented the area’s past. Specific pieces of art on the wall were rarely mentioned, a factor suggesting that, for most respondents, the cacophony of images present there – from the publicly funded panels to the graffiti art to the tourist signatures – had become blurred in memory. Still, a perception existed that the wall art was about peace. This factor, given the stated lack of engagement with the art, is likely attributable to a combination of media messaging and the countless words of peace that cover both the wall and its art. Questions about the Hewitt mural elicited little recognition. Even those who claimed to have heard the name were unaware that he had been a poet and that a mural related to Hewitt’s work had been recently added to the wall. Those who could point to an artwork they liked sometimes referenced images that did not actually appear there. One man took me down to the wall to show me a picture of his niece that was not there, and another woman said she liked ‘Nelson Mandela’s one’, which does not appear on this peace wall, though an image of the South African leader is included on a nearby barrier on the Catholic side of the wall.30 Their confusion may be due in part to the manner in which most said they experienced the space – driving in their cars – as well as to the sheer quantity of murals in West Belfast. Increased visibility in the symbolic landscape did not appear to be a concern of these residents, at least when it came to the wall art. One elderly disabled man, a forty-year veteran of the UVF, summed up the wall and art as ‘part of the furniture. It’s there, but it’s not there’. As such, the symbolism of the art was of no importance to him, ‘provided it’s not republican’.31 Similarly, a teenage mother whose kitchen window framed some of the wall panels said the art ‘doesn’t annoy me’ as long as it did not show the loyalist community as ‘scumbags’. But she maintained that the art ‘didn’t change anything’ and that the area was still under paramilitary control to such a degree that her ex-boyfriend, a Catholic, was not free to visit their daughter there.32 Even among those who felt the art was a positive addition, the co-

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lour or assertions that the art made the wall ‘less scary’ or ‘more inviting’ – a goal of both the official and unofficial projects – were the most frequently cited reasons for liking it. The art did not appear to pique any sentiment for the wall to come down, as the projects’ organizers had hoped. Indeed, for many, the wall and conflict were inseparably linked, an association that the presence of art, in their view, did nothing to ameliorate. One twenty-nineyear-old man who lived across the street from the wall said he was planning on moving house because ‘it’s not nice to look at. … I didn’t think it would bother me, but it has now’. While the violence at the wall was limited to kids throwing occasional stones, he said the lingering fear ‘that something’ could come across the wall and land in his front room was ever-present – a threat the art, which he dubbed an ‘eyesore’, did not diminish.33 For many who had lived through the conflict on the Shankill, the wall brought back memories of adolescent sectarian rioting and being ‘chased by the peelers’, of the British soldiers who were stationed at a base and lookout along the wall during the Troubles, of feeling cut off from former friends and family who had lived on the Catholic side of the wall and of parents who attempted to shield them from the violence of the era.34 Such memories underscore the inherent difficulties of separating the spatial and cognitive dislocation caused by the construction of a roughly eight-metre-tall security barrier from contemporary efforts to reimagine it as an art gallery. Like other interfaces, the wall represents ‘an endurable “aide-memoire” of harm done and threat unstated’ (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 9). Consequently, the wall’s imposing and sinister materiality – arising from its origins in violent conflict and division – appears to overshadow the aesthetic embellishments in many locals’ minds. McLuhan’s (1968: 7) assertion that ‘the medium’, not its content, ‘is the message’ can be applied here as well, for the ‘technology’ of the wall and its fundamental purpose – to keep two historically opposed groups of people separate – remains its dominant discourse, with the ‘eternal vigilance’ that demands, resulting in a predictable widespread ‘indifference’ to it (McLuhan 1968: 30). As one single working mother of two sighed wearily, ‘I wouldn’t even notice if they moved it’.35 In considering the residents’ narratives, the positive, peaceful and mostly nostalgic image of the Shankill community represented in the official public art, and most certainly in the Hewitt piece, is called into question. While an intense attachment to the ‘place’ of the Shankill was evident among most interviewees – ‘I wouldn’t want out of the Shankill. I couldn’t move. I’d be lost’, said the teenage mother36 – a sense of common identification with their neighbours was less apparent. The ‘capacity’ of ‘loyalty to place’ to ‘disguise differences’ (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 17) came across strongly in these conversations. Several of the older Protestant residents expressed concerns about the anti-social behaviour of youth in their community. An

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elderly housebound woman said the wall needed to stay up in order to stop ‘the ones around here’, who had ‘no manners’ from throwing things ‘over at them’ (i.e., Catholics).37 The UVF veteran said the memorial park in front of his house had to be locked after local youth started using it for drinking. He went on to complain about the ‘little gobshites floating about’ the neighbourhood who had been ‘burning motors’.38 Other residents attempted to distance themselves from the neighbourhood’s perceived sectarianism, highlighting their Catholic friends and work colleagues. ‘I’m an individual case. I’ve mixed with both all my life’, one woman said, echoing similar comments heard in other Shankill homes. Still, she asserted, ‘You’ll not meet a lot around here like that’. Pointing towards a house in a cul-de-sac across the way, this woman declared disapprovingly: ‘They put a flag out. That’s who they are’.39 Residual intra-community division also came across in these discussions. A youth worker and ex-UDA paramilitary prisoner dubbed the Greater Shankill Partnership a ‘white elephant’ that was ‘not for the people’. As such, he said the space along the wall was ‘not owned by people living in the area’ who were ‘not getting an input into’ the art but were instead ‘kept in the dark … like mushrooms’ by the partnership.40 The perception that the primary audience for the publicly financed art was tourists, despite official discourses focusing on community, was widely held. Indeed, the Hewitt murals’ inclusion of a framed blank space41 for visitors to sign their names supports this assessment. Reactions to the tourist influx, however, were mixed, with some residents pronouncing it ‘a good thing’ for the area and others expressing annoyance or feelings of objectification at the relentless presence of the ‘tourist gaze’ (Urry 2002). In this way the art appears to contribute to an emerging identity for Shankill residents, that of de facto tourist attraction. Embedded as it is within a touristoriented economic restructuring, the art acquires agency as a shaper of identity rather than mere representation of identity. But the ‘tourist gaze’, contingent as it is on ‘performative, embodied practices’ (Urry and Larsen 2011: 14), has a dialectical quality to it as well. Maoz (2006) uses the term ‘mutual gaze’ to refer to the multiple appropriations involved in any potential tourist encounter. Tourists, after all, are also on display. Indeed, the elderly housebound woman viewed the activity the wall art attracted – such as the stream of tour buses and black taxis that passed by her front window – as a form of entertainment, helping to break up the monotony of her days. ‘It’s lovely to see it all. It gives me something to look at’, she said.42 To be sure, a concern with how the mainly middle-class tourist element perceived the working-class neighbourhood was also present. One woman started to talk about the tourists ‘walking by and looking in as if you were a …’, but then stopped abruptly and asserted, ‘I bet they don’t live as comfortable themselves’. Later in the same conversation, she added that it was ‘nice to see them coming in’

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but that when ‘they come down the street and look out of the buses, I think they look like … I don’t know’.43 In this instance, the woman seemed unwilling to verbalize a suspicion that the tourists might be looking down on or pitying her. The ex-UDA prisoner also expressed equivocal emotions to the tourist presence. He asserted it made him ‘feel like a goldfish in a bowl’. While he was proud of his role in the conflict and what he had accomplished for his ‘community’, he said he wondered if the tourists are ‘looking at me as if I’m some sort of animal in a cage’.44 Moreover, for some residents, the tourism the art supports only accentuated preexisting negative stereotypes. A woman named Lisa recounted how visiting Canadians asked her where they could pay money to see the murals along the peace wall. ‘Back home they had been told people were standing on the corner taking protection money to look at the murals … they thought they were entering a war zone’, she recalled.45 Meanwhile, the man who lived across the street from the wall asserted: ‘It just makes it more run-down. … Graffiti is associated with youth crime. Tourists come and see Northern Ireland and think it is backward’. Though this same man saw the publicly financed art as preferable, he asserted that the lack of continuity between panels (and what he considered insufficient information about why they were there), as well as the official art’s relatively sparse presence compared to the far more ubiquitous graffiti art, negated any potential benefits.46 Suggestions that the art could make the space around the wall more shared (other than as a tourist curiosity or as a thoroughfare for traffic) were mostly rejected. Some residents said it was a space they avoided or told their children to avoid. And one male pensioner harrumphed, ‘You won’t get a Catholic walking up this street’.47 As for the tourists, they have contributed to a shared space policy agenda, although perhaps not in the way presupposed by the phrase in Northern Ireland. In visits to the wall in August 2010, I met Canadian, Catalonian, Australian, Scottish and English tourists, among others, all of whom were happy to share the space for the time it took to snap a few photos and entreat the two sides to seek peace. The tourists I talked to in the space expressed an almost uniform moral duty to feel bad about the wall – what McLuhan (1968: 23) might have deemed a ‘cool medium’, which invites participation or at least beckons for a script to be written on it – and to assuage their guilt by doing just that, leaving peace messages that most likely will be read by other tourists like them. As for the art, the tourists seemed both attracted and confused by it during their brief stops, which typically lasted about five minutes and were limited to whatever pieces the taxi driver chose to highlight. One retired Scottish military officer, who had been stationed in Berlin when that wall went up, said that, overall, the art along Cupar Way broke up ‘the severity of the wall’ for him, while a middleaged woman from Kent said she’d heard about the art on the news and

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made a special effort to come see it, but that it was ‘sad’ the wall had to be there in the first place.48 An Australian woman in her twenties pondered what it would be like to live across from the wall and stare at the graffiti all day, while her travelling companion interjected that the art made things ‘better’ for the locals.49 A Catalonian man on a day trip to Belfast with his girlfriend said the graffiti art made the place look ‘similar to everywhere’ else, and reminded him of Barcelona. He said the publicly financed panels, most of which bear scant descriptions, made no sense to outsiders, and were in need of ‘some kind of explanation’.50 Strikingly, a rumoured visit by the pop star Rihanna, in town to film a music video and give a concert in September 2011, prompted a massive reported presence at the wall and succeeded, if ever so briefly, in further conflating two of the discourses in this landscape – globalized tourist consumption and community representation. According to several residents, minutes after news of her impending visit was posted on local Shankill youth’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, hundreds, if not thousands, of community members congregated along the wall with autograph books and camera phones in hand. In this way, the wall, usually ignored by residents, took on added layers of significance and was briefly elevated in their eyes to the level of global icon worthy of a pop star’s attention. The status conveyed on the wall by Rihanna’s rumoured, and unrealized, visit galvanized residents to come out and gawk at the famous gawker. In this way, it transformed them into both tourists and potential objects of tourism without the residents ever having to leave their own neighbourhood.

Conclusion: The Civic Identikit of Place in Practice The effort to create a positive identity for the Shankill community along the Cupar Way peace wall through the addition of artworks there raises important questions about the effects of state- or elite-imposed communal identities and their reception by those whose culture they claim to make visible. As this chapter contends, the social production of the space via public art has not necessarily been received by the adjacent Protestant population in the manner intended. The social construction of the space reveals numerous counter-narratives to those forwarded by both the official and unofficial public art initiatives. In particular, the Hewitt case study underscored the extensive negotiations required to implement publicly financed schemes in segregated, working-class communities. As Peach (1996: 144) has noted, the intensity of segregation in such areas ‘reverses the power structure of outside authority’ and limits its ability to act, a dynamic supported by this case study. Additionally, the wall’s historical context, imposing materiality and

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genesis as an agent of division have had significant impact on what could be accomplished in the space, as well as on the way it is experienced. Though predicated on the assumption that increased personal confidence would lead to greater cross-community interaction, the Hewitt artwork followed a pattern replicated in many community public art projects, which, according to Kwon (2004: 151 &153) isolate ‘a single point of commonality’ to define the whole, thereby reifying essentialist, harmonizing identities in the landscape. The visual images produced by such programmes often ignore the relational and contingent nature of residents’ identities, as well as intra-community struggle and endemic economic inequalities. The often ‘uplifting’ and distinctively heritagized community images such public art forwards, however well-intentioned, may actually work to ‘obscure the effects’ of the economic and political conditions that perpetuated the social disenfranchisement in the first place (Kwon 2004: 143). In the Hewitt case study, hand-picked community members worked with bureaucratically sanctioned artists to produce the forms of ‘(self)-representation’ (Kwon 2004: 138) needed to fulfil the objectives of a particular funding stream. In turn, this ‘temporary invented’ community (Kwon 2004: 6–7) of youth and adults that took part in the workshops assumed the role of a community of ‘mythic unity’ (ibid.), the residents of the Shankill Road. But this discourse of community, so central to the rhetoric of political appeals in Northern Ireland, is highly problematic. As the case studies reveal, the ‘conflation of cultural category with social group’ (Amit 2002: 20) is likely to project false images of unity that dissolve upon closer inspection. Any symbolization of community is the product of ‘ongoing exchanges’ between individuals (Rapport 2002: 140), and is therefore subject to flux. That these residents were used to showcase ‘Protestant culture’ (Small, interview 2010) implies a narrow reading of culture and identity that ignores the ‘complex processes through which sociality is sought’ (Amit 2002: 14), as well as the ‘worlds of meaning’ (Anthony Cohen 1985: 82) contained in any symbolic construction thereof. Not only does this discount the six per cent of the Shankill population from a Catholic background (DSD 2010), as well as a small ethnic migrant presence, but it also suggests an acceptance, and even a perpetuation, of traditional ‘ethno-sectarian boundaries’ (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 8) by state-financed programmes. This is not surprising given that Northern Irish politics are organized around these same boundaries. At best, this official emphasis that the art be celebratory and represent ‘Protestant culture’ put forward a partial truth about the Shankill. In Northern Ireland, the high level of segregation in working-class housing estates does support a correlation between cultural category and residency. But agreement on the meaning and nature of that community or culture is less than certain. And on the Shankill, the residents interviewed were just as

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likely to express disassociation from other members of their community as to express feelings of solidarity with them. This is not to say that feelings of mutuality were non-existent, but that where they did exist, they were not the sole element of identity or association. Moreover, in a neighbourhood where suicide rates are high and poverty abounds, the ‘fairy tale’-style publicly financed art represents a disjunction with reality for some. As an unemployed eighteen-year-old workshop participant noted, while gluing bottle caps on a sheet of cardboard one overcast spring morning, ‘It takes my mind off things. There’s not much to do unless you’re a tourist. It’s too expensive to go downtown. Everyone who can’t work is on the brew. Everyone who can work is on the brew’.51 This raises a number of questions. Precisely for whom is the ‘positive’ Protestant identity being created? What are the limits of visibility? And does inclusion in a symbolic landscape forged by state-financed public art programmes allow residents to transcend the troubled past and embrace a future suitable for more than ‘cultural tourism’ purposes? The data presented here says as much about what the civic identikit of place forecloses – in the case of the Hewitt mural, references to the Union flag – as to what it opens up. Whether the art is helping to turn ‘a destructive force into a vibrant expression of the Shankill and its people’ (BCC 2011), as boasted by the official city council booklet, is debatable. Clearly, opinion is mixed on the ground, a fact that is overlooked in these official pronouncements about the future. Analogously, how the wall juggles the dual (and contradictory) roles of ‘vibrant expression’ of community and exclusionary communal boundary marker is unclear.52 Finally, the relationship between the neighbourhood’s evolution into a site of tourist curiosity and the state’s incentive to fund artworks at the wall underscores the importance of globalization and consumption in shaping local place identities. At Cupar Way, the ‘tourist gaze’ has become an integral force in the landscape, acting as an unofficial arbiter in civic space. Not only has the ‘gaze’ contributed to a state-sanctioned vision of ‘community’ along relatively narrow, predetermined cultural lines, but it has had the perverse effect of transforming a sectarian security barrier into a potential point of pride for the neighbourhood, without any apparent accompanying desire to remove it. As one adult workshop attendee put it, ‘Tourists are going to learn about John Hewitt. … There’s famous people that come from here. It’s not all doom and gloom’ (Bailey interview, 2011). As the preceding ethnographic case studies have shown, however, there are limits to the effectiveness of relying on the ‘tourist gaze’ as spatial strategy in segregated, working-class areas, where the state’s policy writ does not run deep and civic identikit-style efforts to reimage space positively encounter greater resistance and local circumscription. A medium of division gets a facelift, and, in turn, new divisions emerge.

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Notes Parts of this chapter were earlier published in Anthropology Matters, see Hocking (2012). 1. Personal observation, 2 June 2010. 2. Among these documents are Belfast City Council’s Good Relations Strategy (BCC 2003) and Peace and Reconciliation Action Plan (BCC 2010c), as well as OFMDFM’s A Shared Future (OFMDFM 2005a), draft CSI strategy (OFMDFM 2010) and ‘Contested Space Programme’ for interface communities (NIE 2011). Since 1995, the European Union has funded peace and reconciliation programmes for Northern Ireland and the Border Counties of Ireland through its PEACE I, PEACE II and PEACE III programmes (Special EU Programmes body 2007). In January 2012, the IFI announced the launch of a £2 million programme for confidence- and relationship-building initiatives aimed at bringing about the conditions that would lead to the removal of security barriers (BBC News 2012g). 3. Northern Ireland Department of Justice official, email message to author, 2 May 2012. 4. Personal observation, 17 June 2011. 5. The Cupar Way peace wall was cited by city council and local regeneration officials as a Protestant counterpoint to the more overtly political ‘International Wall’, a popular tourist stop on the Catholic Falls Road. That wall, according to one local black-taxi driver, has also been contested by its mainstream republican muralists and dissident republican muralists, who seek space there for their views (interview with republican black-taxi driver, 2 January 2012). 6. Personal observation, 19 May 2010. 7. Personal observation, 26 May 2010. 8. Personal observation, 13 May 2010. 9. Personal observation, 7 June 2010. 10. Personal observation, 12 May 2010. 11. Prior to Robb’s intervention, the girl was ribbed by her cohorts for making the ‘H’ symbol, though her motivations were unclear. While admittedly atypical for a Protestant youth to use the symbolism of the republican hunger strikers in her artwork, the girl could be overheard whispering Bobby Sands’s name and appeared to understand the association (personal observation, 12 May 2010). 12. Personal observation, 26 May 2010. 13. Changing Faces, one of the earlier public works on the wall, features numerous Union flags, which are incorporated in the piece as backdrops to depictions of contemporary youth culture. 14. Personal observation, 5 May 2010. 15. Personal observation, 6 May 2010. 16. Personal observation, 5 May 2010. 17. Personal observation, 12 May 2010. 18. Personal observation, 5 May 2010. 19. Personal observation, 19 May 2010. 20. Titled ‘The Other Side of the Wall’, the poem was ostensibly directed at their Catholic counterparts, none of whom these youth actually met during the workshops. 21. Personal observation, 2 June 2010. 22. Personal observation, 19 May 2010. 23. Personal observation, 7 December 2010. 24. Personal observation, 7 December 2010. 25. Personal observations, 7–8 August 2010.

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26. Personal observation, 5 May 2010. 27. Personal observation, 20 May 2011. 28. The Shankill Road residents quoted in this section were interviewed on 5 October 2011, 6 October 2011, 7 October 2011, 11 October 2011 and 18 October 2011. Nearly all requested some level of anonymity. Where the residents agreed, the interviews were recorded. 29. Interview with Shankill resident, 11 October 2011. 30. Interview with Shankill residents, 18 October 2011 and 7 October 2011. 31. Interview with Shankill resident, 6 October 2011. 32. Interview with Shankill resident, 6 October 2011. 33. Interview with Shankill resident, 18 October 2011. 34. The gates at each end of the Cupar Way peace wall are opened to traffic and pedestrians during the day, but are closed at night (Northern Ireland Department of Justice official, email message to author, 26 August 2010). 35. Interview with Shankill resident, 18 October 2011. 36. Interview with Shankill resident, 6 October 2011. 37. Interview with Shankill resident, 5 October 2011. 38. Interview with Shankill resident, 6 October 2011. 39. Interview with Shankill resident, 7 October 2011. 40. Interview with Shankill resident, 18 October 2011. 41. Since 2009, the Greater Shankill Partnership has waged a battle to stop the black-taxi drivers from encouraging their passengers to sign their names on the artworks. In mid-2011, signs forbidding writing on the art were added to the wall, though this has not entirely halted the activity. The Hewitt mural’s framed space for visitors to sign their names was in part an attempt to end this practice. 42. Interview with Shankill resident 5 October 2011. 43. Interview with Shankill resident, 7 October 2011. 44. Interview with Shankill resident 18 October 2011. 45. Interview with Shankill resident 18 October 2011. 46. Interview with Shankill resident, 18 October 2011. 47. Interview with Shankill resident, 7 October 2011. 48. Interviews with tourists, 19 August 2010. 49. Interviews with tourists, 12 August 2010. 50. Interview with Catalonian tourist, 12 August 2010. 51. Interview with workshop participant, 13 May 2010. 52. One of the more recent pieces of publicly financed art to go up on the wall, Rita Duffy’s Banquet, an irreverent, feminist-inspired mural based on the Last Supper and commissioned for International Women’s Day, was initially sited on the main Shankill Road. In mid-2012, it was moved to the wall to make way for commemorative imagery related to the Ulster Covenant centenary that year (Rita Duffy, email message to author, 26 March 2013). While the piece represents a lively and provocative addition to the wall’s visual gallery, its appearance suggests a level of disconnect between the regressive ‘medium’ of the wall and the progressive feminist message implicit in the artwork. Whether this opens up a space for actual community reflection or further pushes the wall into the realm of tourist ‘artefact’ remains to be seen. It is interesting to note that despite the inclusion of Duffy’s artwork on the wall, Joe Stewart, one of the outdoor art gallery’s principal organizers, commented, ‘It may be some form of art, but it’s not our art’ (Stewart, interview 2013, emphasis added).

5



Transforming the Stone Recasting Derry’s Diamond War Memorial for the Demands of a Shared Future

Here are the directions by which/You, like the others, should find me./When you come to the central square/You will find a statue rise up/Like a shout that ends in the point/Of his finger. —Seamus Deane, ‘Directions’, in History Lessons (1983: 16)

On the morning of Remembrance Sunday 2010, a thick white fog hung heavy over Londonderry. As my bus crossed the Craigavon Bridge en route to Derry’s Cityside, the faint sounds of an unseen marching band drifted across the River Foyle. A few minutes later, walking through the narrow shuttered streets, I passed well-dressed pedestrians carrying red poppy wreaths. Like me, they were headed to the Diamond War Memorial, the city’s official cenotaph honouring the dead from the First and Second World Wars. The monument sits in the heart of Londonderry’s historic walled city – on the site of the former town hall – and just across the street from the grand and imposing Austins, which bills itself as the oldest independent department store in the world. When I arrived shortly after 10 a.m., a crowd had already begun to converge on the square. Military veterans, dressed in their Sunday best, proudly displayed medals on dark overcoats. PSNI officers sported red poppies – a symbol of remembrance for the dead – in their caps. The nattily attired head of the Londonderry branch of the Royal British Legion, David Davis, carried a large black umbrella as he strode about, overseeing the preparations with a gimlet eye.

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Roughly thirty minutes before 11 a.m. – the fateful hour when the Armistice between the Allies and Germany came into effect on 11 November 1918 – the William King Memorial Flute Band, which had marched from Londonderry’s Waterside on the east bank of the river to the Cityside on the west bank for the occasion, led a procession of military officers and veterans in full regalia into the square (see Figure 5.1). They were followed by civic leaders and city councillors in robes, which included Colum Eastwood, the young nationalist lord mayor at the time. Otherwise, much of the ceremony proceeded as it had more than eighty years previously, when the monument by British sculptor Vernon March was first unveiled on 23 June 1927. Those assembled mouthed the words of the famous First World War hymn, ‘The Supreme Sacrifice’. Bugles sounded ‘Last Post’. Silence was observed. The notes of ‘Reveille’ echoed hauntingly across the hushed and shivering crowd. Wreaths were laid. After a concluding rendition of ‘God Save the Queen’, the procession fell back into order before slowly exiting the square by way of Bishop Street. To an outsider looking in, the moment might have appeared the high watermark of civic unity and shared commemoration. More precisely, though, this ‘official’ Royal British Legion ceremony reflects the resilience of a social ritual of collective remembrance for the city’s Protestant minority. The war

Figure 5.1. A Remembrance Sunday service at the Diamond War Memorial.

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memorial stands in the centre of Catholic, nationalist Derry, where expressions of Britishness have long been met with suspicion, if not unabashed vitriol. This conflicted relationship is related in part to the legacy of violence and discrimination the Catholic population endured for much of the city’s history – the symbolic and emotional crescendo of which occurred on 30 January 1972 when British paratroopers killed 13 unarmed civilians and injured 13 more (one of whom subsequently died) after opening fire on an anti-internment march.1 While during the post-partition unionist hegemony, the monument functioned much as it did in other British cities – as a site to remember the UK’s war dead – the contemporary Northern Irish conflict upended this dynamic. Nearly everything associated with the war memorial, from the Remembrance Sunday service to the various marches that pass by at key dates in the Protestant commemorative calendar, took on distinctively sectarian and frequently confrontational implications and often attracted the ire of republican protestors. The memorial space was catapulted onto the frontlines of conflict and dissent, becoming the target of ongoing, lowlevel nationalist attacks. In the post-conflict era, however, there has been an effort to recast the narrative around the cenotaph to allow this ‘lieu de mémoire’ or ‘site of memory’ (Nora 1989: 19) to sit comfortably in the nationalist city’s civic centre on the west bank, an area the Protestant population all but fled during the height of conflict. Like all memory sites, the Diamond brings history into the present, allowing the memory of the past to influence contemporary identity. But these ‘boundary stones of another age’ (Nora 1989: 12) may also accrue new memories through the reinterpretation and selective dissemination of history. Invoking the ‘shared’ military service of Catholics and Protestants in the First World War, a range of local elites with a stake in the city’s symbolic economy have drawn on various public funding streams to incorporate the memorial into a unifying civic narrative that stresses the mutuality of military sacrifice. This effort to broaden the memorial’s appeal and shine a light on the participation of the city’s Catholic population in the war is in line with the post-conflict policy commitment to create shared space across Northern Irish cities (OFMDFM 2005a, 2010, 2013). This chapter examines how a landscape of both official memory and troubled history – the Ministry of Defence-funded Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the Derry City Council and the Royal British Legion each have a stake in either the oversight or maintenance of the memorial – is redefined to support a reconciliation discourse. It draws on James Scott’s suggestion that a richer interpretation of social resistance and power relations can be culled through the comparative analysis of subordinate and dominate groups’ private and public narratives, or what he terms their ‘hidden’ and ‘public’ transcripts (Scott 1990: xii–xiii). As Scott puts it: ‘[P]olitical anal-

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ysis can be advanced by research that can compare the hidden transcript of subordinate groups with the hidden transcript of the powerful and both hidden transcripts with the public transcript they share. This last facet of the comparison will reveal the effect of domination on political communication’ (Scott 1990: 15). In the case of the Diamond War Memorial, the new ‘public’ transcript demanded by the peace process and adopted to varying degrees by both local elites and non-elites in the city is often at odds with an array of less-prominent ‘hidden’ transcripts. These private narratives raise questions about the partiality of the reconciliation discourse – the messages it promotes and those it suppresses – as well as testify to the resilience of existing divisions in Northern Irish society. In this sense, the Diamond War Memorial, much like Scott’s assessment of carnival, functions as a ‘ritual site of various forms of social conflict and symbolic manipulation, none of which can be said, prima facie, to prevail’ (Scott 1990: 178). While the work to create shared space at the memorial suggests a desire on the part of local elites to improve the city’s functionality, an analysis of the ‘hidden transcripts’ indicates a degree of discordance with conflict transformation narratives that falls short of the ipso facto social reconciliation the memorial is now claimed to represent.

Memorializing the Great War: The Diamond War Memorial in a ‘Troubled’ Landscape As sites of ‘power and memory’, monuments reflect on the ‘social relations and practices which prevail and interact’ at particular times and places, and serve as a means to ‘map history onto territory’ (Whelan 2003: 17). The role of the past in shaping narratives about nationhood and cultural identity makes it a vital player in conflicts over territory and ideology. But the respective identities, memories and narratives associated with monuments are also prone to contestation and resistance. For, by definition, heritage ‘belongs to someone and logically, therefore, not to someone else’ (Ashworth and Graham 2005: 5). There are few places where this has been more apparent than in violently divided societies, where one man’s sacred space is often another man’s symbolic occupier. For the British state, which historically has buried its casualties on the battlefield, the memorials of the Great War ‘served as surrogate graves and the Remembrance ceremony became an occasion for the bereaved to grieve and try to make sense of, or at least come to terms with, their loss’ (Jeffery 2000: 127). In his study of First World War memorials, King asserts that the memorials offered ‘opportunities for people to express the varied sense they were making of the war and its aftermath’ (King 1998: 12), rather than delineated what they should believe about the

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Great War. These memorials were sites of ‘collective remembrance’, which served both political and social-psychological functions for the ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson 1983) of the nation state and its constituent populations (Winter 1998: 224–27). In Ireland, such ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Nora 1989: 12) have presented a distinct conundrum due to their connection to a military undertaking by the former British colonial power. After Ireland’s independence in 1922, ‘the narrative of war commemoration’, including the very question of whether to construct memorials to the war, ‘was consistently in dialogue with the narratives attendant on the national question’ (Johnson 2003: 12). Johnson notes that ‘the sites in which collective memory could be rooted became in themselves the sight-lines through which the conflict would be viewed’ (ibid.: 13). Ireland’s internal ambivalence towards its roughly 210,000-man contribution to the British war effort (Jeffery 2000: 6) was shared among Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland, which remained under British rule. War commemoration in Northern Ireland ‘became overwhelmingly an opportunity to confirm loyalty to the British link and affirm Ulster’s Protestant heritage’ (Jeffery 2000: 131, emphasis in original), to the extent that veterans of the 16th Irish Division were overlooked among the invitees to the 1929 unveiling of the Belfast cenotaph (ibid.: 132). Londonderry was hardly an exception. There, the effort to erect a war memorial was initiated in 1919 by then-unionist Lord Mayor Sir Robert Anderson and paid for by public subscription. The memorial’s Diamond Gardens’ site and its design were approved by the unionist-controlled Londonderry Corporation. And the 1927 unveiling of the nearly forty-feet-tall bronze-and-Portland-stone memorial, which features a central winged figure of ‘Victory’ flanked by sculptures of a bayonet-wielding soldier in the act of taking a trench and a sailor hurrying on deck, was largely a British affair. A massive Union flag draped the base of the memorial, and speeches were delivered by military and aristocratic representatives (Diamond War Memorial Project, n.d.b). As a ‘dominant’ memory site (Nora 1996: 19) that embodied ‘hegemonic official narratives’ (Ashplant, Dawson and Roper 2000: 20), the cenotaph’s existence did not bring about objections that were readily apparent in civic space. According to David Davis, a former unionist Lord Mayor of Londonderry who grew up participating in Remembrance Sunday ceremonies in the early 1950s, there was ‘never animosity shown towards … the war memorial’ (Davis, interview 2010). The challenge to unionist hegemony presented by civil rights activists in the late 1960s disrupted this equilibrium. In October 1968, after the proposed route of a civil rights march that had planned to ‘bring Nationalists, Republicans and Communists to the war memorial’ (Prince and Warner 2012: 87) was banned by the unionist regime, the Diamond became a

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flashpoint for skirmishes between unionists and nationalists, as civil rights agitators increasingly focused on occupying the ‘unionist citadel’ (ibid.: 113) of the city centre and overturning its ‘spatial order’ (ibid.: 87) to secure visibility for their demands. The contested nature of the Catholic population’s relationship to the British military, brought in to restore order after rioting engulfed the ‘no-go’ zone of the Catholic Bogside in August 1969, hardened sentiment against the Diamond War Memorial. While opposition to unionist power had previously existed, shifting power relationships facilitated more explicit acts of resistance. As conflict between Protestants and Catholics escalated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ex-servicemen from nationalist backgrounds burned their service records and medals at that site in protest against anti-Catholic discrimination and the British Army’s Bloody Sunday atrocities, according to local respondents (Eamonn Baker, interview 2010; Glen Barr, interview 2011). The ‘hidden’ transcript was no longer private. Commenting on the Catholic relationship to First World War commemoration, one middle-aged republican woman recalled: ‘My grandfather would wear the poppy to remember. He stopped wearing it after Bloody Sunday. It was seen then as a British symbol that belonged to the Protestant community’.2 Passersby in the Diamond square still vividly recall debris from PIRA bombs landing in the vicinity of the memorial during the 1970s. Given the turmoil, Davis said, city authorities locked the iron gates surrounding the memorial in the early days of the Troubles (Davis, interview 2010). This move further isolated what would come to be seen as an almost exclusively Protestant space in a Catholic-majority area, as thousands of Protestants exited the west bank during the Troubles (BBC News 2006a).The Diamond War Memorial’s prominence in the annual Apprentice Boys of Derry3 commemorations of both the December 1688 closing of the city gates against the attacking armies of the Catholic King James II and the July 1689 relief of Derry by forces loyal to the Protestant King William III (of Orange) has also reinforced its unionist associations. These rituals include a symbolically British memorial service at the cenotaph in August and the December burning of an effigy of the ‘traitor’ Gov. Robert Lundy, which occurs about a block up the street from the memorial. Lundy is infamous in loyalist circles for advocating surrender to King James’s Jacobite troops. The annual Apprentice Boy commemorations, which include massive and often raucous parades, are viewed as incendiary by many Catholics, and have been a point of contention and negotiation over the years (Cohen 2007; Ross 2007). As Lefebvre (1994: 222) has noted, ‘monumental works’ can project ‘consensus’ and quash dissent, but they may also presage conflict when their authority diminishes. In this instance, the nationalist/republican response to the memorial mirrored the broader collapse of the prevailing social order.4 Throughout the conflict and beyond, the monument was assaulted

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by constant paint bombs, graffiti and other acts of desecration, including public urination and the hacking off of the soldier’s bayonet. Much like the nearby Fountain Estate, the last remaining Protestant enclave on the west bank, the memorial space has been perceived as under nationalist assault by unionists (Trevor Temple, Diamond War Memorial Project researcher, interview 2011).

The Great ‘Shared’ History Revival: A Public Narrative of Reconciliation and Remembrance The peace process search for common ground between Protestants and Catholics has contributed to a contemporary interest in their mutual military service during the Great War (Jeffery 2000; Graham and Shirlow 2002; Bryan and Ward 2011). The shared sacrifices endured in that conflict – notably, between the Protestant 36th Ulster Division and the Catholic 16th Irish Division at the 1916 Battle of the Somme and at the June 1917 Battle of Messines in Belgium – have received renewed attention. Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, a former PIRA commander, has publicly commended ‘the courageous Irishmen who gave their lives in that war’, and asserted that the ‘experiences of republicans, nationalists, unionists and all others form part of our collective memory’ (quoted in Derry Journal 2010). Margaret Ritchie of the SDLP made headlines as the first leader of her party to wear the poppy on Remembrance Sunday, a controversial move in nationalist Northern Irish circles due to its association with the British military (Belfast Telegraph 2010b). This new political ‘public’ transcript acknowledges Catholic First World War contributions as part of a reconciliation discourse, and is in line with a body of work that has considered the use of ‘collective memory’ to serve present-day needs (Connerton 1989; Halbwachs 1992; Jarman 1997; Misztal 2011). If, as Papadakis (2003: 254) writes, ‘memory, like history, is concerned not just with the past but with the legitimisation of the politically desired future’, then serving that future requires a rethinking of the dominant discourses governing civic expression. Within conflict transformation processes, ‘one-time opponents in search of peace discover new metaphors and images, build integrative narratives and develop inclusive ritual expressions that communicate their shared past and linked future’ (Ross 2009a: 6). As in South Africa, where ‘heritage sites’ have been modified to accommodate the ‘new national narrative’ (Ross 2009b: 212), Londonderry’s Diamond War Memorial has undergone a conceptual facelift in the post-Good Friday Agreement era. The new ‘public transcript’ surrounding the Great War has been exemplified in two separate initiatives to reimagine the Diamond War Memorial as a shared space. Both have

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sought to influence social or collective memory of the war through a mix of innovative ritual and selective (re)presentations of history. The first of these efforts germinated on the battlefields of Belgium, where loyalist Glen Barr, an ex-politician and one-time leading member of the UDA in Londonderry, established the Island of Ireland Peace Park along with Paddy Harte, a former Fine Gael politician from Donegal in the Republic of Ireland (Bryan and Ward 2011: 177–78). On his website, Barr has noted that he was inspired to help create the park after encountering a rather beleaguered memorial to the Nationalist 16th Irish Division a few miles from the far more impressive Ulster Tower to the Unionist 36th Ulster Division at Thiepval on the Somme and learning about the shared sacrifice and bravery that had occurred at Messines (Barr, n.d.). As he recalled: ‘I was angry at the difference between the two memorials and I was full of guilt that my educational system had not taught me anything about this part of history and angry at myself for not making the effort to find out’ (Barr, n.d.). Opened in 1998 by then-Irish President Mary McAleese, Queen Elizabeth II and King Albert II of Belgium, the park features a round peace tower and serves as a symbolic reminder of the common (successful) endeavour of the two divisions in June 1917. The International School for Peace Studies at Messines grew out of this project, and today thousands of individuals from youth to community members to trade unionists annually attend Barr’s conflict transformation programme, funded indirectly by European Union peace monies.5 As an extension of this work, Barr held a wreath-laying at the Diamond the week before Remembrance Sunday in 2005. For the first time, the Irish tricolour flew alongside the Union flag at the cenotaph (BBC News 2005b). Though controversial in some loyalist circles, the move led to the launch of a symbolically ecumenical ceremony taking place each June at which the flags of all nationalities that fought at Messines, including those of Germany and Ireland, not yet an independent nation at the time, are carried to the Diamond as a means of underscoring the notion that ‘they all died as equals’ (Barr, interview 2011). Barr said it was important to bring a commemoration his group had begun in Belgium back to Northern Ireland (Barr interview, 2011). The Messines memorial service has embraced a distinctively anti-war theme. It has included music by the self-described cross-community bag-piping band Tullintrain, speeches by Protestant and Catholic schoolchildren who have attended the peace school, readings of Bible verses emphasizing love and elegiac war poetry, as well as a wreathlaying.6 In 2011, local politicians such as then-unionist Lord Mayor Maurice Devenney, who laid a wreath at the cenotaph, and nationalist MLA Pat Ramsey, who read a peace pledge, also participated. Though the event has attracted a smaller crowd than Remembrance Sunday, the ceremony itself does not privilege any national allegiance, and seeks to reshape the space

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as fundamentally inclusive.7 This ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawn 1983: 1) comes in the form of a new ritual that ‘claim[s] continuity with an appropriate historic past’ (Connerton 1989: 51) to influence contemporary social memory. As Barr asserted, ‘Shared history, for me, that’s the way forward’ (Barr, interview 2011). Meanwhile, in 2007 the Derry peace-building organization Holywell Trust spearheaded a research project financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to examine the backgrounds of the 756 names of First World War dead from Londonderry on the monument’s bronze plaques. This work produced the statistic that nearly 50 per cent of the names hailed from a Catholic background (Holywell Trust 2007). In addition to research into the lives of the local soldiers who died in the war, the initiative carried out educational programmes in Derry’s (mainly Catholic) schools with the support of the mayor’s office and successfully lobbied the city council to open the memorial’s locked gates on the premise that all citizens should have access to and ownership of the war memorial, according to Mary McElhinney, the project coordinator (McElhinney, interview 2012). The two individuals who oversaw the project – Holywell Trust Director Eamonn Deane, a prominent community activist and brother of the writer Seamus Deane, and Trustee Eamonn Baker – hail from Catholic working-class families, but acknowledge in interviews that the space is a sacred site for the city’s Protestant minority (Baker, interview 2010; Deane, interview 2010). The project’s staffing and management reflected a peace process-style commitment to the Belfast Agreement’s ‘cross-community’ and ‘parity of esteem’ tenets (NIO 1998). The researcher was Trevor Temple, a resident of the Fountain and a member of the loyalist Apprentice Boys and the Orange Order (Temple, interview 2011), while the coordinator, McElhinney, described herself as a ‘liberal-thinking nationalist’ (McElhinney, interview 2012). The project advisory committee included Royal British Legion officials, such as Davis, and prominent Irishmen such as Barr’s former colleague Paddy Harte, who had founded the peace park with him (Diamond War Memorial Project, n.d.a). Londonderry politicians such as former Deputy First Minister Mark Durkan, MP and member of the SDLP, and former Northern Ireland Assembly minister Gregory Campbell, MP and DUP member, were also supportive, participating in a cross-community service that the trust organized for the eightieth anniversary of the Diamond’s unveiling in June 2007 (Campbell, interview 2010; Temple, interview 2010). According to organizers, the research provided a means to explore the significance of the city’s war memorial ‘for all its citizens’ (Baker, interview 2010). ‘It wasn’t that the Protestant dead were more important than the Catholic dead, or the Catholic dead were more important than the Protestant dead’, said Baker. ‘All of them needed to be respected and reverenced’

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(Baker, interview 2010). Newspaper editors helped publicize some of the soldiers’ experiences by running columns by Temple that appeared in the Londonderry Sentinel and Derry Journal, the principal papers of, respectively, the Protestant and Catholic populations. The Holywell Trust’s project also included the launch of a website with information about the soldiers and the creation of a 2008 commemorative diary highlighting local links to the war (Diamond War Memorial Project, n.d.a). Individuals affiliated with the project subsequently published Remembering: Our Shared Legacy from the First World War. The book’s publication, funded in part by Derry City Council, was based on interviews with surviving family members of the city’s war dead (Baker 2009). In this way, the Diamond was recast as a receptacle for the very human dramas – and the attendant emotional power these wield – embodied by the dead service personnel’s lives, rather than as an icon of the British state.8 And the spatial framework of the Diamond, like other such sites undergoing identity reformulation, was imbued with ‘fresh layers of meaning’ (Johnson 2003: 7). This project appeared to recognize the possibility for landmarks to contain and trigger social memory (Halbwachs 1992: 175) and, potentially, social change. The Holywell Trust’s website now boasts that the work on the memorial ‘allow[ed] it to be viewed by the citizens of Derry/Londonderry as a shared monument’ (Holywell Trust 2007). Noting that ‘there hasn’t been any vandalism – not the slightest’, Deane asserted that tacit nationalist community ‘permission [to desecrate the space] suddenly stopped, and so it’s become a shared space’ (Deane, interview 2010). This narrative has been promoted widely in the media, including on the BBC News website (Crowley 2008). It has also been trumpeted by the Derry City Council (2007) and the Heritage Lottery Fund (2012b). The new ‘public transcript’ of inclusiveness surrounding the memorial has extended to the two commemorative traditions most closely associated with the cenotaph: the Royal British Legion’s annual Remembrance Sunday service and the Apprentice Boys marches. William Moore, general secretary of the Apprentice Boys, stressed his organization’s support for the Diamond War Memorial Project. He said: We were pleased that took place and delighted that what we always believed was proved to be correct. And that was almost half the names on the war memorial belonged to the Roman Catholic community. … Everyone has a right to pay respect at a cenotaph, meaning, everyone. … The overwhelming majority, if not 100 per cent of the membership, welcomed that there project taking place. (Moore, interview 2011)

Likewise, the language of the Remembrance Sunday service at the memorial, which remains a symbolically British event, has taken on inclusive tones in the post-Agreement era. In his 2010 exhortation, the Dean of St. Columb’s

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Cathedral, the Very Rev. Dr. William Morton, prayed that ‘this city, community and province may be freed from all sectarianism, bigotry and strife’ and that ‘those who perpetrate acts of terrorism … may see the errors of their ways, returning to paths of peace, reconciliation and democracy’.9 The number of nationalist SDLP city councillors who attend the service has also increased in recent years, according to local respondents (McElhinney, interview 2012; Moore, interview 2011). In Derry, where the SDLP remains strong in the face of diminished electoral clout elsewhere, the party is the majority party on a nationalist-dominated city council. And when these councillors, including then-Lord Mayor Eastwood, strode into the Diamond War Memorial square just prior to the start of the 2010 Remembrance service, one unionist man could be overheard commenting approvingly to his companion, ‘The most there’s ever been’.10 That the monument represents a ‘shared space’ appeared to be endorsed by many of the nearly three-dozen passersby who were interviewed in the square from July 2010 to November 2011. Protestants or unionists interviewed for this research were likely to assert that the memorial has always been shared, but to blame past political pressure from nationalist and republican leaders for limiting the freedom of Catholics to identify with it. Nationalist reaction was more mixed, with some saying it represented all who died in the war, but none going so far as to say they attended the service there. A general indifference, rooted in the notion that it’s ‘not my side of the community’, in the words of one middleaged man, was also evident.11

The Unreconciled: Private Narratives of Social Struggle and Resistance In discussing the projects to cast the Diamond War Memorial as a ‘shared’ space, officials from both groups emphasized the liberating, almost redemptive aspects of the work, underscoring how it helped the Catholic community overcome the stigma of ‘coming out’ (Baker, interview 2010) with stories about their families’ connections to the war and brought ‘our new revealed history’ (Barr, interview 2011) into the public sphere as a means to transcend ‘bigotry and intolerance’ (Barr, interview 2011). But the narrative of confession and revelation required by the reconciliation discourse necessarily sublimates other competing narratives. Comparing this ‘public’ peace process transcript to the ‘hidden’ transcript (Scott 1990) of both local elites and non-elites opens up a space to explore disjunctions within this dominant discourse, and to consider the means by which language reveals ‘social control and social domination’ (Low 2003: 396) in the management of a landscape of troubled history. The following analysis is informed by Scott’s public/pri-

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vate framework, and considers how the peace and reconciliation discourse – in this instance, what might be termed ‘representations of how things might or could or should be’ (Fairclough 2004: 207) – is contested and experienced in reality, thereby exposing ‘the relative solidity and permanence of social entities, and their resistance to change’ (ibid.: 209). By examining ‘hidden’ and ‘public’ narratives, it is possible to articulate a fuller range of this memory site’s ‘possible significations’ (Nora 1989: 24), as well as how these reflect and interact with macro processes of political and social transformation. The decision to finance the nearly £50,000 Diamond War Memorial Project was based in part on its potential to ‘make a huge contribution to communities … understanding potentially divisive and perhaps unpalatable aspects of the past in a safe and supported way’, according to Heritage Lottery Fund official Stella McDermott. In an email, McDermott noted that at the time, the project was seen to support ‘a greater sense of “shared city” and contribute to reducing … tensions’.12 The project’s organizers have been keen to perpetuate this narrative in public. Privately, however, their relationship to the memorial is more complex, with both men who oversaw the project expressing ambivalent views of the memorial in separate interviews. Deane, for instance, brought up past concerns over the memorial’s city-centre location. He referenced claims made by the Slovenian lithopuncturist Marko Pogacˇnik, brought to the city in 1992 as part of an international cultural festival, who asserted that ‘for the city to become a successful city’, the memorial ‘needed to be removed’ (Deane, interview 2010). Deane mentioned a subsequent ‘putative plan for the city centre’ that considered moving the memorial to one side of the square in order both to ease the ‘flow through of traffic’ and to downplay the presence of what some saw as a ‘belligerent’ or ‘bellicose’ monument that ‘was essentially British’ (Deane interview, 2010).13 That proposal had been swiftly dropped, he said, due to a strong reaction from the Protestant minority who viewed it as ‘tantamount to moving [St. Columb’s] cathedral’ (Deane, interview 2010). Deane, who said a cousin was shot dead by the SAS during the Troubles, also acknowledged that he struggled with ‘prejudice’ and had ‘never’ attended any of the ceremonies at the Diamond because of the British connection. But he added that ‘it’s not about me’ and noted that ‘it’s very interesting to help create a shared space’, citing the trust’s work on the memorial as a model for how ‘people can live and let live and move on and create new meaning out of a space’ (Deane, interview 2010). Nevertheless, for Deane personally, the Diamond War Memorial ‘just reflects on the past, which is part of the sort of repression of it’ (Deane, interview 2010). Though Baker does attend the service and said he makes a point of looking after the poppy wreaths left at the cenotaph, his language also echoed a fundamental unease with the memorial that suggested an inclination to remove it. He remarked:

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Arguably what we need in the centre of the city is a peace garden rather than a bellicose war memorial. But I don’t think it’s in any way going to be possible to say to people, ‘Let’s remove this war memorial and create a peace garden’. But if we were ever to remove the war memorial, there needs to be the proper acknowledgement and respect for the people who died. So my objection to the war memorial might be something more aesthetic then. … I’m not against. Well, there’s an ethical question there. Is it good to have this imagery of, you know, brutality? (Baker, interview 2010)

Strikingly, the shared space narratives that Holywell Trust and International School for Peace Studies officials have attempted to promote around the memorial have not translated into cooperation between the groups. Both have rejected the suggestion of future collaborations there (Barr interview, 2011; Deane, interview 2010). According to Deane, ‘we’d already been working at it’ when Barr first brought the Irish tricolour and Union flag to the cenotaph (Deane, interview 2010). In contrast, Barr maintained that the Holywell Trust ‘wouldn’t have been able to do [the Diamond War Memorial Project] if Messines hadn’t happened’ and noted that the inclusion on its advisory committee of Paddy Harte, his erstwhile friend and partner in the Journey of Reconciliation Trust with whom he had had a falling out, ‘probably turned me off’ (Barr, interview 2011). Stating that the Diamond War Memorial Project had ‘made no impact to me or our organization’, Barr maintained that ‘we would have been using the Diamond anyway as our own shared space for the Messines Programme’ (Barr, interview 2011). Later in the conversation, he also took issue with what he described as the city’s ‘Catholic, nationalist agenda’, which had, in his view, ‘excluded’ Protestants and over the years led to ‘priests’ and ‘Irish dancing’ at ‘almost every event’ (Barr, interview 2011). Here, in contrast to the public narrative of a shared society, these comments reflect a sense of ownership of the memorial by officials from both groups who also, to varying degrees, remained aligned with their respective communal and ideological associations. Barr’s assertion that the peace school had created ‘our own shared space’ is also suggestive of residual territorialization. Public space is inherently defined by contestation and negotiation, but the peace process imperative that it be ‘shared’ projects a purifying closure onto the space that is difficult to reconcile with the reality of human difference and subjectivity. This post-conflict dissonance between public and private transcripts is also evident in the language and actions of the Apprentice Boys, for whom the Diamond War Memorial holds such ‘immense importance’ that parading loyalist bands are ordered to fall silent as they enter the square (Moore, interview 2011). On a practical level, the Protestant organization, whose identity is inextricably linked to Derry, and specifically to dozens of sacred sites within the historic walled city, has made concessions to diminish the

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conflict surrounding their annual processions. Banned from marching on the walls of Derry for much of the Troubles, when the British Army occupied the structure, the Apprentice Boys were allowed to return to the walls after the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires. As Ross (2007: 118) points out, ‘multiparty negotiations’ among the Apprentice Boys, the republican Bogside Residents Group, which had opposed their marches, and civic/political leaders have helped reduce (although not eliminate) contention surrounding these parades. Coupled with this has been a ‘redefinition of the August 15 parade within the context of a broader cultural festival’ meant to soften the overall image of the event (Ross 2007: 118). Confronted with diminished political power in a Catholic city, the Apprentice Boys have accentuated the importance of their commemorations to maintaining Protestant culture within the Catholic-dominated west bank, which is crucial to their symbolic position (Cohen 2007: 962–65). Group leaders have demonstrated a willingness to monitor the behaviour of parade participants, and even moved up the date of their December procession so that the Cityside’s ‘mainly Catholic merchants would not have to close on a Saturday right before Christmas’ (Ross 2007: 120).14 More recently, the Apprentice Boys and the staunchly republican Museum of Free Derry in the Bogside have mutually promoted their respective organizations to tourists desiring ‘a balanced view’ (Moore, interview 2011) of the conflict, a fact that is positively highlighted during tours of the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall. Moore said this mainly entailed referring visitors to the other organization in acknowledgement of the ‘the fact that we have to work together in the future if we want to make both our museum centres sustainable’ (Moore, interview 2011). Still, this represents a significant shift, given that the Apprentice Boys’ August 1969 procession triggered a wave of nationalist rioting and precipitated the Battle of the Bogside between RUC officers and residents. But along with these public gestures of conciliation, privately, contention remains. In contrast to claims by Moore that the Apprentice Boys were entirely supportive of the work to make the Diamond War Memorial shared, Gregory Campbell, a unionist MP and forty-year veteran of the group, said the initial Diamond War Memorial Project generated a ‘mixed’ reaction from the Apprentice Boy membership due to past concerns that ‘shared space’ translated into ‘nationalist space’. He added that such reservations diminished as it became apparent there would be no change in ‘the unionist approach to the war memorial’ (Campbell, interview 2010). Nevertheless, the British or Protestant-related rituals that take place there continue to reinforce a perception among some Catholics of the Diamond’s unionist connotations. As one republican woman asserted, ‘It’s just been captured by the Orange’.15 The competing communal responses to the annual burning of Lundy16 just a block up from the memorial further underscore the discon-

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nect at certain times of the year between the notion of the memorial space as shared and the reality on the ground. Like the main Apprentice Boys procession in August, the December parade and burning of Lundy bring a strong security presence to the Diamond area (see Figure 5.2), which has included armoured vehicles and blockaded streets. In December 2011, as an Apprentice Boy doused the Lundy effigy with kerosene, he pronounced the event ‘a great occasion’ and a ‘celebration of the burning of the traitor of the city’. Asked if it contributed to shared space in the area, he said that ‘the city is trying to move on, and the Apprentice Boys is moving with them’. Pressed further along these lines, however, he conceded that the Catholic community would ‘probably not’ feel comfortable in the space that day, but that ‘they can go away and stay away until it’s over’.17 As flames consumed the gigantic timber-and-hay effigy and large flakes of ash floated up into the darkening afternoon sky, the assembled crowd broke out in a boisterous rendition of the loyalist ballad ‘The Sash’. They clutched beers and snapped photos on iPhones. The burning lasted about 50 minutes, coming to an abrupt end after a final spray of champagne-like sparks. The majority of the assembled dispersed quickly. When a glass of beer shattered on the street, the few remaining drunken revellers were hurried off by Apprentice Boy marshals.

Figure 5.2. Armoured police vehicles surround the war memorial during an Apprentice Boys procession in December 2011.

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Just off the Diamond Square, the manager of the local Celtic shop18 stood at the shop’s front door, keys in hand. He said he was prepared to lock up in the event that a group of loyalist boys who had earlier banged and spit on the window returned. The manager said, ‘it stresses me out’, but at the urging of Derry’s City Centre Initiative, he had stayed open that day. ‘It presents a good image if we open … especially us. We are at the opposite [end of the] spectrum and doing it for the city image’, he said. Nevertheless, in his view, the Diamond War Memorial space had been ‘hijacked’ and ‘isn’t going to be shared for us’ – meaning Catholics – because it was ‘aligned’ with the Protestant community. Although his fiancée’s great-grandfather’s name was on the memorial, he said her family ‘don’t class it’ and ‘wouldn’t come up on poppy Sunday’. Unprompted, the man then accused residents in the Fountain, the last remaining Protestant enclave in the city centre, of ‘setting themselves up for people to attack’ them. ‘There are other areas where they could go and live’, he contended, suggesting that they might relocate to the suburbs of the Cityside.19 Like the Apprentice Boy responsible for the Lundy effigy, this nationalist shopkeeper fluctuated between public and private narratives within the same interview. After initial expressions of accommodation, the suppressed desire for the other side just to ‘go away’ was apparent in both men’s language, with the order of the shopkeeper’s monologue revealing a link in his mind between the memorial and the remaining Protestants on the Cityside. Meanwhile, when Moore was asked whether the Apprentice Boy rituals could adapt to a more inclusive commemoration, he repeatedly used phrases such as ‘our own means’, ‘our own method’, ‘our own religious service’, to underscore the group’s fidelity to its traditions and right to the space. In a representative passage, he declared: The Apprentice Boys have been adopting this role for many, many, many, many years, and this is our way of commemorating the siege and paying respect. Now if anybody else wants to commemorate the siege in whatever way they want to do it, we have no right to stop them. But this is the way we do it. If anybody else wants to go to the cenotaph for whatever reason, we have no right to stop them … but this is our way of doing it, and we are not going to change our way of doing it. (Moore, interview 2011)

Moore’s responses to questions about the group’s partnership with the Museum of Free Derry indicate a new level of pragmatic accommodation in civic space, but they also suggest the private limits of post-conflict reconciliation discourses. HOCKING: Do you feel differently toward each other? Do you actually like each other?

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MOORE: There’s no point in asking stupid questions here now. We’ve got a working relationship and that’s what’s important. We don’t need to go into these stupid things. We’ve a working relationship. HOCKING: There are no stupid questions. MOORE: There are a lot of stupid questions. I get a million stupid questions believe you me. But in this case here … HOCKING: I think it’s actually an important question: Do people actually like each other? MOORE: The important answer is that we’ve got a working relationship that’s good. It’s good for the city. It’s good for our communities, and hopefully it will be good for tourism in the future, and hopefully it will ensure that both centres are sustainable in the future, and that’s the important aspect.

In this exchange, Moore also notes the group’s desire to ‘work together to tell our own respective stor[ies]’ (Moore, interview 2011), an assertion that points to a reduction of ‘overt conflict’ (Ross 2007: 126), but not to resolution. This attitude, a sort of mutually agreed ‘separate but equal’ compromise, is also reflected in the memorial space. That each ethno-national community has adopted an ‘our way of doing it’ orientation to the memorial since the unlocking of the gates is seen in the vernacular tokens of remembrance left there (see Figures 5.3a and b). Protestants leave poppy wreaths or crosses in memory of loved ones; Catholics, if they do leave anything, prefer ‘bouquets and flower arrangements’ (McElhinney, interview 2012).

Figure 5.3. (a) Poppy wreaths, a symbol associated with the British military, are left at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. (b) A bouquet placed on the memorial’s steps represents the preferred form of commemoration for Catholics.

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As for the response on the street, while many Catholics stopped did express the view that it represented ‘people who have died’, in some cases that view was followed by far more negative sentiments the longer the conversation went on. For instance, a naturopathic consultant said it was ‘good it remembers people that died’ and that she was ‘glad that [the memorial] was opened up by Derry City Council’. Eventually, however, her tone changed. ‘What it says to me? Lots of Irish people fought for the British in wars. And my perception of that is they probably ended up in the front lines and lost their lives quicker’.20 An elderly Catholic woman from the Bogside also initially called the cenotaph ‘a reminder of the people who have died’. But then in something of a non sequitur, she pointed to the sculpture and blurted out: ‘It is the occupying force. The British or English coming to take our country – it’s been going on for so many generations’. The woman quickly caught herself and returned to a more conciliatory tone. She noted that ‘the tourists are coming’ and she had ‘no hatred’ and that city officials were ‘trying to combine everything’,21 meaning the British and Irish identities.22 While nearly all Protestants interviewed said the space was shared – it was just that Catholics stayed away – their relationship to the monument (through ceremonies, commemorations and other reactions) connotes a sense of unarticulated ownership. When republican Sinn Féin parliamentary election posters were placed on lamplights around the monument in April 2010, a local unionist man complained that their presence was an affront to the dead. After some initial resistance, Sinn Féin removed the offending posters (Londonderry Sentinel 2010). This divergence between residents’ ‘public’ and ‘private’ transcripts comes into sharper focus in an examination of the memorial’s public reception. While the paint bombing of the cenotaph may have halted since the gates were opened in November 2007, vandalism has continued to occur there, contrary to statements that the Holywell Trust’s project ended any tacit ‘permission’ for such activity. One local interviewee, a 24-year-old DJ from a Catholic background, said that in the past year he ‘saw some guy standing and peeing on it’ about ‘three or four in the morning’, and that on another occasion, he’d witnessed ‘a fellow’ from the Bogside pick up the flower pots and ‘throw them about the place’.23 In May 2011, after masked men claiming a republican affiliation bombed the Spanish bank Santander, which faces the memorial at the corner of Butcher Street (CNN 2011), graffiti appeared on the cenotaph loudly proclaiming ‘Up the IRA’ (Temple, interview 2011), a slogan popularly ‘daubed around the Bogside’ in the early days of the Troubles (Prince and Warner 2012: 191). Temple, the Diamond War Memorial Project researcher, said the graffiti was swiftly removed by the city council, and not reported in the media (Temple, interview 2011). Moreover, following Remembrance Sunday 2011, a number of poppy wreaths left at

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the memorial were stolen and later found burned at Free Derry corner, an iconic symbol of republican resistance (BBC News 2011f). Events such as these have been dismissed by individuals associated with the Diamond War Memorial Project as the work of ‘thugs who knew nothing better’ (McElhinney, interview 2012) or classed as mere ‘bitter-enders’ (Temple, interview 2011). But as Scott (1990: 53) writes, ‘Whenever one encounters euphemism in language it is a nearly infallible sign that one has stumbled on a delicate subject’. Indeed, the DJ who witnessed the urination and other vandalism was adamant that the desecration had distinct political-symbolic motivations.24 ‘The people peeing on the monument wouldn’t have been peeing on it if it was the H blocks. They were peeing on it because it was a Protestant thing’, he asserted.25 Perhaps the most telling counter-narrative to the peace process ‘public transcript’ has occurred on the grounds adjacent to the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall, located down a side street a little more than a block away from the cenotaph. While the opening of the Diamond War Memorial gates has been touted as an example of the expansion of shared space, the gates surrounding a prominent Protestant icon there have had to be locked. In July 2010, a refurbished statue of Protestant Gov. George Walker, hero of the Siege of Derry, was attacked ‘by an iron bar [and] badly mutilated’ (Moore, interview 2011). The statue, a copy of one that had once stood on a pillar along the city’s walls before being blown up by the PIRA in 1973, had lost its left arm, which was reduced to a stump with a protruding iron spike. As a result, the gates at this ‘off-stage’ site were locked due to concerns that someone might ‘walk into an iron spike and make a compensation claim’ against the Apprentice Boys (Moore, interview 2011). ‘Police never caught anyone, but we can guess who did it’, Moore said. ‘Well, we don’t know the names, but we can guess what community they come from’ (Moore, interview 2011). The group has since removed the statue from its grounds for repairs, with plans for it to be resituated inside a new Siege Museum and Shared Space Visitors Centre under construction adjacent to the memorial hall.26 Both the Walker memorial plinth and the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall remain frequent targets of paint bombs, the splattered remains of which are visible to passersby.

Conclusion: Managing the Space of Troubled History in a Post-conflict Era Efforts to recast the Diamond War Memorial as a ‘shared’ landmark reflective of past ‘shared’ military sacrifice speak to broader shifts in the dominant discourses and values governing Northern Irish civic space. In Derry, over

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the past century, this dominant discourse has moved from one of unionist hegemony to violent confrontation to post-conflict reconciliation. An analysis of both the ‘public’ and ‘hidden’ transcripts surrounding the Diamond War Memorial reveals a space of domination, although not necessarily in the way Scott envisioned. In this instance, the private transcripts of local elite and non-elite actors exhibited a degree of convergence in their respective inconsistencies with the public script they, for the most part, shared. Interestingly in Londonderry, both ethno-national traditions have reason to perceive themselves as collectively excluded from power and, as such, part of the subordinate group. For Protestants, Derry is a Catholic-majority city on a Catholic-majority island, and for Catholics, it is the second city in a narrowly Protestant majority state with a history of anti-nationalist policies. A comparison of their ‘public’ and ‘hidden’ transcripts sheds light on the narratives, memories and communal identities subsumed in the interest of peace. According to Scott (1990: 176), ‘Dominated discourse is, of necessity, distorted communication because power relations encourage “strategic” forms of manipulation that undermine genuine understanding.’ Such ‘strategic’ manipulation may be linked to funding programmes and even to transnational policy goals, such as the EU’s promotion of shared space. The post-conflict reconciliation discourse, much like ‘any ideology which makes a claim to hegemony’, must make promises to non-elites explaining ‘why a particular social order is also in their best interests’ (Scott 1990: 77, emphasis in original). That said, it must be stressed that all social situations are infused with ‘power relationships’ with ‘no single privileged vantage point’ from which speech ‘can be measured’ (Scott 1990: 176). Just as the public sphere requires peace-process discourse conformity, power relationships within groups exert influence over private narratives. Individual memories – and the narratives these might project onto the memorial – are shaped by collective cultural memories and broader social contexts (Misztal 2011: 5), as well as by idiosyncratic reactions. (Among a handful of outlier voxpop responses, for instance, was an Englishman who told me he found the memorial frightening, and a republican woman who viewed it as evocative of the protective presence of the Archangel Michael.) The inconsistencies in these transcripts are hardly surprising, given the competing Catholic and Protestant narratives of the conflict (Ross 2007), coupled with the residual effects of a long-standing unionist association with the memorial. As Young (1993: ix) has noted, a monument’s ability to trigger memory and associations is inseparably linked to the conditions of its initial genesis, as well as to evolving social and personal interactions. Nevertheless, these public accommodations – represented by sharedhistory research projects, educational programmes and the invention of new rituals – do intimate a level of ‘constructive conflict management’ (Ross 2007:

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4) on the part of local elites with an interest in Londonderry’s civic wellbeing, not to mention their own sustainability, as the reconciliation discourse is supported financially at all levels of governance and is also increasingly linked to the tourist industry. For instance, Derry’s designation as UK City of Culture 2013 accelerated plans to recast the Maiden City as an international cultural destination. The memorial may not be a major tourist attraction in itself, 27 but the ‘public’ transcript of the landmark as ‘shared’ has fed into the objectives of the wider, City of Culture tourist venture. Holywell Trust’s work on the Diamond War Memorial was featured on the City of Culture’s official website, and a comic book inspired in part by the project – Distant Fields – was held up by an official at the ‘Your 2013’ City of Culture conference in Derry as ‘an example of somebody from one side of the community empathizing and looking at the stories and something that’s very important to the other community in this city’ (Melarkey 2011). ‘It would be great if there could be more of that in 2013,’ the official observed (Melarkey 2011).28 Indeed, the tactic of mining history for shared experiences to heal presentday divisions has proved a popular antidote due to Northern Ireland’s dearth of ‘shared symbolic space’ (Ross 2007: 101). In March 2011, the Holywell Trust received a £446,700 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to expand the Diamond War Memorial Project model of ‘shared heritage’ to the city’s iconic walls, which have also been a site of contestation. At the time of the announcement, the head of Heritage Lottery Fund Northern Ireland, Paul Mullan, said the project would support a ‘new shared future’ by ‘uncover[ing] the shared history of the walls and their impact on people’s lives’ (quoted in HLF 2011). Again, the city is cognitively reconstructed as a site of civic identikit, where notions of community and diversity can be projected onto the landscape through such premeditated means as the production of a ‘Definitive History of the Walled City’ (HLF 2011). The civic identikit of place is drafted to produce similar outcomes across diverse landscapes.29 Along these lines, city council officials have also considered the possibility of carrying out a shared-history research project for a local park with a record of strife (Temple, interview 2011). In this way, civic identikit approaches to public art can be expanded to include the reimagining of existing ‘icons of identity’ (Whelan 2003: 17) and place through interchangeable, and broadly applicable, models of transformation. As the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Mullan further pronounced: ‘The Walls will be reclaimed for the people of the City, creating a new sense of ownership and civic pride towards one of the region’s greatest heritage assets’ (quoted in HLF 2011). Such assertions leave little room for inconvenient counter-narratives. Likewise, civic identikit strategies for rethinking lieux de mémoire are complicated by the potent mix of memory and history commingling at such sites, as well as by the way in which ‘official memory practices’ are nearly

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always associated with ‘the broader narrative of the nation state’ (Phillips and Reyes 2011: 3). In the case of Northern Ireland, this remains a point of clear disagreement. New memories hold the potential to alter or expand messages implicit in the symbolic landscape, but they are unlikely to banish the past’s impact on present identities, a condition that Temple, the Diamond War Memorial Project researcher, seemed both to acknowledge and to embody. In retrospect, Temple said that ‘there was too much of a simplistic interpretation of my work’ that didn’t recognize the full story of the shared war experience, such as that ‘when they went out they were largely segregated’ and that there was ‘a lot of division as well – people being segregated in prisoner of war camps … fighting in different regiments, you know, and then when they came back, [some] … ended up fighting each other in the streets’ (Temple, interview 2011). That Temple is a former UDA prisoner, who was arrested in 1989 as part of the Stevens Enquiry into collusion between state security forces and loyalist paramilitary members, and spent more than two years in jail on a variety of terrorist-related charges (Temple, interview 2010), also remains outside of the public view. His biography on the Diamond War Memorial Project website makes no mention of his paramilitary background, and describes him simply as a ‘renowned local historian’ (Diamond War Memorial, n.d.c). But for Temple, his ‘hardline image’ made the research feel ‘like a shoe that didn’t fit’, like he was ‘betraying’ his roots (Temple, interview 2011). There were whispers behind his back in loyalist circles that ‘Temple’s kind of gone soft. What’s he doing bringing this out? He shouldn’t be bringing this out’ (Temple, interview 2011). In line with Scott’s theoretical model, Temple attributed this to a ‘dichotomy within people’ that made them say different things depending on the context (Temple, interview 2011). Thus, like other post-conflict landscapes, Derry’s Diamond War Memorial speaks to ‘the overlapping and complex connections between memory, territory and heritage’ (McDowell 2008: 49), and the ways in which identities are subsequently interwoven into spatial practice. The rehabilitated memory of the Great War, embodied by the work to resituate the monument as part of Northern Ireland’s shared cultural heritage, is reflective of both shifting power relationships and peace process requirements. That private ‘transcripts’ about the Diamond War Memorial are often at odds with the ‘new’ Northern Ireland reconciliation discourse attests to the conflict’s wider status: mitigated, but not resolved. Notes Parts of this chapter earlier appeared in the Irish Journal of Anthropology, see Hocking (2011). A version of this chapter also appeared in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, see Hocking (2012).

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1. The civil rights march was organized in protest against the unionist government’s policy of internment without trial, introduced in August 1971 for those suspected of involvement in political violence. 2. Interview with republican woman, 5 June 2011. 3. The Apprentice Boys of Derry, formally constituted in 1814, are a fraternal Protestant club organization. They exist to commemorate key events of the 1689 Siege of Derry, at the time a Protestant stronghold, during the Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland. 4. In contrast, the cenotaph in Belfast, a Protestant majority town, did not become a focal point of resistance. Located within the gated grounds of the Belfast City Hall, that memorial has benefited from a more protected position in the civic centre. As early as July 2002, then-Lord Mayor Alex Maskey, a member of Sinn Féin, laid a poppy wreath there to mark the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. 5. The peace school has received indirect funding through the EU Programme for Peace and Reconciliation. The peace school has contracted with groups and councils ‘in receipt of Peace III funding’ to carry out a number of its programmes (Glen Barr, email message to author, 13 October 2011). This raises important questions about the impact of transnational policy goals in the reconceptualization of civic space, as well as their impact on the narratives of local elites. 6. Personal observation, 5 June 2011. 7. Personal observation, 5 June 2011. 8. Baker also has been involved in the creation of a short film dramatizing the ‘ghostly return to the city’ of nurse Laura Marion Gailey, the only woman whose name appears on the memorial. The film premiered as part of an event in November 2012, highlighting local songs and stories of the First World War (Derry Journal 2012d). 9. Personal observation, 14 November 2010. 10. Personal observation, 14 November 2010. 11. Interviews with Derry residents occurred in or near the square on 11 November 2010, 14 November 2010, 14 April 2011, 5 June 2011, 26 October 2011 and 13 November 2011. 12. Stella McDermott, email message to author, 28 February 2011. 13. Switzer (2007: 77–78) describes the ‘unusually aggressive figure’ of the Diamond War Memorial soldier as unique among Northern Irish Great War memorials, and notes the ambivalent responses it elicited during the interwar period. 14. In turn, since 2009, Derry’s City Centre Initiative has urged businesses to stay open during the event, according to one local shopkeeper. 15. Interview with republican woman, 5 June 2011. 16. In an ironic twist, Eamonn Baker of the Diamond War Memorial Project has reportedly been involved in street theatre performances that interrogated this Apprentice Boy ritual. According to an account by the performance artist James King published in the Derry Journal, Baker participated in a piece during the Lundy event in which King, dressed as Lundy, sang ‘Forgive Lundy’, while Baker and others followed behind chanting ‘Forget about it – move on’ (Derry Journal 2008). 17. Interview with Apprentice Boy, 3 December 2011. 18. This shop sold the official gear for the Celtic football club, which is popular among Irish nationalists, but it went out of business in July 2012. 19. Interview with Celtic store manager, 3 December 2011. 20. Interview with nationalist woman, 26 October 2011. 21. Interview with Bogside resident, 26 October 2011. 22. Svašek (1995) describes a similar ‘double reaction’ in her analysis of post-communist Czech responses to Soviet-era monuments. Rather than destroy the statue ‘Welcoming

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25. 26. 27.

28.

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the Red Army’ in Hanrice (as the Nazis had done to an earlier statue of the country’s first president that had stood in the square), the city council there opted to relocate it. In this instance, the statue elicited complex emotions, given that the Soviets had liberated the Czechs from Nazi occupation in 1945 but also occupied the country themselves in 1968. Despite Czech opposition to the monument, Svašek (1995: 109) writes, ‘They saw iconoclasm as a barbarous act which would place them together with the Nazis and the communists’. Interview with Catholic man, 26 October 2011. In 2006, when drunken youths were photographed urinating on Canada’s National War Memorial in Ottawa, also designed by Vernon March, their act triggered widespread national outrage and led to the creation of an honour guard to stand sentry at the monument (Szpunar 2010). While the man I interviewed claimed urination has continued at the Derry cenotaph, the lack of a similarly unified social response is suggestive of endemic ethno-national division (as the memorial remains a British icon for many Irish nationalists), and of the relatively weak and dissonant nature of the Northern Irish state. Interview with Catholic man, 26 October 2011. William Moore, telephone conversation with author, 31 July 2012. Apart from small groups of walking tours, the memorial has mostly avoided the ‘tourist gaze’. The sacred aura surrounding the Remembrance Service and other commemorations there no doubt militates to some degree against the commodification that has occurred at the Cupar Way peace wall. During this Culture Company official’s remarks, a quote from the Brian Friel play Translations was projected onto an overhead screen (personal observation, 26 October 2011). The quote read: ‘It is not the literal past, “the facts of history” that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. … we must never cease renewing these images; because once we do, we fossilize’ (Friel 1984: 445). In an interview in 2011, the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Stella McDermott said she anticipated that some of ‘the principles and the methodologies’ used in the Diamond War Memorial project might also be applied to the redevelopment of the former Maze/Long Kesh prison site outside of Lisburn (McDermott, interview 2011). The Heritage Lottery Fund has pledged £6.4 million in funding for work that will look at the ‘complex recent history of this site as a military base and prison, as well as stories relating to its time as an airfield, its links to the Second World War and motor racing’ (Heritage Lottery Fund 2012a).

6



Art on the Frontlines Civilizing Derry’s Ebrington Military Barracks for a ‘City of Culture’

‘You think,’ said the Other, ‘that a name should economise description rather than stimulate imagination?’ ‘Properly chosen, it should do both. There is my lady kitten at home, for instance; I’ve called it Derry.’ ‘Suggests nothing to my imagination but protracted sieges and religious animosities. Of course, I don’t know your kitten.’ —Hector Hugh Munro, Reginald (1993: 8)

In June 2011, just one year after Derry was named UK City of Culture 2013, members of the European Union and Northern Irish political establishment converged on the River Foyle to mark the opening of the Peace Bridge. As thousands of west bank spectators watched from behind metal barriers, hundreds of VIPs left an invitation-only luncheon in the Guildhall and made their way onto the bridge for dignitaries’ speeches and choral performances by schoolchildren expounding on themes of reconciliation, harmony and unity. Dubbed ‘a symbolic handshake’ between the river’s mostly Catholic Cityside on the west bank and the once-Protestant majority Waterside on the east bank,1 the EU-funded foot-and-cycle bridge was decked out in the confederation’s banners for the occasion. Attendees waved tiny EU flags provided by organizers. ‘Are you ready to claim the bridge?’ an emcee shouted to the crowd before officially inaugurating the new £14.7 million structure with a deluge of blue and gold confetti. The launch took place

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amid three days of festivities, which saw some of the city’s most prominent public spaces, such as the Guildhall Square and St. Columb’s Park, morph into colourful multicultural stage sets replete with outdoor yoga classes, drum circles, Buddhist prayer flags, Bollywood-style dance performances and even Polish and East African soul music.2 The images from that weekend provide a distinct contrast to Derry’s historical position as the site of the Northern Irish conflict’s most symbolically divisive moments. For if the violence of the Troubles manifested most viciously along Belfast’s patchwork of ‘ethno-sectarian boundaries’ (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 8), many of the defining historical events that inform both the Catholic and Protestant narratives about Northern Ireland occurred in Londonderry. From the 1689 Siege of Derry by the Catholic King James II in the Williamite-Jacobite War to the civil rights marches of the late 1960s to the British Army’s 1972 killing of unarmed anti-internment protestors on Bloody Sunday, the city’s contested past shapes the competing ethno-political identities of Protestants and Catholics, and is crucial to the ‘psychocultural dramas’ (Ross 2007: 79, 2001) at the core of ‘each group’s historical experience and contemporary identity’ (Ross 2007: 79). After all, the historical metaphor of Derry as a Protestant enclave besieged by a Catholic king’s armies during their 1689 offensive inspires the contemporary Protestant perception of themselves as a people ‘under siege’, as well as the battle cry of ‘no surrender’. Likewise, for Catholics, the legacy of political gerrymandering and anti-Catholic housing discrimination by Protestants in the Catholicmajority city fuelled animosity towards the perceived injustices of partition and unionist rule (Prince and Warner 2012). Within these dramas and narratives, the west bank of the city – the location of its historic seventeenthcentury walls, a product of the Plantation of Ulster by English and Scottish colonists, and the Bogside below them, an area with a predominantly working-class Catholic population – has played central, if opposing, roles in each group’s collective memory of the conflict (Prince and Warner 2012). Against this backdrop, Derry’s successful bid to secure the mantle of inaugural UK City of Culture 2013 was predicated on an ability to tell a ‘new story’ about itself (DCC 2010a) through a sustained engagement with the arts. A key element in telling the City of Culture’s ‘new story’, according to the bid document, is the ongoing revamp of the Ebrington Barracks, former headquarters of the British Army’s 8th Infantry Brigade, which oversaw the “military command of a quarter of” the province during the Troubles (Northern Ireland Environmental Agency, n.d.). The barracks’ planned metamorphosis into a ‘national cultural treasure’ (DCC 2010b: 5) was cast as a contemporary counterpoint to the more entrenched historical position of the walled city and its environs. That the barracks is linked to the Cityside by the symbolically titled Peace Bridge (see Figure 6.1), designed to ex-

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Figure 6.1. The Peace Bridge links Derry’s commercial Cityside to the former Ebrington Barracks.

pand the city’s civic centre by connecting it to the sprawling former parade ground, now rechristened Ebrington Square, is part of an ambitious effort to rethink the city’s image and spatial relationships. This chapter examines the City of Culture discourse as it mediates among the other dominant discourses considered in the book. By way of an empirical example, Mute Meadow, the initial public artwork for Ebrington Square, is assessed as one instance of how the culture discourse practically engages with discourses around globalization, consumption, community and troubled history/reconciliation. Ebrington is then critiqued as an evolving laboratory for the broader reimagining of the Northern Irish public sphere, an arena where citizenship is increasingly defined by hierarchies of cultural and material productions/consumptions. The post-conflict civic life reflected by these spatial policies reflects a concerted effort to deactivate the potentially explosive implications of certain political and national attachments and promote the wider economic restructuring of the province. But as this chapter further posits, the culture discourse as urban spatial strategy is predicated on particular economic arrangements and ideological assumptions that suggest the promotion of an emerging symbolic citizenship to the benefit of ever-freer, and more unaccountable, postnational capital flows. As subsequent

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developments in 2013 and early 2014 suggest, the highly contingent nature of the culture discourse leaves it vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global ‘cultural arms race’ (Richards 2000), a dynamic that may ultimately prove hard to sustain.

The City of Culture Discourse at Ebrington As Jordan and Weedon (1995: 6) assert, ‘culture’ is a ‘contested’ category with multiple social meanings and purposes. Williams (1976, 1981), for instance, has noted four primary classifications of culture: a process of aesthetic and intellectual development; a system of significations that communicate social orders; the output of artistic efforts; or the social practices of particular ‘ethnic groups’ or societies. Referencing these categories, Jordan and Weedon (1995: 7) contend that the concept of culture as ‘High Art’ has tended to predominate in popular usage, pointing to a ‘Liberal Humanist’ strand in British cultural policy from the mid-nineteenth century onward that has viewed culture as a conduit to promote social cohesion and avoid ‘class-based social unrest’ (ibid.: 38). Added to this is a contemporary government-driven push ‘to make the arts pay’ (Jordan and Weedon 1995: 45), which has resulted in an art-as-‘business’ approach (ibid.: 46, emphasis in original) to cultural policy. Due to the elasticity of the ‘culture’ term and its implications for a range of spheres, discourses around culture and particularly ‘cities of culture’, have tended to privilege some form of ‘creative’ output, but with tentacles to varying degrees in each of Williams’s four categories (Griffiths 2006). Inspired by the better-known European Capitals/Cities of Culture programme – specifically, the much-touted experience of Liverpool, which held the designation in 2008, and Glasgow in 1990 – the new UK City of Culture title, of which Derry was the first recipient, reflects similar ideological underpinnings to those of its transnational role model. The European title, first bestowed on Athens in 1985, has the explicit goal of ‘bringing the peoples of Europe together’ and fostering ‘a feeling of European citizenship’ (European Commission 2011), but is also considered a means for raising a city’s global profile, tourist appeal and overall social and economic regenerative capacities (Miles 2007; Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2009; European Commission 2011). Since its inception, the value of the European Capitals/ Cities of Culture programme has been the subject of substantial debate. Some researchers have pointed to the economic benefits the title brought to post-industrial cities such as Glasgow (Myerscough 1991). But others have underscored ‘the lack of reliable independent data’ to evaluate programme claims (Palmer 2004: 106; Evans 2005), and the often short-term

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impact of the promised economic rewards (Griffiths 2006). Like other ‘mega events’, city of culture programmes serve as ‘social spatio-temporal “hubs” and “switches” that … channel, mix and re-route global flows’ and capital (Roche 2000: 199), however ephemerally. García’s (2005: 861) study of Glasgow, for instance, found the quality of jobs produced during the culture year to be ‘relatively poor’ and unsustainable. And Palmer (2004: 134) has noted ‘insufficient evidence’ of measurable social outcomes, despite the ‘burgeoning rhetoric’ (ibid.: 136) directed towards social inclusion and uplift. Not surprisingly, scholars have often concluded that the primary legacy of the European City/Capital of Culture designation lies in its positive impact on civic image promotion (see DaCosta-Holton 1998 on Lisbon; Mooney 2004 and García 2005 on Glasgow; Boland 2010 on Liverpool). In particular, Boland (2010: 639) warns of the propensity of such initiatives to ignore or sanitize certain aspects of the city’s cultural life in favour of perpetuating saleable ‘place myths’. Likewise, MacLeod (2002) contends that such initiatives are emblematic of the hegemonic position of revanchist urban policies. Though the accolade has contributed to cultural development and place marketing in some instances, Palmer (2004: 188), in his examination of twenty-one municipalities that held the European City/Capital of Culture title between 1995 and 2004, concluded that participating cities ‘often do not meet the objectives they set for themselves’ and advised that more precise objectives would be required in order to ‘achieve realisable outcomes’. Few of these concerns appear to have been addressed in the UK spinoff programme. Central to the UK City of Culture discourse is the presumption that a purposefully undefined ‘culture’3 holds the potential to deliver a dizzying array of economic and social benefits. Responding to programme criteria that required candidate cities to outline social, economic and cultural/ artistic objectives (Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2009), Derry’s bid document asserted that ‘culture has emerged from the margins as a transformative engine that can deliver jobs, improve life chances, build new audiences, unleash talent, instil confidence and address the dilemmas we face about our identities and issues of equality’ (DCC 2010a: 11). In the UK City of Culture discourse, as represented by the city’s bid document, Derry’s renaissance was linked to its ability to ‘create a new story’ (DCC 2010a: 62) about itself, a ‘new story’ told almost entirely in floating or empty signifiers. Abetted by ‘Joyous Celebration’ and ‘Purposeful Inquiry’ – two endeavours the document asserted would facilitate ‘exchange’ as well as internal and external connections (DCC 2010a: 32) – the ‘new story’ was to ‘allow for alternative views and ideas to be absorbed and considered’ (ibid.: 7). Under this vision, creativity, a term that also remained undefined, was to animate the entire landscape as well as its inhabitants. Indeed, the ‘whole of the City’ was declared ‘a Creative School or Campus in which learning can take place

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anywhere and at anytime’ and ‘everyone … can play a positive role’ (DCC 2010a: 25), albeit in ways that sounded eerily formulaic. Previously socially segmented ‘community’ festivals such as St. Patrick’s Day or the Apprentice Boys of Derry Maiden City Festival4 were to be ‘bracketed and branded together with enhanced capabilities’ (DCC 2010a: 25). Designated ‘Cultural Codebreakers’ tasked with researching their communities would, with the help of City of Culture-defined ‘recipes and blueprints’, help bring about ‘deep and positive change’ (DCC 2010a: 7). The hyperbolic promise of the culture discourse, however calculated to pitch the city to bid judges, also has ramifications for Londonderry’s body politic. With the City of Culture year described by one local official as a potential ‘opportunity to redefine what it means to be a citizen of this city’ (Melarkey 2011), the culture discourse appears to signal a shift in the emphasis of civic participation. Here, the citizen is idealized for his or her creative potential and the role this might play in promoting the city to tourists. As the bid document declared: ‘Once visited, our City is never forgotten. The irrepressible spirit and energy of the place – a spirit of curiosity and creativity that flows through the people, their stories, how they tell them and the welcome they give to all, makes our City special in one’s heart’ (DCC 2010a: 6). Interestingly, politics is recognized in the bid document only in respect to its ability to tell Derry’s ‘new story’ of successful, post-conflict reconciliation, a story considered useful in putting the city ‘at the centre of the debate of what culture is about, its role in peacemaking and what it can be in the future’ (DCC 2010a: 5). In turn, a culture-based ‘symbolic economy’ – predicated on the simultaneous ‘production of space’ and the ‘production of symbols’ (Zukin 1995: 23–24, emphasis in original) needed to bolster the ‘imageability’ (Lynch 1960) of the built environment – is held up as central to Derry’s future economic competiveness, with culture ‘one of the key distinguishing assets’ of the city’s new branding strategy (DCC 2010a: 100). In the lead-up to the UK City of Culture year, one official even framed the upcoming programme as an opportunity to ‘show the world ... what our product is in terms of arts and culture’ (Bradley 2011). The bid document further underscored that ‘[w]e cannot underestimate the cultural, social and economic impact [that] designation would mean for the City but most importantly of all economically’ (DCC 2010a: 27; emphasis added). At the time, the City of Culture year was projected to create 2,800 new jobs and generate nearly £100 million in GVA by 2020 (DCC 2010a: 37). Its legacy would be ‘a more sustainable economy that not only helps develop a unique offering in NI that will continue to attract future investment, but also helps the wider NI economy by attracting tourists … and reducing the fiscal costs of support currently incurred by the Derry~Londonderry economy’ (DCC 2010a: 35). Irrespective of substantial social transformation

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rhetoric, the accrual of economic benefits was arguably the City of Culture’s overarching objective. Echoing the language of business and bottom lines, the year was run by a Culture Company (as was the case in Liverpool), with a ‘cultural broker’ to oversee the year-long programme of cultural events as well as the culture-led redevelopment of Ebrington (DCC 2010a: 42). In turn, the Culture Company reported to a multi-sector Strategy Board, tasked with delivering the Derry-wide One Regeneration Plan put forward by the public-private Ilex Urban Regeneration Company, a driver behind the City of Culture bid. The City of Culture year was subsequently described as a ‘strategic intervention’ under the One Plan to stimulate economic growth (Derry City Council 2013b). Though the goal to create an unofficial arts quarter on the Ebrington site (DCC 2010a: 21) predated the culture bid, the former barracks on the east bank of the river was quickly incorporated into the ‘new story’ the City of Culture discourse told. Closed in 2003 due to the ‘reduced threat’ following the end of the Troubles, the Ebrington Barracks, which prior to 1970 had played a major role in Royal Naval operations during the Second World War, was transferred to the Northern Ireland Assembly (Northern Ireland Environmental Agency, n.d.; Ilex 2006).5 In turn, the assembly charged Ilex with Ebrington’s regeneration. Under Ilex’s initial vision, the former parade ground inside the barracks’ historic 1841 walled Star Fort was to be surrounded by cultural venues, primarily oriented to arts, leisure and tourism. A contemporary art gallery was even discussed for the Clocktower GHQ building on the square’s eastern edge, and negotiations were said to have occurred with the Tate in London to secure access to aspects of its collection (DCC 2010a; Tait 2010; McGonagle, interview 2011). Indeed, the bid document stated that Ebrington’s ‘underlying focus will be on the interaction of visual and material culture’ and the ‘impact’ this has on identity formation, with ‘contemporary art practice’ and ‘an in-depth exploration of maritime narratives’ (DCC 2010a: 21) key to this focus. Moreover, the One Plan further noted that the construction of an ‘arts and culture cluster’ at Ebrington would serve as a ‘focal point and a beacon of regional, national and international cultural excellence’ and thus contribute to the culture and tourism orientation of the new economy (Ilex 2011: 28). A central staging ground for the City of Culture year, Ebrington was the scene of many of the year’s marquee events, including the opening ‘Sons and Daughters’ concert that featured stars of stage and screen with links to the city, BBC Radio One’s ‘Big Weekend’ rock festival and the Turner Prize, Britain’s leading contemporary art award. On the community level, the regeneration of Ebrington and the construction of the Peace Bridge connecting the former barracks to the Cityside were described as a means to bridge divisions between Catholics and Protestants

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literally and figuratively. By enlarging the civic centre beyond Derry’s historic walled city, the historical isolation of Protestants on the Waterside from the city centre would be mitigated (Mo Durkan, Ilex communications official, interview 2010). Like the Diamond War Memorial, the barracks’ association with the British military during the conflict, including its dubious distinction as the site where Army operations on Bloody Sunday were coordinated, placed it in an uncomfortable position in a majority-Catholic city. The arts-led overhaul appeared to offer a symbolically inoffensive means to transform a site best remembered by residents today for the buzz of military helicopters that once hovered above it and for the impenetrable corrugated metal fencing that surrounded the fort’s perimeter, effectively shrouding the Troubles-era military activities inside the fort in a chrysalis of secrecy. Mo Durkan, head of communications for Ilex, explained how Ebrington, a repeated target of PIRA bombs during the conflict, has held alternate associations for each of the city’s predominant communities: That site for the Protestant, unionist, loyalist community was a site where they felt a sentimental or an emotional attachment. It also provided work for them. It was an employer, whether they were a serving soldier or they might have been an ancillary or an office worker at Ebrington. … Then you have the Catholic, nationalist, republican [side] and for them it’s synonymous with conflict, division, domination, the Troubles, no-go area. … This is moving those two things very much on into a central embracing public space. (Durkan, interview 2010)

To be sure, the discourses of community and reconciliation affect the space on multiple fronts. According to officials, the new Ebrington is intended to be a shared civic space, a place of intermingling and interculturalism (Durkan, interview 2010; Brendan McMenamin, DCC arts officer, interview 2010). In a report on shared public space produced for Ilex, DSD and DCC, interculturalism is defined as comprising ‘a non-antagonistic spectrum of individual identities which evolve through their interaction’ (Deloitte and INCORE 2008: 27, emphasis in original). This definition of interculturalism has been endorsed at various European Union levels as a vehicle for the confederation to move beyond multiculturalism and towards a more fluid identity construction model (Deloitte and INCORE 2008: 48). At the same time, the City of Culture discourse is relatively short on specifics as to how non-Catholic/Protestant identities are to become part of this spatial interaction. A rare reference to ethnic minorities in the bid document, for instance, merely noted that the work of a local multicultural forum ‘has shown us how we have increased the self esteem of ethnic and other groups by endorsing and embracing their culture’ (DCC 2010a: 31–32; emphasis added). In practice, there are obvious parameters on the material implementation of an intercultural vision at Ebrington, a space that regeneration officials have

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asserted should ‘not have particular [symbolic] resonance for either community’ (Durkan, interview 2010). The site remains under the jurisdiction of OFMDFM, which Durkan referred to as the ‘guardians of equality and good relations’ (Durkan, interview 2010). As such, she said, requests for memorials or tributes there that referenced the conflict have been declined, though heritage trail brass plaques and storyboards would detail the history of the listed buildings retained in the new development, and a gallery in a planned maritime museum would also touch on Ebrington’s history (Durkan, interview 2010).6 By spring 2013, a naval statue commemorating the base’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic and based on a similar sailor sculpture in Halifax, Canada, was installed near the proposed future home of the maritime museum in the barracks’ former military hospital (Mullan 2013b). Plans are also ongoing to incorporate Ebrington into a Christian Heritage Trail linking the adjacent St. Columb’s Park – where a statue of the city’s patron saint, Columba, founder of an early Christian settlement in Derry, was recently unveiled – to Ebrington, the Peace Bridge and the Walled City across the river (Londonderry Sentinel 2013c). Reaching back to the barracks’ pre-Troubles history as a naval base central to Allied efforts during the Second World War and as a point of interest along an ancient religious trail de-emphasizes current political divisions in the body politic while reproducing a largely ‘heritagized’ material landscape, evocative of the civic identikit of place. Similarly, the abstract Mute Meadow public artwork, the subject of the following section, is aesthetically representative of the civic identikit of flows. At Ebrington, the culture discourse binds both categories of identikit in a unifying embrace, with an eye to the creation of shared civic spaces. Notably, in the lead-up to the culture year, Noirin McKinney, an Arts Council official, said the intent was for Ebrington to be ‘a shared resource through the development of arts and culture on the site’ (McKinney, interview 2011). According to McKinney, arts and culture were among the few focuses in Northern Irish society, in addition to ‘shopping’ and ‘third-level education,’ that could facilitate the creation of a ‘neutral’ space ‘in that it’s like going to Marks and Spencer’s’ (McKinney, interview 2011). Recognizing the financial costs of social division, the city regeneration plan made clear that sites vital to ‘accelerating the tourism and cultural economy’ (Ilex 2011: 28) must be developed ‘in ways that provide public spaces which are accessible and welcoming to the whole community. The future development of Tourism for example, a key driver of our local economy, will be constrained unless we can show potential visitors that we have a stable, attractive place that is safe to visit’ (ibid.: 12). Thus, at Ebrington, as in the other public spaces considered in this book, discourses of community and reconciliation are mobilized to support discourses of globalization and consumption, two forces presumed by almost

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all official rhetoric to bring about economic prosperity. The initial feasibility study for an arts and culture cluster at Ebrington is a case in point. Produced in 2008 with the participation of key government, private sector and academic stakeholders, this document is notable for an explicit focus on tourism above all else as the organizing principle for the future development of the site. The Ebrington development, it contended, would put the city ‘on the national and international map’ as a ‘must see – must visit’ location (SQW Consulting et al. 2008: i). The study underscored the need for ‘wow’ factors to animate the space through ‘blockbuster’ projects that elevated ‘experience’ over the tangible (SQW Consulting et al. 2008: 36, emphasis in original). This ‘inspiring’ initiative, much like Rise at the Broadway Roundabout, was couched as a means to attract ‘businesses and inward investors’ (SQW Consulting et al. 2008: ii) and appeal to the ‘high spending segment of [the] destination tourism market’, which, the study pointed out, ‘arts and culture facilities’ can ‘play a big role’ in achieving (ibid.: 9). As in Cornmarket, where a consumerist landscape has been described in moral terms by officials, Ebrington was conceived of as ‘a facility for cultural and community “good”’ (SQW Consulting et al. 2008: 28), a forum that could help bring about ‘a virtuous cycle of prosperity’ (ibid.: 9). Similar to the official public art at the Cupar Way peace wall, the image produced there was to ‘reflect a positive view’ of the city that celebrated the past and looked to an inclusive future (SQW Consulting et al. 2008: 12). In this way, a historically contentious site, like the Diamond War Memorial, would support the city’s broader reimagining, ‘transform negative perceptions surrounding the Troubles’ and make ‘a positive statement’ about the future (SQW Consulting et al. 2008: 13). This vision was informed by models of development from elsewhere, and the report included examples of other contemporary UK arts centres, some of which appeared remarkably similar to what had been proposed for Ebrington.

From Militarization to Mute Meadow The Mute Meadow public artwork is one element in a menu of cultural ‘programming’ that was intended to animate Ebrington Square during the City of Culture year and beyond (DCC 2010a: 21 & 99; McMenamin, interview 2010). As the first permanent art intervention there, Mute Meadow provides an example of the culture discourse in practice, as it engages with and mediates among the discourses of globalization, consumption, community and troubled history/reconciliation. The following analysis draws on key heuristic frameworks employed in the previous chapters to consider how the ‘space of flows’, represented by the discourse of globalization, and the

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community discourse of the ‘space of places’ (Castells 1989) is socially produced (Low 2000) to promote a consumerist ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 2002) and place-identity attractive to tourists, the ultimate consumer citizens (Lash and Urry 1994; Urry 2006). Consequently, the reconciliation discourse, evident in the policy imperative to produce shared spaces, requires certain aspects of the ‘space of places’ – the legacy of inter- and intra-community contestation, for instance – to be subsumed within the public art transcript of the culture discourse. Like much civic identikit public art of the ‘space of flows’, Mute Meadow’s postproduction ‘social construction’ (Low 2000) is suggestive of the contradictions endemic in processes of glocalization and the modes of identity expression permitted under the rubric of economic development. Telling a ‘New Story’ by Saying Nothing at All In 2005, as part of Ilex’s regeneration of the Derry City Council area, the Northern Ireland Assembly allocated £4 million for cultural capital development, including £800,000 for public art to be located anywhere in the urban core (Ilex 2009; McMenamin, interview 2010). The fund was characterized by one culture minister as part of an effort to ‘maximise the benefit from the growth in Cultural Tourism’ (quoted in NIE 2007a). This initial step precipitated the 2009 commissioning of Mute Meadow, a ‘major statement’ that the city was ‘moving on’ in the form of a steel sculpture to ‘reflect positively on us as a city and speak to a wider world’, according to Brendan McMenamin, Derry City Council arts officer and a member of the commissioning panel (McMenamin, interview 2010). Created by the London-based husband-and-wife artistic team of Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier, Mute Meadow eventually consisted of forty pairs of LED-lighted steel columns, between six and 10 metres tall, stretching from the southern end of Ebrington’s former parade ground down the slope beyond the Star Fort walls to the banks of the River Foyle. ‘Derry has always been locked within this notion of history’, said McMenamin, referencing the historic walls and their role in the plantation and colonization of Ulster. ‘What we wanted to say is we are no longer a city locked in the past … a significant piece of contemporary public art would be a symbol of us looking to a future’ (McMenamin, interview 2010). Mute Meadow, described by the artists in their concept design statement as a ‘vast field of light’ (Phaophanit and Oboussier 2008), was specifically meant to avoid prescriptive symbolism. It was to ‘act as a silent, reflective cipher of the city of which it is a product’, and in this way demonstrate ‘its correlation to the polarised, contested history of Derry and, crucially, the potential and possibilities of the city’s future’ (Phaophanit and Oboussier 2008). In a landscape perceived to be burdened by multiple

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conflicting narratives, Oboussier said the work would ‘suspend narratives’ and allow ‘new meaning’ to be created for the Ebrington space (Oboussier, interview 2011b). The July 2010 decision to award Derry the UK City of Culture 2013 title reinforced the artwork’s centrality to the city’s emerging cultural image. ‘This is something that begins to tell this new story’, said McMenamin, who also served as the executive producer of Derry’s City of Culture bid video (McMenamin, interview 2010). As part of the globalization discourse, the commissioning of a large-scale contemporary artwork was framed as a way to elevate the city’s international standing – in effect, its symbolic capital – and enhance its position on the tourist circuit (Safle 2007a, 2007b). In this regard, the culture-led revitalization of post-dictatorship Barcelona and post-industrial Gateshead/ Newcastle in the North of England served as inspirational examples for selection panel members (McMenamin, interview 2010; McKinney, interview 2011). In Barcelona, the post-Franco regeneration of public spaces saw an ambitious programme of major public art interventions by Catalonian artists and global art superstars in the run-up to the 1992 Olympic Games; and in Gateshead/Newcastle, Antony Gormley’s monumental Angel of the North sculpture was among the cultural additions that reshaped the area’s identity in the late 1990s. Likewise, the Derry public art commission was intended to help create ‘a cohesive “brand”’ for Derry, which could help achieve ‘[t]ourism objectives’ and create ‘“a sense of place” for tourists and citizens’, according to Public Art Wales (PAW 2007: 8), which later became known as Safle and had oversight of the commission until September 2010, when the group’s funding was slashed. Interestingly, at the time PAW tendered for the contract to manage the Londonderry public artwork, it was also working with EDAW/AECOM, the global design and infrastructure conglomerate, on the development of a ‘large sculptural work’ for Cornmarket (PAW 2007: 3), a process that would result in the Spirit of Belfast, discussed in Chapter 3. Like the Spirit of Belfast, Mute Meadow was framed as a ‘spectacle’ attraction (Declan McGonagle, selection panel chairman, interview 2011) that would draw people into a space, primarily for the consumption of arts and leisure activities. In yet another example of how a handful of international firms influence the material face of urban life, reproducing civic identikit-style built environments globally, AECOM also served as the engineer and as a co-designer for the Peace Bridge, which leads to Ebrington, where Mute Meadow was to be located. In addition, AECOM was instrumental in crafting the city’s draft riverside masterplan (DCC 2011a; AECOM 2012), and is involved in the development framework for the overall Ebrington site. Meanwhile, the Peace Bridge’s architect, Wilkinson Eyre, designed the contemporary white Gateshead Millennium Bridge, which, like the Peace Bridge, received financing from the European Regional Development Fund

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(Gateshead Council n.d.), and links Gateshead’s commercial core to its arts quarter, as was envisioned for the Peace Bridge and Ebrington. Alongside this internationalized and serialized design and regeneration context, the individuals at the centre of the artwork’s commissioning and production process espoused a distinctive cosmopolitanism, or what Hannerz (1996: 103) has classified as ‘an intellectual and esthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences’. Those with a role in officially producing the space highlighted the cosmopolitanism of the global ‘space of flows’ and the presumed neutrality this carried in a post-conflict milieu. As McKinney, the ACNI representative on the selection panel, asserted: ‘The artists are neutral, you know. They are based in England. They have nothing to do with Northern Ireland. They are internationally renowned’ (McKinney, interview 2011). Indeed, the English Oboussier described herself and her French-educated Laotian husband ‘as global citizens’ (Oboussier, interview 2011b). The artists’ brief, which outlined the objectives and context of the commission, was written by Declan McGonagle, director of Dublin’s National College of Art and Design, the prominent British cultural broker Peter Jenkinson, and Mo Durkan, the Ilex communications chief, all of whom were also active in Derry’s City of Culture bid (McGonagle, interview 2011). Derry native McGonagle, founding director of the city’s now-defunct Orchard Gallery, an early pioneer of the contemporary arts scene there, has been key to crafting Derry’s post-conflict cultural strategy. A prominent name in curatorial circles, McGonagle served as the first director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, as an Irish commissioner for the Venice Biennale and as a juror for the Turner Prize. Jenkinson, whose biography on the British Council website highlights his professional expertise in using culture to effect social change, co-founded a non-profit agency in London that researches the role of culture in conflict and post-conflict situations (British Council, n.d.). His Paris metro ticket-sized business card – emblazoned with the words ‘Make Friends With Strange People’ – reads like an advertisement for Derry’s ambitious new intercultural city vision. Durkan, who is from Derry but said she was ‘educated elsewhere’, pointed out that she had also lived in Bonn, London, Dublin, Brussels and Belfast (Durkan, interview 2010). In addition to McGonagle, chairman of the commissioning panel, and Jenkinson, other influential members of the committee also cited their intercultural roots (McMenamin, interview 2009) or claimed not to identify with any particular community background (McKinney, interview 2011). McMenamin, whose interest in art and culture was sparked in the early 1980s while he was devouring the library at the Israeli kibbutz where he lived at the time, asserted that ‘to have a traditional notion of yourself is very aligned to nationalism, and nationalism is very aligned to fascism for me. … We will never build an intercultural or integrated society if we

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don’t remove the protectionism around traditionalism. … That’s what we are talking about, building citizenship’ (McMenamin, interview 2010). Alongside this postnational, global discourse of the ‘space of flows’, the community discourse of the ‘space of places’ was also rhetorically incorporated into the commissioning process, albeit in ways largely prescribed by the ‘space of flows’. Thus, while several selection panel members referenced the need for the work to represent community and have local resonance – ‘It would be developed about this place, in the context of this place, and be responsive to it and not just be something shipped from the production line’ (Jenkinson, interview 2010) – the manner in which ‘place’ or ‘community’ would be reflected was delimited by the official producers of the space with an eye to international reception. In addition to no ‘political or religious iconography’ (McMenamin, interview 2010), the aesthetics and symbolism of the artwork were to be ‘looking forward’ (McGonagle, interview 2011), which the brief specified as ‘contemporary’ (Safle 2007a). According to McGonagle, the project would be ‘part of a process of … re-thinking the city’s identity through arts initiatives’ (quoted in Ilex 2009). But this rethinking of ‘the city’s identity through arts initiatives’ did not necessarily translate into reflecting residents’ popular preferences. After commissioners sent out a press release noting that an artwork inspired by the ‘Golden Teapot’, a reference to a large teapot that had once hung outside McCullagh’s, a grocery and tea purveyor at Waterloo Place and later Clooney Terrace, was among the submissions, ‘there was people ringing radio stations [and] writing to the newspapers’ in support of the proposal (McGonagle, interview 2011). McGonagle pointed out that ‘everybody in Derry would have known exactly what it was’, but that it ‘was an undeveloped idea’ and there was concern that ‘visitors would have come to the city and said, “What the fuck is that, the golden teapot?”’ (McGonagle, interview 2011).7 More generally, McKinney, the Arts Council representative, described submissions that referenced traditional symbols of Derry – such as St. Columb or the city’s native oak trees – as ‘very clichéd’ (McKinney, interview 2011). She pointed out the need for Ebrington to embody the ‘contemporary creative side’ of Derry, and conceded that ‘traditional symbolism’ often brought with it ‘limiting factors’, such as a perception that it belonged ‘maybe more to one side of the community than the other’ (McKinney, interview 2011). The Mute Meadow proposal avoided symbolic contention by translating the sounds of the city and its constituent ‘imagined’ communities into light patterns. To this end, the artists – who said commissioners ‘protected’ them from having to interface with residents about their proposal (Oboussier, interview 2011a) – teamed with the Derry-based Verbal Arts Centre (VAC), which dispatched staff as well as youth to collect audio in venues ranging from shopping centres to bowling alleys (James Kerr, VAC executive direc-

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tor, interview 2011). These teams also solicited contributions from various groups in the city, e.g., ‘single mothers’ and the ‘travelling community’, to describe their ‘sound of the city’ (Kerr, interview 2011). The audio was translated via software into a soundless light show – to be transmitted by the sculpture – with colours based in part on the palette of the Guildhall’s stained-glass windows. A website was launched for people to upload their own audio into the system. This approach allowed audio elements with potentially divisive communal or ethno-national associations, such as recordings of the Apprentice Boys’ feet marching on the Derry walls or the July 2010 reaction of a crowd in Guildhall Square to the findings of the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, to take their place alongside more mundane city sounds in the ‘audio collage’ (Kerr, interview 2011). The sound frequencies triggered ‘certain colours’ or ‘animations’, and were mixed with a base tone as well as ‘bursts’ of colour taken from the collage (Kerr, interview 2011), obscuring any identifiable connection between specific sounds and light patterns. ‘You can’t look at it and say, “Ah ha, that’s David Cameron’s apology”’, said Kerr, conceding that the concept created ‘a credibility gap between what the artists wanted to do and what the public thought was happening’ (Kerr, interview 2011). Still, in a space where commemoration or memorialization was to be avoided in deference to creating shared space, Mute Meadow (see Figure 6.2) offered a safe alternative for a contested site. Community was represented without being represented – a frequent trope in the civic identikit of flows – and unity upheld. Significantly, in the initial year following Mute Meadow’s 2011 unveiling, Londonderry residents’ social construction of the piece evolved in ways very different from what was conceived in the ‘social production’ of the space. Circuitry malfunctions meant that the defining light show – intended to represent the city’s communities as well as to beckon people physically into what the artists deemed a ‘forbidden space’ (Phaophanit, interview 2011b) – was itself mostly suspended, aside from ‘intermittent’ illuminations.8 Absent the light show, much of the work’s ‘agency’ (Gell 1998) was curtailed. The light show, which had returned to part (but not all) of the sculpture by mid-2012, also became a point of contention in the media (McDaid 2012). Kerr attributed the technical difficulties to the multiple government entities involved – in addition to Ilex and ACNI, DCAL, DSD and the city council also had roles in the commission – which meant that ‘nobody is fully’ responsible for its functioning (Kerr, interview 2011). As such, the steel posts have been frequently interpreted by Derry residents as unfinished elements in a construction site. ‘I thought it was a building waiting to be completed’, said one man, echoing a comment frequently heard from city residents.9 To some in Derry, the sculpture’s lack of illumination in its first year of existence was also emblematic of the inefficacy of wider regeneration efforts.

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Figure 6.2. The Mute Meadow public artwork runs from the new Ebrington Square to the river’s edge.

As another resident harrumphed, ‘There are two things being discussed on the radio: Why is it not working? And why can’t you see the minutes on the [refurbished] Guildhall clock face?’10 But even when apprised of the artwork’s purpose, locals (in dozens of street interviews and, importantly, across age ranges, gender, ethno-national background and social class) expressed near unanimous disassociation from the piece, as well as puzzlement at its objectives and metaphoric aspirations. Asked to give his impression of the artwork, one young man who was walking on the Peace Bridge with his girlfriend commented, ‘God, what a stupid name. Mute means you don’t talk’.11 The notion that the artwork could help generate new meaning for the city or its residents was also viewed with scepticism. ‘I can’t see bringing anything to it personally’, said one woman, who mostly worried that ‘unless there is security’ in the vicinity, people would use the space for ‘drinking at night’.12 Here, the ‘social construction’ of the artwork reveals a rich ‘hidden’ transcript, whereby locals sometimes poked fun at Mute Meadow in order to attack the credibility of the regeneration company or other city officials. One man quipped that perhaps Ilex, which he felt had produced few tangible results in a decade of existence, had ‘run out of money for bulbs’.13 As for the project website, it, too, confronted technical difficulties (Kerr, interview 2011). And, as of early 2014, only fifteen sound clips

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could be accessed on the site, all of which appeared to have been uploaded in 2011.14 The apparent lack of identification with the work is a common feature of the civic identikit of flows, which loudly proclaims its relevance to ‘community’ and indigenous ‘identities’ through abstract forms that are serialized in cities around the world, each piece endowed with its own local meaning, while in visual form, at least, contributing to a harmonized global landscape. Indeed, Mute Meadow recalls abstract works such as John Fleming’s Grass Blades at the Seattle Center, an arts and entertainment park in Washington State originally built for the 1962 World’s Fair, but also shares aesthetic similarities with the Hyde Park memorial to the victims of the July 2005 London Underground bombing. As such, the Mute Meadow public art process can be read as a warning about the potential disjunction(s) that may occur between the stated aims of an all-consuming and ill-defined culture discourse – meant to market the city globally, attract tourist consumption, promote intercultural social mixing in new ‘shared spaces’ and reflect local identities in non-divisive ways – and its materialization and reception in a fractured landscape. Moreover, it must be noted that the distinctions of culture, whether artistic or Geertzian in definition, imply certain exclusions. These exclusions are amplified by the economic imperatives behind the City of Culture accolade, which itself is an imported globalized model of civic regeneration and place marketing. That the ‘new story’ be positive for tourists, the ideal consumer citizens who, after all, must purchase every aspect of their existence while on holiday, restricts the narratives acceptable in the City of Culture’s public sphere. Some of the stories elided in the name of city promotion are the subject of the following section.

Counter-narratives to the City of Culture Discourse The morning after the London 2012 Olympic flame passed through Derry in early June, an enthusiastic update appeared on the City of Culture Facebook page. ‘For those of you who missed it, check out the Olympic Torch as it arrived in the city to a fantastic welcome – another great day for Derry~ Londonderry’.15 The message was accompanied by a one-minute, forty-second YouTube video featuring shots of cheering crowds as the flame made its way from the outskirts of town and through the city’s historic streets, before cutting across the Peace Bridge and into Ebrington Square and St. Columb’s Park. That same day, newspaper headlines from London to Washington told a somewhat different story. The torch may have received a warm welcome ‘as it arrived’ in the city, but it was also diverted from the Guildhall to the Peace Bridge due to skirmishes between PSNI officers and republican demonstrators, protesting police searches of suspected Republican Action

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Against Drugs (RAAD) members’ homes. RAAD, a republican vigilante group that has carried out a number of ‘punishment’ attacks on alleged drug dealers in Catholic working-class areas of the city, had reportedly forced dozens of men out of Derry in the year prior to the torch incident (McDonald 2012b). Comprised of former Provisional IRA members, some of whom have also joined the Real IRA, RAAD has attracted a steady drumbeat of negative headlines for the city (Deeney 2012; McDonald 2012b). Alongside the republican-on-republican violence threatening Catholic communities, the Real IRA and other dissident republican paramilitaries have continued to wage a low-level bombing campaign against city-centre targets.16 The former City of Culture office at Waterloo Place was bombed twice after Derry earned the title in July 2010. (Soon after the second bombing, the Culture Company consolidated its operations in its Ebrington location within the protective fortress of the Star Fort.) A pair of city-centre bombs that exploded in January 2012, including one at the Derry Tourist Office, nearly derailed the city’s bid for the All-Ireland Fleadh, an annual Irish traditional music and dance festival that draws hundreds of thousands (BBC News 2012e). Beyond this organized violence, there is significant anecdotal evidence that not all Derry residents believe themselves free to move about the city safely. In multiple interviews, teenagers and young adults expressed concerns that they could be ‘beat’ or caught up in ‘fights’ were they to cross paths with youth from the opposing ‘community’ or patronize a club not in their community’s perceived territory.17 Further complicating the culture discourse was an underlying contention over the wording of the title itself. While some republicans objected to the ‘UK’ City of Culture title – the Real IRA dubbed the Culture Company offices a ‘UK target’ after one bomb attack there (Derry Journal 2011b) – Protestants also voiced disassociation from it, reflecting their deeply held disaffection from the Catholic-dominated political establishment in the city. Some expressed concerns that the ‘UK’ part of the title had been jettisoned in official promotional materials (Londonderry Sentinel 2012a; Simpson 2013), and others worried that the so-called culture on display in 2013 would not reflect their heritage. The Very Rev. William Morton, dean of St. Columb’s Cathedral, repeatedly raised the issue at Apprentice Boy commemorative services, for instance, calling for ‘proportion and due consideration’ to ensure ‘the Protestant community is involved in these celebrations’.18 The ‘public transcript’ of elites in response to these counter-narratives, particularly regarding the activities of republican paramilitaries, has been remarkably unified across the political spectrum. In official rhetoric, the perpetrators are described as marginal forces that cannot delay Derry’s ‘journey of change’, in the words of Colum Eastwood, a former SDLP mayor (quoted in Derry Journal 2011b). Nor can they take away from the ‘fantastic show-

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case’ that is the UK City of Culture, as a cross-community ‘open letter to dissidents’ by civic leaders declared (quoted in Belfast Telegraph 2012b). After the bomb attack on the tourist office, DCC chief executive Sharon O’Connor averred: ‘This is a time for people to be sensible and to be carrying forward the message that this is a wonderful place. … We really need the economic lift [City of Culture] can provide us’ (quoted in BBC News 2012b). At the same time, the RAAD protestors who interrupted the Olympic Torch were branded ‘pathetic losers’ by unionist MP Gregory Campbell, who said they had embarrassed the city and threatened its image in the upcoming City of Culture year (quoted in Londonderry Sentinel 2012c). In contrast, ‘the people behind the City of Culture, those who are selling it and attracting new visitors’ were ‘the real patriots’, in the words of former deputy First Minister Mark Durkan (quoted in Derry Journal 2011). This official effort to reinforce the positive image of a post-conflict city that has left ‘the bad old days’ (Derry Journal 2012c) behind it, irrespective of other realities, proved a challenge to sustain. When the Derry Tourist Office was attacked in January 2012, First Minister Peter Robinson and deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness were in London promoting the province’s ‘Our Time, Our Place’ tourist campaign (Derry Journal 2012c). Culture Company officials stated their willingness to meet with republican dissident groups. But no Culture Company officials spoke at an anti-RAAD rally in April 2012, where one mother of a young man killed by the group for his alleged drug-dealing activities declared Derry closer to a ‘city of murderers’ than a ‘city of culture’ (quoted in Derry Journal 2012a). That day, in the shadow of the historic Guildhall, mainly working-class Catholic residents relayed stories of torture and victimization at the hands of the republican vigilante group. The brutal reality for those Derry residents could not have been farther removed from the upscale culture vision then planned across the river at Ebrington. In fact, it is difficult to imagine such a rally taking place in Ebrington’s new ‘community space’ with its ‘leisure and enjoyment’ focus (McClements 2012). But even Ebrington’s symbolic neutrality has been challenged by a range of groups – from victims’ families to unionist political factions – seeking recognition in the symbolic landscape for the military and civilian personnel who served there during the Troubles (BBC News 2012c). These counter-narratives, however contentious and problematic to the city’s marketing campaign, are as much a part of the ‘new story’ as the old.

Conclusion: Culture for Whom? Creative Citizenship in the Northern Irish Public Sphere If the launch of the Peace Bridge was a symbolically European affair, defined by EU flags, paeans to unity and recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,

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the first major event in the new Ebrington Square – the Peace One Day concert hosted by actor Jude Law – was more commercial in style (see Figure 6.3). There, attendees were greeted with tourist billboards and blow-up stands, and handed NI 2012 ‘Our Time, Our Place’ flags to wave before entering the square to bop to the beats of Pixie Lott and Imelda May. In between acts, they were treated to speeches that urged ‘peace’ and declared that ‘the atmosphere in this city is one of achievement and jubilation’.19 But the event was not without its kinks. Two months before the concert, its reported headliner, Massive Attack, pulled out, and tickets, initially offered at £25, were eventually given away free a week before the show when a donor stepped in to make this possible. If audience members were generally pleased that ‘anything this cool’ was happening in Derry where there was ‘fuck all’ to do, in the words of one young woman,20 they were equally consistent in their inability to articulate any substantive definition of the City of Culture title. As one attendee noted, ‘it’s something that means something to other people that are in it’.21 That said, among the roughly three dozen people I interviewed that night, there was widespread support for an event hoped to bring tourists, cash flow and a ‘positive impact’ that would help the town ‘look to the future’ and ‘erase its Troubles image’, in the words of attendees.22

Figure 6.3. A scene from the Peace One Day concert at Ebrington Square in June 2012.

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To the extent that the City of Culture attempted to reimagine Derry as a creative ‘campus’ in which everyone is allowed to make a ‘positive’ contribution and to exhibit ‘a spirit of curiosity and creativity’, it has also foreshadowed a political-cultural-economic consolidation. On one hand, the civic and spatial vision outlined by McGonagle, who also served for a time on the Culture Company board, assumes that creative expressions such as public art can encourage a more vibrant, democratic public sphere, defined by ‘civil’, ‘shared’ spaces that belong ‘to citizens’ (McGonagle, interview 2011). In McGonagle’s vision, the culture discourse has universal applicability because ‘everyone engages in the creation of meaning out of the arts process’, a process that McGonagle said could encourage ‘models of empathy’ (or ‘understanding of other’), and help build ‘a new society’ for post-conflict Northern Ireland (McGonagle, interview 2011). Involvement in cultural processes, where there is no ‘destination’ (McGonagle, interview 2011) other than the recognition of mutual humanity, presents an appealing framework for the organization of post-conflict urban space and the values embraced in its symbolic landscapes. On the other hand, implicit in the culture discourse is that ‘the proposition to explore a new space’ (McMenamin, interview 2010) is also a proposition to consume it. Here, art has been charged with civilizing space not only for the use of citizens but also in the interest of global, capitalist development. As was the case during Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year, when an ‘art-as-empowerment discourse’ obscured the overall programme’s alignment with models of ‘neoliberal governance’ (Fitzpatrick 2013: 13), Derry’s City of Culture designation promoted an ethos that attempted to co-opt people and place for the marketing of ‘destination’. Although Zukin argues that culture-led regeneration strategies are useful in projecting ‘the appearance of a common public culture’ (Zukin 1995: 270), the end point is often cultural spaces as ‘separate spheres’ in which ‘the discussion of hard problems of social and economic inequality’ are avoided, and social ‘differences’ are accentuated through processes of gentrification (Zukin 1995: 282). The need for Ebrington to generate income, while not incompatible with citizenship-building exercises, presages its own set of civic exclusions, which also remain unacknowledged in this discourse. Spaces remade for the perusal of consumer citizens are inevitably spaces subject to greater privatization, levels of surveillance and restrictive codes of conduct, where speech itself is regulated (Sorkin 1992a, 1992b; Zukin 1995; Mitchell 2003). Indeed, on occasions when I have been in the square for concerts and other events, the embodied experience is comparable to visiting a penal yard or gated community (depending on one’s perspective), with the individual in space subject to a panoptic regime of total visibility à la Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault (MacCannell 2011). Access and

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egress are closely monitored and limited, with private security guards and police manning major entrance points during free public events and also milling about inside the square with a watchful eye. (Outside of these special staged events, the square, which remains under development as of early 2014, is usually bereft of both visitors and security forces, exuding a cold, almost barren atmosphere.) The space may have been reclaimed as shared, but mainly for certain prescribed activities that are closely programmed, surveilled and regulated. To be sure, culture may meet the demands of the consumer citizen for symbolic experiences, for the fulfilment of the ‘aesthetic-expressive dimension of the modern self’ (Lash and Urry 1994: 32) and the ‘identity-building’ (ibid.: 57) role consumption plays in this process. But what of those it occludes? Those who lack the cultural or economic capital (or even the desire) to participate in these meaning-making endeavours? Just as the symbolic economy elevates the consumer citizen in global space, it also demands an antipode: the symbolic citizen – the poorly paid service worker, the cheerful ‘creative’ native – who populates and ‘performs’ the landscapes on which the consumer citizen (read: tourist) feeds, but with potentially limited participation in the civic-consumerist life around which new public space is centred. The current Derry regeneration plan envisions the ‘embedding of tourism, culture and arts in communities so that they are more accessible and relevant, and offer opportunities for self employment and enterprise’ (Ilex 2011: 20). Predictably, the plan has identified ‘the most disadvantaged’ as a potential labour pool for the new ‘community-focused tourism’ (Ilex 2011: 20). Willingly or not, lower-income individuals are already appropriated in these ventures, which essentially commoditize the quotidian existence of certain social classes as ‘tourist offer’ subject to the same laws of total visibility on display in the new Ebrington civic space. As one working-class resident of the Protestant Fountain Estate commented: Every tour done in Derry is taken up on the Derry walls and they look down at us. There are Americans and Chinese looking in and saying, ‘Oh, there’s one of them’. The guy says, ‘This is the Fountain, this is the last Protestant estate’, and all these Chinese go, click, click, click. … We are like the Derry walls. We are for people to look at’.23

But in an increasingly postnational world of global capital flows, where a potentially endless supply of images competes for the consumer’s attention, the symbolic citizen’s value, like the symbolic economy he or she supports, is highly contingent. At the neighbouring Limavady Borough Council, a 2012 tourism area plan purportedly emphasized the importance of friendliness to economic development. It stated that both local community members and businesses needed to provide ‘a warm welcome reinforced by the highest

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standards of customer care’, with such requirements ‘not optional extras’ (Londonderry Sentinel 2012b). Echoing Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (1998) assessment that objects at museums and other tourist venues serve a performative purpose, here the citizen is implicated in the ‘performance’ of a landscape reimagined as ‘destination’.24 The problematic of the UK City of Culture discourse is that it rests on twin-yet-contradictory imperatives, promising both to reconstruct citizenship in a divided society by deactivating the ‘stagnant politics of the past’ (DCC 2010a: 26) through engagement with largely symbolic cultural processes, and to sell a product – the symbolic city – a city whose well-being is predicated on the production of ‘positive’ images and cultural ‘offer’. Importantly, Miles (2007:125) draws a connection between the European Capital/City of Culture programme’s ‘alternative mapping’ of Europe, which allows cities to promote themselves outside of the nation-state paradigm, and Sassen’s (1991) global city, defined by its location within a network of transnational capital flows and post-industrial production circuits. Similarly, in discussing cultural transformation in Derry, McMenamin highlighted the ‘rebirth of the city state’ in Europe and its role in building an ‘intercultural society’ of interconnected and overlapping identities. But he also added, ‘We sell places now through cities. … We are re-identifying the city state as the entity’ (McMenamin, interview 2010). As such, while postnationalism is invoked as part of social reconciliation, it is also a means to ever-freer global capital flows, unconstrained by national oversight or citizen input, a dynamic all but ignored in official rhetoric trumpeting the appeal of a city where more than thirty-five per cent of children live in poverty (DCC 2012). This is the Catch-22 of the culture discourse, which promises civil society through postnational models of empathy production embedded in and inevitably facilitating the whims of capital. With Derry, like so many other places, reentering ‘the global order’ as a ‘tourist destination’ (Urry and Larsen 2011: 25), culture as image production has assumed paramount importance. As Ilex representative Mo Durkan once said of Ebrington’s transformation: ‘We’re making brand new images here’ (quoted in McClements 2012). But the images needed to attract such capital must forever be renewed, as the reams of slick, highly staged photos uploaded to Derry’s City of Culture Facebook page attested. Like all images, they tell selective stories, stories calibrated to seduce a largely external audience, and that bear scant resemblance to the lived experience of the spaces in question.25 What tourist, after all, would be eager to visit a city where vigilante groups terrorize swathes of its working-class residential areas, where dissident paramilitaries periodically plant bombs in pedestrian shopping areas, or where the Olympic torch, an emblem of universal brotherhood, is waylaid on public streets? These are not stories visitors will likely find in the new Ebrington, which may be one

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reason so much of the ‘new story’ to date seems to be about someplace else, or at least about replicating models of redevelopment from elsewhere. In this way, the City of Culture project may be read as the logical extension of processes of civic identikit public art. Within this culture discourse, the city itself becomes a site of civic identikit art writ large, its symbolic landscape redefined by globalized forces, using globalized models of regeneration overlaid with localized narratives and ‘performances’ to create a sense of ‘place’, that, far too often, has a fresh-off-the-assembly line feel about it. The culture discourse merges the civic identikit of flows with that of place, producing what Sorkin (1992a: xiii) has aptly described as ‘a universal particular, a generic urbanism inflected only by appliqué’. The result, in Sorkin’s view, may be ‘the increasing irrelevance of actual movement’ (Sorkin 1992b: 217). Nevertheless, ‘the appeal of framing a space with a cultural institution when all other strategies of economic development’ (Zukin 1995: 23) have been exhausted has continued apace during the Great Recession and beyond. Cities ranging from Salem, Massachusetts, which, like Derry, has attempted to redefine its ‘dark’ past through maritime history and art, to Plymouth, England, have turned to culture to rebrand their global images and attract tourists (Ngowi 2011; Plymouth Culture Board 2011). Moreover, the 2013 European Capitals of Culture, Marseilles and the Slovak city of Košice, shared similar hopes that their year in the cultural limelight would rebrand gritty civic images. Like Derry, Košice overhauled a former army barracks and other derelict city spaces as arts venues (Bednarikova 2013), while, Marseilles, a long-time hotbed of drug violence and crime, renovated its Old Port and opened a new museum (Hours 2013). This global gold rush towards what can sometimes seem like culture-led sameness does not bode well for the tourist-oriented economic restructuring currently under way in Derry. As Dovey (2002: 272) puts it, ‘symbolic capital is a fixed resource, a zero/sum game. There is only so much distinction and prestige to be distributed’. Midway through Derry’s UK City of Culture 2013 year, profits had fallen significantly short of expectations, requiring further public subsidies and some programme cuts (Magee 2013; McDaid 2013). By the end of the year, an ongoing high-profile spat between Derry City Council and Culture Company officials related to funding and marketing responsibilities dominated media headlines (Hargan 2013). The planned arts and culture focus for Ebrington also showed signs of fraying. A development framework, intended to ‘open up the site to full market potential’ (Mullan 2013c), put forward three possible thematic development scenarios for public consultation in early 2014. A ‘creative industries and culture’ focus was among these, but the other possible themes had broadened to include ‘health and education’ or ‘mixed commercial’. Although some of the high-profile cultural and leisure proposals initially discussed for the twenty-six-acre site, such as

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the maritime museum and archives centre and a new hotel, remained in all three scenarios, others were noticeably absent. The flagship contemporary art gallery once considered for the Clocktower building had reportedly been scuttled due to insufficient funds and stakeholder interest (Mullan 2014). Meanwhile, it was announced that the museum-quality, £2.5 million gallery spaces created in the barracks for the Turner Prize exhibit would be converted into digital hub offices (Higgins 2013). Craft workshops and business incubation units were planned for another building (Londonderry Sentinel 2013b). As the year wrapped up, the cultural broker hired to head Ebrington’s culture-led development, Caoimhín Corrigan of Ilex, maintained that the reversion of the Turner galleries to office space was always in the works, with culture merely ‘one of the things that is being referenced’ for the overall site (quoted in Higgins 2013). And when ‘The Venue’, a £4.6 million tented concert space erected for the culture year, failed to attract private investors, the structure was set to be deconstructed at an additional cost of £450,000 (Quinn 2013). The fundamental contingency of the culture discourse in Derry, including its tenuous claims to bring about economic prosperity for those other than the well-paid consultants who staffed and advised the project,26 brings to the fore both the structural injustices of late capitalism as well as the complicity of city-of-culture discourses in furthering neoliberal governance models, and the symbolic citizenship such models increasingly encourage. Millions of pounds in public sector investment have yet to have much impact on the city’s abysmal employment and economic inactivity figures. And while both the city council and DCAL had by the end of 2013 announced plans to ensure a positive legacy from the City of Culture year, even this arena has proved contentious. The council’s announcement that it would shutter the Culture Company by March 2014, a full three months earlier than initially intended, further ruffled feathers and led to board resignations (Hargan 2013). In turn, DCC pledged a new legacy team ‘to liaise with partners to coordinate programmes and delivery mechanisms’ (DCC 2013b: 17), while Northern Ireland Culture Minister Carál Ní Chuilín also said she would create a North West office to oversee the creation of yet another company, this one charged with overseeing legacy plans in Derry and the wider North West area. Whether the added bureaucracy will achieve its goals remains to be seen, with the outlook for the City of Culture legacy murky at best. Even so, the push to cement Derry’s status as a cultural ‘destination’ on the world stage presses on. The city council’s legacy document hints that the ultimate goal is no less than the creation of an entity known as ‘Celebration City’ (DCC 2013b:10). In its initial incarnation, this designation points to a menu of cultural festivals and programmes for Derry – i.e., Music City 2014, Creative and Learning 2015 and Maritime City 2017 – that will

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frame it through 2017 and beyond (DCC 2013b). As of early 2014, there has also been talk that the city will put in a bid for Irish City of Culture 2016 or even for European Capital of Culture 2023. Let the ‘celebration’ without end begin.

Notes 1. While the Waterside electoral district remains narrowly Protestant, according to the 2011 Census, the overall population is now majority Catholic (Mullan 2013a). 2. Personal observations, 25–26 June 2011. 3. The UK City of Culture Working Group Report claims to make ‘no attempt’ to delineate what is meant by the term ‘culture’, stating only that ‘it may well have different meanings, interpretations or reflections for potential bidders’ (DCMS 2009: 7). Similarly, Derry’s bid document defined ‘culture’ expansively as a concept that ‘embraces rather than excludes, recognises difference and the respect it deserves and reaches out to everyone in our community by creating opportunities to bring people into the wider cultural debate and to continue that debate and share it with the wider world’ (DCC 2010a: 62). 4. The publicly funded, week-long Maiden City Festival was initiated in 1998 to situate the Apprentice Boys’ annual August commemorations within a broader celebration of Protestant ‘culture’. It includes historical talks, bluegrass music and a street festival and claims to be a showcase for ‘tolerance and openness’ (Apprentice Boys of Derry, n.d.) 5. From 1947, the base was known as Sea Eagle and housed the Joint Anti-Submarine School, which trained NATO allies, until returning to Army control in 1970 (Environment and Heritage Service 2003). 6. Ilex’s stance on Troubles-related memorialization at Ebrington may be evolving. In February 2012, it agreed to consider requests for a memorial by victims’ families and unionists (BBC News 2012c). 7. In January 2013, the original golden teapot returned to public view when it was removed from storage and resurrected outside a jewellery shop on the Strand Road (BBC News 2013b). 8. Alan Armstrong, then-Ilex Development Manager, telephone conversation with author, 28 August 2012. 9. Interview with Derry resident, 14 February 2012. 10. Interview with Derry man, 13 November 2011. 11. Interview with Derry resident, 25 June 2011. 12. Interview with Derry woman, 14 February 2012. 13. Interview with Derry resident, 21 June 2012. 14. As of February 2014, community-generated sound clips uploaded for the Mute Meadow project could be accessed at onedayiplantedaseed.com. 15. ‘City of Culture 2013’ Facebook page, retrieved 5 June 2012 from https://www.face book.com/cityofculture2013/posts/250558108381491?. 16. In mid-2012, the Real IRA, RAAD and other armed republican groups announced they had merged to form a new IRA, which would continue the struggle against British rule in Northern Ireland (McDonald 2012c). 17. Interviews with Derry youth, 26 June 2011, 26 October 2011, and 14 February 2012. 18. Personal observations, 3 December 2011 and 11 August 2012.

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Personal observation, 21 June 2012. Interview with young woman, 21 June 2012. Interview with Derry resident, 21 June 2012. Interviews with concert attendees, 21 June 2012. Interview with Fountain resident, 21 June 2012. Importantly, the city council’s draft City of Culture legacy report highlights the ‘2200 people … trained in World Host’, a tourist hospitality training and international licensing programme begun in Canada. The WorldHost programme has been influential in shaping visitor services around the world, including the London 2012 Olympic Games. The council’s document goes on to note that ‘over 560’ of these trainees were ‘young people at the risk of becoming NEETS [not in education, employment, or training]’ (DCC 2013a: 14). There is no mention, however, of whether any of these people were subsequently employed, and, if so, how long such employment may have lasted. The tourism product of the underprivileged symbolic citizens of Derry will no doubt be further enhanced by the funding of ‘dedicated cultural animators in neighbourhoods’, another apparent legacy outcome (ibid.: 30). 25. At a July 2013 Legacy Conference at Derry’s City Hotel, city and Culture Company officials fielded criticisms related to the disjunction between image and reality in the City of Culture. Noting the lack of toilet facilities along the riverfront and in St. Columb’s Park in contrast to the amount of public art, one resident commented to hearty applause that perhaps an artist could ‘design a structure that would allow you to use it as a toilet facility’ (personal observation, 5 July 2013). 26. At one point, two of the top City of Culture consultants were making 22.6 times more than gross average weekly earnings in Derry, with one of these consultants reportedly paid £1,000 a day (Londonderry Sentinel 2013a). At the same time, the city council’s draft legacy plan claimed that ‘more than 1,180 jobs have been created by the One Plan vision during the bid, run-up and implementation of the City of Culture project’, though a footnote at the end of the statement indicated that this figure was ‘[e]stimated[,] still to be confirmed’ (DCC 2013a: 36). Several months later, the council’s final legacy report made no mention of jobs created (DCC 2013b). Interestingly, the lone entrepreneurial success story highlighted at the July 2013 Legacy Conference was that of a woman named Joanne Doherty, whose ‘New Business Start Up’ constituted a wooden souvenir and refrigerator magnet company (personal observation, 5 July 2013).

Conclusion



The City as Civic Identikit? Twenty-first Century Public(s) on the Transnational Urban Stage Set

The word icon in Greek means image. It’s an image that communicates a message. It’s iconic in the sense that it has a symbolic value. It has a sort of meta-reality value – something that says more than it just physically is. … [W]here there’s been sort of generations of conflict or people are at each other’s throats for so long, when you start to see the physical environment changing around you … you really say to yourself, ‘This place is changing’. —Special EU Programmes Body Chief Executive Pat Colgan (Interview 2011)

In May 2012, a herd of fibreglass cows descended on Belfast. Their entrance at an annual livestock and agricultural show that spring was delayed due to a procession of real-life Clydesdales. When the way cleared, a team of artists and public relations consultants swiftly set to work on the display. One cow was wrapped with pink, yellow and blue ribbon, the colours of the ‘NI 2012: Our Time, Our Place’ tourist campaign. Another featured a map of the world, linking ‘Derry-Londonderry’ in Northern Ireland to a network of eponymous, though un-hyphenated, towns around the world. News photographers soon arrived to capture these images for posterity. Over the coming weeks, cows would make brief appearances in a range of public spaces in Northern Ireland. Many were placed in highly protected and controlled city-centre spaces, such as Derry’s Ebrington Square and the gated Belfast City Council grounds, during the parade’s three-month run. Part of the global Cow Parade public art event, the mass-produced cattle herd’s presence in Northern Ireland illustrates the convergence of top-down and bottom-up discourses in public space, and the ways in which these are

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materialized in the symbolic landscape. Pitched to Belfast and Derry city officials by a local consulting firm that had acquired the licensing rights from a U.S.-based company, the event was cast as a means to highlight the cities’ global presence and gin up tourist interest. But it also promised to engage with community members, who helped artists decorate some of the council-sponsored cows. In still other instances, cows, funded by the European Union’s PEACE III programme, were used to explore themes specific to the reconciliation discourse – i.e., positive relations, diversity and shared space – with school children (Newtownabbey Borough Council 2012). The international event, which has previously occurred in global cities such as New York, Tokyo and London, even boasted a ‘Peace Line Cow’ produced through cross-community collaboration. Beyond social and civic purposes, the cows were marketed to businesses as ‘a unique opportunity for engagement with customers, employees and stakeholders’ (Cow Parade Northern Ireland 2012). The global cow parade marks the quintessence of civic identikit public art as an urban spatial strategy. The highly mobile cows, produced to attract capital to the cities they ephemerally inhabit, represent a ‘grobalized’, harmonized and essentially content-free form that can be filled with whatever meaning (or discourse) its owner so desires. Interestingly, prior to the cow parade launch, an unpainted cow appeared at the unveiling of a Cúchulainn-themed stained glass window at Belfast City Hall. That cow was tagged with the label ‘the Bull of Cooley’ – a character that features in the mythological Ulster Cycle – and was decorated with photographs of miniature bulls made by schoolchildren who had participated in the workshops. In this way, the standardized, replicable form of a mass-produced cow was glocalized to project a local Irish identity as part of a council effort to make City Hall more inclusive. Ironically, as in many other projects designed to promote shared space in Northern Ireland, the children did not actually mix during the workshops, though they did show up for a group photo-op at the unveiling.1 From behind their unassuming countenances, the cows serve to order spatial interactions and encourage city-centre consumption. Notably, a cow trail map usually accompanies these events, though not, apparently, in Northern Ireland, where the cows were intermittently pulled from view for repairs due to vandalism (Cow Parade Northern Ireland 2012; Newtownabbey Times 2012). Globally, such art is part of the image production that brands a city and routes its inhabitants and visitors through space.2 It is the art of peace and prosperity, of shopping malls and Disneyland. It is creative but with caveats. Controversial cows rarely see the light of day, and sponsors dictate the outlines of acceptable creativity. (One Northern Irish artist privately chafed over being forced to use the colour palette of the tourist board’s promotional campaign.) As an event, the global cow parade is also

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wildly popular, and has generated millions of pounds for charities since its inception in the late 1990s (each parade concludes with a cow auction), not to mention hundreds of millions of pounds in revenue for sponsoring cities and businesses (Asitis Consulting 2011). The postmodern public spaces such art seeks to produce provide a commentary on official visions for the civic life of citizens. In Northern Ireland and elsewhere, this has centred on reshaping public space as a locus of leisure and consumption, a focus underlying the twin fixation on the production of spectacle and positive images in public spaces. Not only does this focus ignore the existence of those who cannot support the consumption discourse or who constitute ‘negative’ cultural or social images, but as Mitchell (2003: 230) points out, the positive ‘perfectly ordered city’ is ‘an authoritarian, even totalitarian, fantasy’. It is a fantasy upended ‘by the social processes that must be put in place to make utopia reality’ (Mitchell 2003: 235). By the same token, the dominant visual discourses of landscape are challenged by multiple ‘competing’ narratives and histories ensuring the contingency of such spatial discourses (Binns 2009: 190). As the global cow parade further highlights, the image of public space is subject to a range of unpredictable trajectories, which may undermine symbolic intentions. First launched in Zurich in 1998, the cow parade was subsequently promoted abroad as part of a Swiss effort to repair its image in global space in the wake of reports that banks there had failed to return Holocaust victims’ money to their families (Gardiner 2000; Hedges 2000). But it soon attracted its own negative headlines after cows shipped to schoolchildren taking part in a New York Cow Parade were found to be highly flammable and returned to Switzerland. The American partner in the firm set up to organize the Big Apple cow parade then walked out on his Swiss partners, ushering in a period of fierce competition between the Swiss and American collaborators, as well as other spinoff companies (Hedges 2000). The U.S.-based CowParade Holdings Corporation, which emerged from this initial split, has since become the licenser of what is billed on the Cow Parade website as ‘the largest and most successful public art event in the world’. And the irony of the cow parade’s earlier role in an image rehabilitation programme related to Nazi-era war crimes has, predictably, been expunged from its official history. Likewise, the disjunction between image and reality is a recurrent theme in the reimagined Northern Irish landscape. Despite officials’ belief in the power of images and symbols to express new realities about social relations and potentially alter the way people view and engage with public spaces, the reality is far more complex. After all, in public space, an arena of perpetual contestation and flux, no image is final, no symbolic vehicle can be guaranteed that its message will be delivered, received and internalized in the prescribed manner. In exploring the primary questions considered in this

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book, the notion of civic identikit has provided a useful tool to assess the spatialization and modification of official discourses in the symbolic landscape. These civic identikit stage sets of reconciliation and capital attraction, primarily designed (on the material level) by, or for, the instruments of global capital, such as multinational design consultancies, corporations and the nomadic consumer citizen, may harmonize landscapes, reflecting postmodernism’s seriality and simultaneity. But they do not necessarily ‘work’ as intended once in place. Shifts in the symbolic landscape may reflect wider social, cultural, political and economic changes, changes that are heavily dependent on ‘influences whose origins often are far removed from the immediately local’ (Schein 1997: 663), but they are also subject to layers of negotiation. Due to the legacy of conflict in Northern Ireland, the Lefebvrian triad of conceived, perceived and lived space is permeated with ‘geographies of ethno-sectarian separation’ (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 3). This underlying spatial and social division is sometimes complicated by a post-conflict influx of immigrants and the impact their presence, in the form of ethnic restaurants, festivals and shops, is beginning to have on parts of the urban landscape.3 The following analysis reviews the findings of the primary research questions, and the implications these pose for the relationship between image/ symbolic production and post-conflict/post-industrial regeneration efforts. These findings indicate an often-tenuous link between image in space and spatial practices and suggest the need for future research to interrogate official discourses rigorously through broad-based, multifactorial approaches. The research presented here has resonance for the evaluation of conflict transformation processes in other post-conflict societies and for more general sociological analysis. As Dovey (2002: 278) warns, ‘The illusion of “changing the world” is maintained through the production of ever-new imagery while the reproduction of social practice continues unchallenged.’ Research that confronts this condition may mitigate the perpetuation of spatial myths that ignore or diminish underlying social/economic inequalities and contention in the name of place promotion and capital attraction. As a result, a more nuanced, qualitative picture of conflict/social transformation processes may emerge.

Symbolism and Signs: The Civic Identikit of Flows and Place in a Troubled Landscape The state-financed public art considered in the previous chapters mainly endorsed ‘non-aligned’ abstract forms, with the exception of the nostalgic, place-based symbolism showcased in the Hewitt mural. The Diamond War

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Memorial, while certainly not a new artwork, was reimagined as symbolically shared through the conceptual invocation of selective historical experience. To varying degrees, these symbols are reflective of post-conflict, post-industrial urban regeneration programmes and cultural interventions carried out to support an official imperative, evident at all levels of Northern Irish government, to produce ‘positive’ urban images for global consumption (see, for instance, DRD 2001; DSD 2006b; DCC 2010; BCC 2012a). The result has been a ‘tame’, two-tiered urban landscape with the abstract contemporary art of the space of flows and occasional quaint figurative sculpture in city-centre spaces juxtaposed with the civic identikit of place, which includes artworks referencing a limited menu of cultural/industrial heritage or reconciliation themes in inner-city neighbourhoods, particularly in Belfast. (Middle-class residential areas appear largely immune to artistic interventions, a dynamic underscoring the diversionary usefulness of some projects.) Sanitized city-centre spaces and working-class neighbourhoods peppered with simplistic heritage tropes predominate. Celtic mythology and Irish-language references are common in Catholic areas; industrial legacy and First World War symbolism are widespread in many Protestant neighbourhoods. This binary cultural vision reflects an incongruence between the stated public values of the new Northern Irish state and the vision for their practical manifestation in the symbolic landscape. For instance, in an interview, then-Department for Social Development Minister Nelson McCausland of the DUP maintained that the principal values governing public spaces in Northern Ireland were ‘equity, diversity and interdependence’. He then proceeded to advocate for an apparently essentialist cultural landscape that represented the ‘Irish tradition, the English tradition and the Scottish tradition’. Asked how this would accommodate Northern Ireland’s emerging multicultural landscape and alternative identities, he replied, ‘If Chinese culture were to die out in Northern Ireland, it still exists in China’ (McCausland, interview 2011). Hence, these new state-financed additions, with a few notable exceptions, continue to mark space outside of the city centre as the preserve of particular ethnic groups, albeit without the specific threat of violence and in a clearly tourist-friendly way. On Belfast’s Sandy Row, King Billy, hero of Protestants and the ‘Glorious Revolution’, now stares benevolently down from a gable wall where before a masked gunman glowered (see Figures 7.1a and b). After decades of intimidation, the infamous gunman’s image was finally jettisoned in mid-2012. It was, according to business owners cited in the Belfast Telegraph, ‘bad for investment’ (O’Hara 2012). Understandably for policymakers in a post-conflict state, the question of symbolism remains a nettlesome subject. As Eleanor Wheeler, the former artist-in-residence at Belfast City Council who coordinated numerous public

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Figure 7.1. (a) The infamous mural at the entrance to Sandy Row. (b) The reimaged mural.

art projects for the city between 2005 and 2009, explained, programmes carried out in working-class areas undergoing regeneration were focused mainly on looking ‘for normality’, which meant highlighting broad-based industrial themes such as linen factories in North Belfast. ‘We would actually not go out of our way to look for things that were to sort of highlight conflict,’ she said, with most of the work based on the simple premise that ‘visual enhancement’ could promote a better quality of life (Wheeler, interview 2011). As this book has elucidated, however, the search for normality has more often than not resulted in what I have classified as civic identikit public art, replicating a limited number of heritage themes across the urban landscape alongside a spate of abstract contemporary art, which also often claims to evoke these same themes. As of this writing, there is still no official public art strategy in Belfast or Derry. And the symbolic landscape, much like the broader policy environment it backgrounds, is ‘characterised by dispersed and isolated programmes and initiatives, small-scale projects and funding streams aimed at a range of diverse and complex problems’ (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 11), a condition that may have intensified the duplication of symbols across urban space and has potentially limited the ability of artists to further the goal of symbolic innovation. Indeed, one community public artist highlighted the degree to which outcomes in Northern Ireland were hostage to funding programmes and predetermined themes. ‘Art can change [things] but not in this funding format. I have to tick boxes’, the artist told me. Along depressed stretches of South Belfast’s working-class Donegall Road, for instance, there are two different aluminium murals ded-

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icated to the late singer Ruby Murray, who was born there. One was funded by DSD, the other by the city council. Not far from Donegall Road, on Sandy Row, a council-commissioned mural featuring local sports and entertainment stars also prominently features Murray, and, in 2012, there was even discussion of adding her image to yet another potential public artwork proposed for the Donegall Road-area Village neighbourhood.4 The challenges and constraints of public art practice in Northern Ireland speak to the wider difficulties of identity reformulation in societies emerging from conflict. The imperative to forge new visual cultures that both foster inclusion (and therefore promote reconciliation and social transformation) and bolster the legitimacy of new regimes and economies has been addressed in a number of national contexts. A cursory survey of international, post-transition, public art interventions indicates a common propensity to fall back on formulaic approaches, though with various degrees of emphasis between the space of flows and place. In many nations in the former Soviet bloc, for instance, the post-socialist reimagining of public space has focused on ‘excising the communist period … by treating it as an aberration’ (Verdery 1999: 116). While this propensity has resulted in the removal of unpopular communist-era symbology, including scores of imposing statues of Lenin and Stalin (though Soviet war memorials have often been saved from this fate), it has also led these nations to embrace a commonly repeated visual narrative of national re-emergence akin to decolonization discourses (Forest and Johnson 2002). These have materialized in various forms across the former Warsaw Pact countries. In Hungary, new memorials to the 1956 Uprising against communist rule have been installed in proximity to old memorials marking the nation’s 1848–49 War of Independence from Hapsburg rule (Foote, Tóth and Árvay 2000). Similarly, the widespread placement in town squares of traditional Magyar folk symbols such as decorated grave poles have served to draw ‘a subtle parallel between the fight to liberate Hungary from the Turks and Hapsburgs … and the struggle against the Soviet Union’ (Foote, Tóth and Árvay 2000: 315). Even new symbols in public space have often sought inspiration from the icons of the 1956 Uprising, such as the Hungarian flag with the communist crest ripped out of it or the ‘Pest Kid’ streetfighters (ibid.: 316–17). A reappropriation of a heroic and/or romantic past to meet the needs of the present can also be found in Berlin’s post-unification planning embrace of ‘critical reconstruction’, a policy that backgrounded the spectacle consumerist developments that began to rise from the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz in the 1990s and aimed to resuscitate the cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1920s-era Weimar Republic (Ladd 2000; Tölle 2010). This policy also informed the revitalization of old spaces such as the Reichstag building, the former seat of the German Parliament until it was burned out in 1933. In 1995, global art luminary

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Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude famously wrapped the structure in fabric in anticipation of its renovation by British architect Norman Foster. And in 1999, the parliament of the reunified German Federal Republic officially took up residence in the ‘critically reconstructed’ building, now sporting a modernist glass dome atop its historical neo-baroque structure. As part of wider efforts to erase the memory of the former German Democratic Republic regime, communist-era public art monuments and buildings were targeted for removal by the new centrist government,5 among these the towering Lenin statue in central Berlin, dismantled in 1991 over the protests of former East Berliners and buried in a ‘gravel pit’ (Ladd 1997: 199; Tölle 2010).6 Nevertheless, resilient social and economic cleavages between Easterners and Westerners in the reunified Berlin have manifest in a continuing Ostalgie for what was lost with the end of the socialist state, including its symbols. Likewise, in Moscow, the post-socialist urban landscape looked back to a Golden Age in order to move forward. City authorities reconstructed prominent Russian Orthodox churches (Forest and Johnson 2002) destroyed under communist rule and commissioned public art celebrating traditional Russian fairy tales and imperial splendour. A spate of cartoonish sculptures by Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli, a favourite of political elites in both Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, harked back to a pre-communist past, evoking innocence, fantasy and former glories, most notably in Tsereteli’s bombastic, 98-metre-tall Peter the Great statue on the banks of the Moscow River (Grant 2001). This apparent ‘infantilization of public space’ may be read as a means to reinforce the municipal authorities’ ‘moral innocence’ in light of Soviet authoritarianism (Grant 2001: 344). At the same time, other post-socialist icons retained in the landscape have been recontextualized as heritage, as has occurred with a number of monumental socialist statues removed from Budapest and reinstalled in Statue Park on the outskirts of the city centre (Foote, Tóth and Árvay 2000). Changes in the ‘spatial framing’ of old icons can also be viewed at Moscow’s Park of the Arts (Forest and Johnson 2002: 536, emphasis in original), where many former Soviet heroes on plinths have gone to their rest. Finally, one of the more striking transformations of a communist icon in the post-socialist symbolic landscape has occurred in Berlin, which over the past decade has recalibrated its relationship to its formerly detested wall. In 2006, a Berlin Senate-approved wall memorial concept plan laid out its vision for conserving, expanding and linking existing wall memorial sites (Tölle 2010). The national capital is now dotted with markers, memorials, interpretive centres and tourist trail posts outlining nearly every aspect of the Berlin Wall experience from its 1961 construction through to its destruction in 1989. This streamlining of wall memory represents an obvious nod to the tourist market, for which much of the formerly divided city has been restaged (Colomb 2012). Even

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a 1.3-kilometre stretch of wall along the Spree River known as the East Side Gallery due to the colourful paintings placed there in 1990 by more than 100 international artists underwent a massive renovation in 2009. The initiative to save the outdoor art gallery, which had fallen into disrepair, required significant public funds and entailed both repainting and rebuilding the wall, the longest remaining stretch of the former barrier. More informally, single sections of the Berlin Wall are scattered across the public and private spaces of the city, usually bearing graffiti art, an erstwhile emblem of resistance during the Cold War. In this way, the former synecdoche of global division has been recast as a unifying civic branding device offering visitors visual testaments to the West’s victory over communist oppression alongside a dash of urban cool in the form of street art. To be sure, the sempiternal appeal of narratives of human struggle and triumph over adversity provides a powerful organizing focus for post-conflict reconstruction efforts, and though largely absent in Northern Ireland, has also animated the symbolic landscapes of post-apartheid South Africa. There, however, the African National Congress-led government has implemented policies specifically aimed at inscribing the ‘rainbow-nation’ model of national identity onto the built environment, through the appropriation, modification and addition of monuments and museums (Ross 2007, 2009b). This goal has been advanced by the South African Heritage Resources Agency, created in 1999 to help shape an inclusive representation of national heritage through a focus on ‘healing and material and symbolic restitution’ (Ross 2007: 232). Memorial spaces central to the identity and cultural heritage of the former ruling Afrikaner Nationalist Party have not disappeared, however. Rather, in some cases, such sites were modified via Legacy Projects designed to inject a sense of recognition for the previously marginalized and effect reconciliation between groups. But the realization of such goals has been complicated in practice. For instance, on the bank opposite the Blood River Monument in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, which marks the 1838 Boer victory over 3,000 Zulu warriors, the post-apartheid government funded the construction of the Ncome Monument, unveiled in 1998 as a ‘critical response’ to the Boer interpretation of the Blood River battle, a seminal encounter in Boer mythology (Marschall 2010b: 276). Ncome offered a re-examination of the battle through Zulu eyes (Marschall 2010b: 276; Ross 2007) and marked the beginning of ‘a key strategy in the post-apartheid politics of remembrance’ (Marschall 2010b: 281). That ‘both museums … remain skewed reflections of each other’ (Marschall 2010b: 294) was an early indication of the potential drawbacks of such policies. Though notable in its efforts to address issues of memorialization, the largely top-down approach has prefigured the creation of a binary heritage landscape (not unlike Northern Ireland’s), which, ‘[b]elow

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the veneer of inclusiveness … endorse[s] simplistic dichotomous notions of blacks and whites as former enemies to be reconciled, ignoring much more complex historical lines of division’ (Marschall 2010b: 316). The ultimate goal of many post-apartheid projects, Marschall contends, is to reinforce a ‘foundation myth’ for the new regime aimed at amplifying a message of ‘resistance and ultimate triumph’ (2010b: 16). Despite the use of public art across the nation’s major cities as a form of symbolic reparations, a key concept to emerge from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Minty 2005; Marschall 2010b), its relationship to local populations is also less clear (Ross 2007; Marschall 2010b). High rates of vandalism and neglect raise questions about community identification and ownership of the new monuments (Marschall 2010b). As is also anecdotally suggested in Northern Ireland, many struggling ‘ordinary’ South Africans do not see or understand the benefits of this push to transform the symbolic landscape in light of more pressing economic and social needs (Marschall 2009: 167). South Africa has justified the production of new monuments, ostensibly undertaken to support more high-minded objectives, in part on their ability to sell place through tourism, promoted by the government ‘as a panacea for all ills’ (Marschall 2010b: 318). This has further reified particular narratives of a mythic past on landscape, including stereotyped images of Zulu culture geared to ‘capturing the imagination of tourists’ (ibid.: 326) by branding the province as ‘Zulu Kingdom’. Prominent among these is an ongoing effort by KZN officials to install a gigantic King Shaka statue, to eclipse the Statue of Liberty in height, at the mouth of the Tugela River in Durban.7 The proposed artwork, which features centrally in the province’s latest tourism master plan (Naidoo 2013), comes on the heels of two other commissions of the famous Zulu leader Shaka. These were both done for Durban’s King Shaka International Airport, opened ahead of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. After the first statue was removed due to its contested depiction of Shaka, the second sculpture was commissioned (Ndaliso 2013). Likewise, proposals to create monumental Nelson Mandela statues have often targeted tourist districts and, due to their profit-driven contexts, have sparked debate and resistance across South Africa (Marschall 2010b), though some have been realized. Just days after Mandela’s death in December 2013, the world’s largest sculpture to the former African leader was unveiled at government headquarters in Pretoria on South Africa’s Day of Reconciliation. Depicting Mandela with arms outstretched, the nine-metre-tall monumental memorial, executed under the auspices of Koketso Growth, a heritage development company, is intended to symbolize national reconciliation and become a major tourist draw.8 As one official with the company noted, ‘We wanted a pose that said “unity”, “reconciliation”’ (quoted in P. Murtagh 2013). Ironically, the statue ignited controversy almost immediately after

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its launch when it was discovered that its Afrikaner sculptors had added a small rabbit inside Mandela’s ear in protest over an initial refusal to let them add their signatures to the monument, and as a comment on the haste with which they were forced to work (Saul 2014).9 The historical elisions and hegemonic narratives so evident across postsocialist and post-apartheid space, however problematic and potentially suppressive, have nevertheless allowed for some common spatial frameworks to emerge after extended social conflict. But where bitterly opposed constituent populations coexist in the absence of a shared struggle or unifying narrative, the public art process, as in Northern Ireland, has been particularly vulnerable to contestation and paralysis, paving the way for the proverbial path of least resistance. The bloody civil war in Bosnia that followed the 1991 breakup of Yugoslavia provides a stark example. There, as in Northern Ireland, a peace agreement created a power-sharing government that reified sectarian divisions, effectively carving up space and political influence along ethnonational lines. Known as the Dayton Accords, the 1995 agreement split the country into two semi-autonomous entities, the Muslim-Croat-controlled Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska. Though power is mostly exercised within these entities, the country also has a tripartite presidency drawn from the three dominant ethnic groups. Unsurprisingly, the symbolic landscape, particularly regarding aspects of memory and memorialization, has largely reflected the tribal politics of governance there. Indeed, the most prominent post-war monument, the Memorial to the Murdered Children of Besieged Sarajevo, unveiled in 2009, embodies the deep-seated cleavages that remain, most intensely between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs. An otherwise-nondescript abstract glass memorial and fountain located at the edge of a central city park was transformed into an exclusionary marker by the simple addition of the word ‘besieged’, a modifier tacitly excluding those children who died in non-besieged areas of the city, which were under Serb control. As Morrow (2012: 30) observes, the distinction contributes to the perpetuation of ‘victim and perpetrator identities in the collective memory’, where little room for overlap and reconciliation has so far been constructed. No doubt the severity of the bloodshed militates against spaces of meaningful joint reflection, mourning or symbolic unity. The memorialization of the genocide at Srebrenica, where 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by Serb forces in the space of a few days in July 1995, is a case in point. Located in Republika Srpska, the Srebrenica-Potocˇari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide is a rarity in Serb-controlled territory. It was constructed over the opposition of local Serb authorities due to pressure from the international community, which has provided substantial funding for the effort (Morrow 2012). While the memorial centre and cemetery were conceived as a means

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to facilitate the return of Bosnian Muslims to areas from which they had been ethnically cleansed, the site is notable for the absence of Serbs from the ‘discursive space’ (Morrow 2012: 65).10 Not only have Serbs mostly kept their distance from commemorative ceremonies (opting to create their own memorials to Serb victims in the region), but what ‘reconciliatory dialogue’ has occurred there has played out mainly ‘between the Bosnian Muslim community and the international community’, seen to need expiation of its own guilt for allowing the genocide to take place in a town declared a UN ‘safe area’ (Morrow 2012: 65). Elsewhere in the Republika Srpska, however, officials have successfully moved to halt memorials for Bosnian Muslims and Croats, as was the case at the Omarska Concentration Camp, a former mine reopened after the war that since 2004 has been under the majority ownership of ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel manufacturer. Despite initial support for the proposed memorial, the company, which has a predominantly Serb workforce, has shelved the memorial plans indefinitely due to apparent disagreements related to ownership and management of the project (Morrow 2012). The local Serb mayor withdrew his support, and the site has been blocked on occasion to victims’ groups (Hodzik 2012). In a peculiar twist, indicating the far-reaching intersection of global and local developments, the giant red ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, commissioned to mark the London 2012 games and primarily funded by ArcelorMittal Chairman Lakshmi Mittal, has been dubbed the ‘Omarska Memorial in Exile’, due to allegations that steel from the Omarska mine was used in its construction, a charge the company has denied (ArcelorMittal 2012). Across the Balkans, the persistent bitterness and inability to agree on the creation of a post-war symbolic landscape has resulted in public art, which, much like that of Northern Ireland, is roughly shaped by a two-tiered aesthetic portfolio represented on the one hand by the global marketplace, and on the other by single identity references, particularly in those countries where clear ethnic majorities exist. In many cities and towns, for instance, the post-war period has witnessed a profusion of statues to Hollywood and pop culture icons, such as Bruce Lee, Rocky Balboa and even Tarzan. While this development was criticized by one Serbian artist as a ‘dangerous joke in which history is being erased and replaced by Mickey Mouse’ (quoted in Bilefsky 2007), the statues were initiated by local residents and officials, who in some instances saw them as optimistic symbols capable of providing identity and hope in areas still reeling from the discredited, bloody nationalisms of the ‘wars of the 1990s’ (Bilefsky 2007). In a move that represented ‘the subsumption of politics to popular culture’ (Volcic 2010: 159), global icons were locally reappropriated to fill a void in post-conflict space, which in some cases was so fraught that even these ‘neutral’ global symbols proved contentious. The creators of the Bruce Lee statue in Mostar, Bosnia, for

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instance, altered its position after Croats and Muslims complained that the statue’s aggressive martial arts pose was a ‘provocation’ directed towards them (Bilefsky 2007). Much like the embrace of flagship contemporary public artworks in Northern Ireland, which sidestep hard issues of identity and meaning in urban space, ‘a threat of these monuments lies in the benign form in which it allows different actors to rewrite, reshape and/or erase the years of war in Yugoslavia, and to focus solely on celebrating the global commercial culture’ (Volcic 2010: 164, emphasis in original). More critically successful have been temporary public artworks in places such as Pristina, Kosovo, where the British artist Nathan Coley installed his ‘A Place Beyond Belief’ light billboard to mark the end of the country’s ‘supervised independence’ in September 2012. The move was praised by one critic in The Economist magazine as a welcome respite in a national landscape burdened over the years with Serb – and, later, after the end of the Kosovo War, Albanian – national heroes. While the critic stressed the recent embrace of ‘contemporary optimistic pieces’ in Kosovo, including a giant sculpture that read ‘Newborn’, he also noted a re-emergence of nationalist statues elsewhere in the Balkans, such as Macedonia, which has moved to erect monuments to its religious heritage and to its political heroes despite the objections of its Albanian Muslim minority, as well as those of neighbouring Greeks who have accused Macedonia of co-opting their culture by constructing a large Alexander the Great statue (The Economist 2012; Milevska 2011).

Public Art and Policy: Gauging State Power through Spatial Practice As the previous international examples have demonstrated, the struggle over control in socially divided societies is deeply linked to wider issues of ethnic and cultural competition, global political economy and shifting geopolitical considerations. Arguably, the question of who or what has the right to direct and shape civic identity foregrounds many of these debates. But while the challenges of post-conflict, post-transition public art practice clearly vary by context, a recurring theme internationally centres on the relationship between state power and the outcomes of spatial practices. The more hegemonic the new ‘regime’, the easier it is to implement its agenda. The greater the unresolved social fault-lines, the less likely the art will accomplish its official goals. In this respect, the post-conflict Northern Irish state appears rather weak. Across the case studies considered here, a dominant official discourse (or spatial strategy) for transforming the image of a particular place identity through public art was circumscribed in practice. At the Broadway Roundabout in Belfast, the universal, contemporary symbolism represented by the geodesic sculpture Rise has yet to have much

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impact as a global branding tool for the city. Unveiled just months before the launch of the Titanic centenary celebrations, which included the opening of the Titanic Belfast visitor centre, this symbol of ‘new’ Belfast has largely faded in favour of the commercial appeal of a rehabilitated ‘old’ symbol, the famously doomed White Star ocean liner. In addition to four prominent Titanic or shipbuilding civic sculptures installed in and adjacent to the city centre, Belfast City Council has pushed to place Titanic-themed murals in working-class neighbourhoods to highlight ‘each community’s link to the great ship’, with half-a-dozen officially sanctioned murals completed or in process by mid-2012 (BCC 2012b: 23). ACNI also funded a Titanic mural unveiled in 2010 along the Lower Newtownards Road, as well as another Titanic-related artwork for the Cupar Way peace wall (Impact Training 2012). While Rise may have reinforced the neutrality of the roundabout (apart from the ritualized violence that occurred there during the summer marching season from 2008 to 2012), there is little evidence to suggest the sculpture has been adopted by the adjacent working-class residential communities. Nor has it facilitated much social interaction between ordinary residents, apart from the ‘staged’ Christmas gift exchanges there. Whether Rise will ultimately inspire a generation of creative industry workers that will bolster Northern Ireland’s nascent creative economy remains to be seen. As of 2014, the Broadway Roundabout continues to exhibit scant evidence of economic regeneration or tourist influx.11 Rumours that some of the adjacent derelict lots were slated for redevelopment have mostly remained unsubstantiated, save for the recent addition of a McDonald’s restaurant across the street from the roundabout. In contrast, in Cornmarket, a contemporary sculpture designed to entice patrons into a ‘neutral’, upscale shopping centre, emblematic of the ‘peace dividend’, proved attractive to a range of less-than-neutral groups, including evangelicals, youth dancers, immigrant circus performers and scantily clad club promoters. The materiality of the Spirit of Belfast sculpture, which included a large plinth that easily doubled as a stage, exerted an unintended secondary agency in space, drawing local groups to consume the square for purposes beyond its official retail and leisure purpose. Here, the artwork’s abstract symbolism, which several of these frequent users did not understand or like, actually contributed to its interpretation as a stage rather than a piece of art. On those Saturdays when I was present in the square between 2010 and 2012, the area in and around the sculpture was often infused with a carnivalesque abandon that stood in stark contrast to the orderliness envisioned by ‘the broken windows scenario of regeneration’ (Corrigan, interview 2010). However, this reappropriation of space took its toll on the sculpture, used by some as a climbing frame, and the artwork was deemed unstable. In May 2012, DSD surrounded the artwork with metal fencing

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in preparation for repairs and a structural survey, and the youths and acrobats were forced to relocate temporarily. For two months, the space was effectively reclaimed by state authorities, but in a physically awkward way that marred the square’s aesthetics, and ironically, worked against official goals to make it appealing to shoppers. In turn, a Belfast-based artist, Tonya McMullan, seized the opportunity to highlight what she viewed as the artwork’s ‘failure’, and briefly attached a banner with this pronouncement on the fencing to draw attention to the spatial and cognitive distance between artwork and public, as well as to the temporary elimination of what McMullan called ‘the only good thing about it’, its function as a stage.12 While the dancers and acrobats returned to the square after the repairs, the future use of the space remains uncertain. In a preliminary 2012 evaluation of Belfast: Streets Ahead, a variety of public authorities, including Belfast City Council and the PSNI, blamed the youth at the sculpture for creating a ‘public nuisance’ that had negatively affected retailers’ trade.13 Meanwhile, the initiative to transform the Cupar Way peace wall into an outdoor art gallery for the positive portrayal of Protestant culture encountered widespread apathy, as well as some local resistance related to residual conflict-based divisions and an ongoing paramilitary presence in (and influence over) the Shankill landscape. Though organizers of the Hewitt mural dissuaded participants from including symbols of ‘tribalism’ in their artwork, such imagery has hardly disappeared from the wall. In mid-December 2012, in the wake of the loyalist flag protests, stencilled (unofficial) Union Jack graffiti appeared at one end of the Cupar Way peace wall. Even the tourist influx, an objective of the project, continues to generate unwanted externalities, including the defacement of the wall’s art, on which roughly £200,000 had been spent by the end of 2010 (Small, interview 2010). As such, the celebratory message of the Hewitt artwork’s nostalgic symbolism has been mostly lost under an onslaught of peace and pejorative graffiti. Local regeneration officials have repeatedly complained that the tourist presence in the area has failed to benefit Shankill businesses. This they blame on tour operators who confine their time there to photo-ops with conflict-based imagery, as well as on the dearth of cosmopolitan shopping opportunities and ‘cafe culture’ (Small, interview 2010). By summer 2012, the Shankill’s fledgling tourist office had shuttered its doors over funding issues, and Small, the partnership’s arts and tourism coordinator, had left her position. More recently, local regeneration officials in the Shankill have indicated a desire to highlight Northern Ireland’s international connections in some way, suggesting a possible move away from the narrow community theming that has to date dominated the wall’s aesthetic; as of this writing, however, what form this will ultimately take is unclear (Stewart, interview 2013).

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In contrast, the efforts to reframe the Diamond War Memorial as shared space have met with some success in advancing the message of joint First World War Catholic and Protestant military sacrifice and a mutual right to public spaces for commemorative or cultural purposes – even if each community’s events continue to occur separately. At the same time, the projects also shed light on the depth of Northern Irish social division and the fragility of the reconciliation discourse. Ongoing attacks on the memorial and other Protestant ‘icons of identity’ (Whelan 2003: 17) testify to the resilience of conflict in Derry. Even at Ebrington Square, where a culture discourse has sought to neutralize the former army barracks as a shared ‘destination’ for leisure activities, official objectives confront challenges. A range of groups have pressed for symbolic inclusion in the landscape, contrary to an official desire to keep the space free of conflict-era memorialization. The technical difficulties that dogged the Mute Meadow artwork further confounded the objective of having it serve as a conduit for new ‘meaning’ – unless one counts the pervasive jape that the artwork resembled an unfinished construction site. Lacking full illumination (at least initially), Mute Meadow fell short of its ‘proposition’ to beckon people into the square. That people have crossed the Peace Bridge in high numbers anyhow raises additional questions about its relevance. Like Rise, the Ebrington sculpture problematizes the effectiveness of ambiguous, civic identikit symbolism in furthering particular spatial objectives. And in doing so, it also problematizes the broader culture discourse as organizing spatial framework, particularly given the province’s highly contingent position in the global order.

Citizenship and Subjectivity in the Civic Identikit Landscape The symbolic landscapes of contemporary Northern Ireland have moved beyond the single identity hegemony of the erstwhile ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’ (quoted in Ross 2007: 98). Rather, the landscapes considered here reflect an official desire to reshape the city as an amenable site for global capital, as well as to address Northern Ireland’s underlying social divisions, a further impediment to capital investment. In each of the discourses outlined in this book, the production of space with appeal for investors and consumer citizens (mainly tourists) was apparent, alongside a desire that the space be shared and inoffensive to members of the opposing community. Arguably, the emphasis on normalization of image has facilitated more inclusive use of space between some groups, and is certainly endorsed by many residents – though these tend to be of the middle-class – eager to embrace a more cosmopolitan aesthetic and material standard of life. In this sense, aesthetic harmonization through contemporary, abstract art installations

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or global public art ‘events’ like the cow parade are welcomed as a sign of progress. As one retired British soldier in Londonderry told me: ‘It would be just nice to be able to drive somewhere and say, “That’s normal. It’s like anywhere else in the world”’.14 After years of conflict and strife, policymakers are understandably eager to cast off deeply entrenched community divisions and are likely well-meaning in their efforts to search for non-divisive options. Certainly, the transformation of sectarian hostilities and their manifestation in the urban landscape are vital components of post-conflict reconciliation processes. Moreover, the globalized consumption discourse embraced for many of these spaces is not, in and of itself, necessarily a bad thing. After all, the global only materializes through local embeddedness. And as Chapter 3 pointed out, spaces produced for mass consumption do not preclude creative acts by citizens, with globalized discourses appropriated and transformed for vernacular identities and individual uses. That said, the elevation of a globalization/consumption discourse holds the potential to alienate and exclude through its largely uncritical embrace of an increasing, globally interchangeable, cultural-cosmopolitan aesthetic geared toward middle-class and high-spending ‘consumer citizens’. Not only does this tend to promote officially the privatization and depoliticization of public space while advancing the interests of a handful of multinational corporations in the urban landscape, it also threatens to marginalize (and/ or aestheticize) further the poor, the struggling middle-class and any other group unwilling or unable to meet its capital demands. Public space, in this regard, becomes public only insofar as the public it attracts is there to shop. Moreover, Bourdieu’s (1984) assertion that the field of art production is among the most predisposed to telegraph ‘distinction’ between social classes, therefore reinforcing social hierarchies and inequalities in social space, remains, in my view, an accurate assessment. Though open to some appropriation, the ‘new spaces’ geared for global investors and tourism for the most part diminish or simplify local identities and ultimately threaten the viability of small and non-multinational businesses, further ensuring dependence on the whims of global capital networks with their notoriously short attention spans and volatile labour markets. Small businesses in Derry city centre, already hit hard during the Great Recession, will likely undergo a further blow should a 40,000-square-foot Asda superstore, a subsidiary of the U.S. retail behemoth Walmart, with a 1,000-space car park, be built on the edge of town, as has been proposed (Derry Journal 2011a; Derry Journal 2012b). The future for many Derry city-centre businesses, such as Austins Department Store, which actually make the place unique and interesting to visit, appears uncertain. As Zukin (1998: 837) avers, ‘Cities’ receptivity to “destination retail” sites and entertainment facilities [has] lured them … into dependence on property developers and multinational

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corporations that share the same, endlessly repeated vision … that reduce[s] the uniqueness of urban identities even while claims of uniqueness grow more intense’. Inevitably, these sanitized landscapes of consumption also paper over social division and the economic realities of deindustrialization – in other words, ‘the obvious realism of social exclusion and sectarianism’ (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 11). This is where many of the contradictions in the symbolic landscapes of a ‘new’ Northern Ireland arise. For as part of a narrative of reconciliation, public art is called on to participate in peace or social work, while simultaneously attracting tourists and the globalized consumption of space.15 Processes designed to promote peace are inseparably linked to processes to promote capital attraction. As the opening paragraph of the government’s community relations strategy makes clear, due to the peace process, ‘[w]e have seen Northern Ireland become somewhere investors consider a viable business base; where tourists want to visit’ (OFMDFM 2013: 10). For policymakers, the culture discourse further offers an opportunity to depoliticize the entrenched identities of the sectarian landscape by appropriating them for the purposes of a consumption discourse. According to one BBC News account, a newly proposed Cultural Awareness Week, aimed at celebrating identity and ‘mutual respect’ between cultures, is also intended to ‘be marketed both at home and beyond Northern Ireland’ (Devenport 2013). Simultaneously, landscapes of troubled history and the respective heritages of conflicted ethno-national communities are repackaged as yet another consumable good, evidenced in the widespread commodification of ‘dissonant heritage’ (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) practices. In Northern Ireland, this has included a state-funded effort to reframe the 12th of July loyalist commemorations of the Battle of the Boyne as ‘Orangefest’ as well as a current push to highlight the shared aspects of Apprentice Boy history in a new visitor centre. The centrality of the ‘tourist gaze’ to the future economic and social sustainability of the province is now assumed in almost all official (and, increasingly, unofficial) discourse. As prominent South Belfast UDA leader Jackie McDonald explained, the viability of the shrinking loyalist working-class Sandy Row community where he worked hinged on its ability to develop a museum and conference centre that would ‘make this part of the tourist trail’ (McDonald, interview 2012). The hegemonic position of a commodified culture discourse has also led to a ‘performative’ turn in the public art event. During the years of this research, public art unveilings in Belfast evolved from rather bland civic occasions where the virtues of reconciliation and regeneration were championed (along with a side of sausage rolls) to, in some instances in 2012, full-on tourist happenings. The launch of a sculpture on the Lower Newtownards Road in East Belfast dedicated to the yardmen of the former Harland and Wolff shipyards

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saw schoolchildren dressed up in flat caps and scarves and posing with officials, before the gathering moved across the street to a church where pop-up stands advertised Northern Ireland’s 2012 tourist campaign and a singer belted out ‘My Heart Will Go On’, the Céline Dion theme song to the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster Titanic.16 Similarly, the Sandy Row ‘King Billy’ mural unveiling was accompanied by flute-playing Battle of the Boyne reenactors dressed in seventeenth-century military garb (O’Hara 2012). In city-centre spaces, unencumbered by so-called cultural baggage, the landscape continues its evolution into a site of Disneyfied civic identikit. A DSD master plan for Belfast’s Queen’s Quay area near the Odyssey Arena and Titanic Quarter envisions the permanent installation of a zipline across the Lagan River, linking an observation tower on the east bank of the river and Custom House Square in the city centre (Dougan 2012). In addition to residential space, restaurants and a four-star hotel, the area would feature an ‘urban gym’, a park and public art (Dougan 2012). In line with this development ethos, the Rank Group, a major European gambling outfit with whom former Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Richard Needham (an early force behind the province’s physical regeneration in the late 1980s and early 1990s) is affiliated, has continued to push plans to turn Belfast into a ‘mini Singapore,’ though tough local anti-gambling laws have as of 2014 stymied efforts at opening an ‘entertainment centre’ in Titanic Quarter or elsewhere in the city (Kilpatrick 2014). Moreover, at Royal Exchange, in Belfast city centre’s northeast quarter, yet another massive shopping complex, rivalling the size of Victoria Square, was green-lighted in September 2012 and is said to include retail/office space, apartments, cafes, a boutique hotel and an arts centre (Belfast Telegraph 2012a). More generally, plans are in the works to turn the city’s dilapidated north side near the Central Library into an ‘urban village,’ with a key focus of the development aimed at creating amenities and new housing for students at the University of Ulster’s York Street location (Stewart 2014), which is being massively expanded to accommodate the relocation of most of the university’s Jordanstown campus on the outskirts of Belfast into the city centre. Finally, at Belfast City Hall, a new memorial unveiled in April 2012 to those who perished on the Titanic makes no pretence as to its intended audience: The memorial is accompanied by a tourist information board that displays the official city brand logo and the web address of gotobelfast.com. Likewise, Derry’s Guildhall, home to council chambers and the mayor’s office, has also been reimagined as a destination for tourists. A multi-million-pound renovation saw the mayor’s parlour transformed into a tourist information point and the former council chambers into an exhibition space. According to a Derry City Council official, the city’s ‘premier building’ had successfully morphed into an ‘engaging and interactive visitor experience’ (quoted in Belfast Telegraph 2013a). Rather

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than note its civic function, then-Lord Mayor Kevin Campbell praised the revamped structure as an ‘iconic gateway … now linking the city centre to the Peace Bridge and Ebrington Square’ (quoted in Campbell 2013). So what sort of citizenship might these new symbolic landscapes foretell? As suggested in Chapter 6, the City of Culture discourse’s conflation of civic participation with a cultural tourism economy foreshadows an emerging consumer citizen-symbolic citizen dialectic. Here, symbolic citizens serve as extensions of the reimagined cultural landscapes they perform and service for the perusal of tourists or consumer citizens. In effect, these symbolic citizens are drafted to sell the spectacle of the city to the outside world. Case in point: ‘The Return of Colmcille’, a two-day City of Culture visual extravaganza by Frank Cottrell Boyce, the writer responsible for the London 2012 opening ceremony, relied on the voluntary participation of hundreds of local people to showcase the city’s ‘monastic superhero’ (Boyce, quoted in City of Culture 2013). During the event, organizers even distributed a map of the walled city, rechristened as ‘Colmville’, a place where nearly every street and structure was transformed into a consumable, performative experience. In this fantasy-style remapping of civic space, culture, not politics (potentially disruptive to image of place), was invoked as the primary forum for civic engagement. If this sounds far-fetched, a recent push in South Africa to create a ‘citizen formula’ offers a hint as to how this might play out in practice. There, the Department of Arts and Culture has teamed with Brand South Africa, a government-funded agency dedicated to developing and implementing ‘a pro-active marketing and communications strategy for South Africa’, to produce ‘the Formula of a South African’ to ‘be expressed in an array of art forms’ located throughout the country (Brand South Africa 2012). To these ends, the government initiative enlisted the help of a company that ‘specialises in discovering the DNA of organisations’, such as Deloitte and Ernst and Young, to conduct research on the virtues needed to ‘make the country a better place’ (Brand South Africa 2012). Citizens were to be engaged in the effort through online ‘votes’ cast for a predetermined list of possible civic virtues (Brand South Africa 2012). In echoes of the City of Culture discourse, the South African initiative merges culture, industry and tourism with the branding strategies of global business concerns to create a civic formula for the optimal marketing of the nation through the appropriation of its own citizens, thereby consolidating the civic identikit of flows and place. As Dudu Nchoba, then-chief director of social cohesion at the Department of Arts and Culture, asserted, public art exhibits would be commissioned to ‘engage both the right and left brain thereby effectively instilling these principles at a subconscious level’ in members of the public (quoted in Bizcommunity 2012).

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With nations now ranked by ‘brand’ appeal, the South African initiative attests to the dominance of global capital institutions over political structures, and reflects the increased privatization of the public realm, including a reliance on business models and public-private partnerships to carry out public goals. The nation branding process hinges on ‘monitoring and mobilizing the population’ (Volcic and Andrejevic 2011: 600), and as has been demonstrated in Northern Ireland, increasingly relies on ‘participatory and collaborative’ ventures to accomplish capital goals (ibid.: 600). Incidentally, the ‘branded’ cultural citizen is also the ideal symbolic citizen needed to sell place to the consumer citizen. After all, the ultimate aim of the citizenship project is to produce “a formula for how we as South Africans should behave” (Formula SA 2012; emphasis added). In South Africa, this linkage among brand, symbolic landscape and citizen-subject can be traced back to 1998 when the then-Minister of Tourism and Environmental Affairs noted in reference to the construction of new heritage sites, ‘We cannot say that our campaign to market SA to potential British tourists can be separated from nation building’ (quoted in Marschall 2010: 320). Accordingly, the more recent South African citizenship project, like the ongoing reimagining of Northern Ireland, reinforces the global importance of symbolic landscapes and the cultural expressions these contain in branding people, places and nations for marketing purposes. In postnational urban milieus defined by transnational flows and ethnic competition, global capital has proved relentless in its ability to claim new territory and spaces for its purposes in both the physical and virtual realms. The rapidly expanding power of social media platforms to shape consumption patterns and social habits is symptomatic of the wholesale capitalization of connectivity (Van Dijck 2013) so crucial to neoliberal economic and governance regimes. Just as much of the public art considered in this book sought to route bodies and capital through space in situ and across borders (by marketing the city to a host of potential foreign audiences), the new virtual public spheres ‘engineer the sociality’ of everyday (private) life for corporate interests (Van Dijck 2013: 12). The city as civic identikit, much like the commodified and engineered sociality of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, further obliterates boundaries between public and private spheres, appropriating space and (often willing) bodies for the fulfilment of capital needs, in a world where civic authority ‘outside of security’ (Bauman 2005: 11) mostly defers to the ‘mediation of the market’ (ibid.: 107). Fittingly, perhaps, one of the final ‘happenings’ of Derry’s UK City of Culture year was the unveiling of a Culture Wall mural, sponsored by Tourism Ireland, which drew on the contributions of 27,000 individuals’ Facebook profile pictures, to create a mosaic of ‘positive’ symbols referencing ‘hope’ and reconciliation. The

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mural was displayed on the side of a Primark shop (Londonderry Sentinel 2013d). Indeed, the visual trajectory of the urban landscape offers insight into the ongoing restructuring of twenty-first-century civic life into highly surveilled, consolidated and choreographed consumption flows. Here the relationship among self, capital and place merges into total commodity. A world where everything can be uploaded is, in effect, also a world where every aspect of place and space is for sale to the highest bidder. This raises a number of questions for further cross-disciplinary investigation. How do landscapes of consumption, which nearly all landscapes become in tourist-oriented economies such as Northern Ireland, affect the identity of those who populate them? What relationship exists between performativity and subjectivity in such locales? Can place identities constructed for a global market also address the concerns of citizens and possibly even help to manage conflict in the mutual interest of tourism promotion? Or will the wide-scale reproduction of harmonized civic identikit landscapes ultimately militate against the very tourism these landscapes aim to attract, and potentially precipitate a return to conflict alongside declining economic fortunes? The answers to these questions remain beyond the scope of this book. However, the new symbolic landscapes of Northern Ireland indicate that future outcomes are anything but certain, and subject to a complex of unpredictable forces. Dominant spatial discourses may physically shape space through particular symbolic images, artefacts and other visual ‘technologies’, but their reception is never entirely foreseeable, and no single result is guaranteed. The research presented here has shown that even the most controlled consumerist landscapes are open to counter-interpretation and reappropriation. Likewise, cultural heritage, given its relationship to memory, identity and territoriality, may just as easily defy attempts to ‘civilize’ it for capital purposes – as the sometimes-violent loyalist flag protests that rocked Belfast in late 2012 and 2013 have evidenced. Personal identities, whether political, cultural, religious or associational, have a way of reasserting themselves even, and perhaps particularly, in the face of global capital pressures. The struggle to define and negotiate the city’s public spaces remains an ongoing project perpetually in the process of ‘becoming’. Much of this research has offered a critical assessment of the role of public art in Northern Irish regeneration and social reconciliation initiatives. Certainly, across the five case studies examined, varying degrees of failure to meet objectives were evident. Time may eventually set these failings right. Just as some pieces of public art disappear from consciousness, others may grow in affection or social importance. For instance, Bahrain’s Pearl monument, erected in 1982 to represent the Gulf Cooperation Council’s pearl industry heritage, later became a rallying point for pro-democracy, anti-

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government demonstrators during the Arab Spring protests and a de facto symbol of resistance before its brutal destruction by Bahraini security forces in March 2011 (Bronner 2011). As such, all artworks, postproduction, remain part of both intended and unintended processes. Rather than signal the need for a blanket rejection of public art practice in urban development, these provisional outcomes highlight the importance of capital pressures, funding and commissioning processes and human talent, as well as a host of unpredictable factors in revitalization efforts. At its best, public art can delight, inspire and on occasion serve as a focal point for social criticism and shared identification. But the ‘art on the frontlines’ approach, apparent in so many of these case studies, has clearly led to significant disjunctions between image and social reality, disjunctions that have significant implications for city governance, including the success of council branding campaigns. These disjunctions are exacerbated by a fractured and incoherent post-conflict policy landscape, as well as by myriad uncoordinated, and hastily implemented, funding streams that have resulted more often than not in artworks of dubious distinction and thin social relevance. Easily replicable and highly derivative civic identikit art and architecture is nevertheless declared ‘iconic’ or ‘world-class’ by officialdom and praised for its connection to ‘community’. This has created an obvious credibility gap, with even highly sensitive redevelopment projects, such as the proposed peace centre at the former Maze prison site – which, as of this writing, remains at impasse – subject to criticism that designs ‘failed to reflect the unique complexities and nuances of the Troubles’, and instead evoked an aesthetic similar to one that architect Daniel Libeskind had earlier replicated for ‘casinos and residential developments, including apartment blocks in Singapore and shopping centres in Las Vegas and Switzerland’ (Independent 2013). Finally, urban regeneration projects work best when rooted in a vibrant civic/civil society. One of the most prominent recent examples of public art in urban revitalization, the High Line Park, opened in 2009 along a derelict rail line on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, was a resident-generated idea that received public funding but has been maintained predominantly through a private foundation of committed, and extremely well-connected, locals. In its short existence, the park has served as a platform for an eclectic mix of engaging and provocative artistic interventions and has also become a major tourist attraction. This points to the centrality of intellectual capital and influential urban social networks (best-supported through education and sustainable economic development, as opposed to cursory art workshops with disadvantaged groups or blockbuster flagship pieces intended to generate media headlines) to broader regeneration work. Rather than spur a rush to copy – in effect appropriate the park for civic identikit purposes, as has already been the case elsewhere (Taylor 2010) – the High Line should

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offer cause for both reflection and caution among municipal authorities. That public art’s civic benefits are significantly captive to the quality of the processes, social networks and intellectual vision behind its creation is also far too often unacknowledged. And though social inclusion and urban symbolic position can potentially be enhanced by public art programmes, such efforts are just as likely to result in gentrification and social exclusion, as criticism of the High Line’s impact on less-upscale residents and small businesses has argued (Moss 2012). Thus, the outcomes of public art programmes are inevitably dependent on a web of factors difficult to identify in isolation and even more problematic to duplicate effectively. Like many spheres of endeavour, separating the public art chicken from the egg in the regeneration recipe remains a Sisyphean task. Notes 1. Personal observation, 6 March 2012. 2. The cow parade event in Belfast was commissioned as part of the ‘Patterns of the

3.

4. 5.

6.

City – Belfast City Dressing Plan’, first initiated in 2011. According to the city council, the plan aims to ‘build the city and Northern Ireland brand and promote Belfast as a vibrant and welcoming city for our visitors and inspire further visits and investment whilst also instilling pride and confidence in our people. The plan will not only enhance the vibrancy of the city but will also incorporate messages and communications’ (BCC 2013). While the visual culture of diverse ethnic groups has been used to neutralize previously socially segmented events such as the Saint Patrick’s Day and Lord Mayor’s parades in Belfast, both now almost entirely defined by colourful multicultural aesthetics, the post-conflict ethnic influx has also created new conflict in some areas. In July 2012, for instance, Polish flags and election posters for a Polish political candidate were burned on loyalist bonfires in East Belfast (Meredith 2012). And in early 2014, a rash of anti-Polish violence further swept the area, when seven homes of Polish immigrants were attacked (McDonald 2014). William Dickson (Blackstaff Community Development Association chairman), email message to author, 29 August 2012. Among those retained were the popular sculpture of Marx and Engels located in Berlin’s central Mitte district and the monument to Weimar-era Communist Party leader Ernst Thälmann in Prenzlauer Berg. The Marx and Engels statue remained due to a government-established commission recommendation that it be preserved on the basis of its decidedly non-monumental presentation; Thälmann avoided destruction due to popular local protest in favour of retaining the monument to the martyred communist (killed at Buchenwald) as well as due to the sheer cost of the massive sculpture’s removal (Ladd 1997). This was not the case, however, when it came to engaging with Germany’s Nazi past in public space, an effort that has involved painstaking deliberation and public debate (Forest and Johnson 2002). The resulting profusion of museums, monuments, memorials and other artworks that confront issues of Nazi persecution and the Jewish Holocaust led Ladd to describe the ‘new’ Berlin as nothing short of an ‘open-air museum of horrors’ (Ladd 2000: 20).

Conclusion

193

7. Marschall (2010a) has also linked an evolving government policy on multicul-

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

turalism, which more recently has shifted away from the rainbow nation ideal in favour of African nationalism, to the introduction of specific public artworks in Durban’s symbolic landscape. The convergence of identity, economy and public art was on display in a January 2014 South Africa Tourism Board Facebook ad that featured a prominent public art image of Mandela in Howick KZN alongside the assertion: ‘He changed South Africa and South Africa will change you’. Haas, the Afrikaans word for haste, also means rabbit. In the days leading up to the tenth anniversary commemorations of the genocide, an event expected to draw thousands, 35kg of explosives were discovered in two locations near the memorial site (ISN Security Watch 2005). The Windsor Park football stadium not far from the Broadway Roundabout on the Boucher Road is undergoing a multi-million-pound government-funded redevelopment and expansion, and is due to be completed by late 2015 (Beacom 2014). The ultimate impact of the stadium, which has been a fixture in the landscape since the early 1900s, remains to be seen. Tonya McMullan, email message to author, 3 June 2012. Ronan Corrigan, email message to author, 3 September 2012. Interview with Londonderry resident, 14 April 2011. In 2009, Belfast City Council merged its culture and arts unit with its tourism development unit to form the Tourism, Culture and Arts unit, under the management of Kerrie Sweeney, a former NITB official. Wheeler noted, ‘I started feeling sort of the arts side of it was getting a bit more kind of marginalized, and the emphasis was very much on tourism. And any art that was created had to be some sort of tourist mapping. … I had to keep having meetings to see where exactly on a map each of these pieces were to make trails and all this jazz’ (Wheeler, interview 2011). Personal observation, 28 March 2012.

 Appendix

Interview Profiles

Table 1. Interviews Per Case Study Case Study

Semi-structured Interviews*

Vox-pop Interviews

Rise/Broadway Roundabout Spirit of Belfast/Cornmarket Murals/Cupar Way Peace Wall Cenotaph/Diamond War Memorial Square Mute Meadow/Ebrington Barracks Total

12 6 25 9 9 61

37 12 15 34 85 183

Table 2. Profile of All Semi-structured Interview Respondents Category

Number of Subjects*

Public Sector Elected Officials Community/Voluntary/Charity Artists/Architects/Cultural Brokers Residents Total

12 4 18 15 13 62

*Not all semi-structured interview participants are referenced in this work, but their views inform the overall ethnography. In a few instances, the same respondent addressed more than one case study during a single interview or in multiple interviews, and is therefore counted twice in Table 1. Moreover, semi-structured interviews with Shankill residents are counted here, but not listed in the references due to requests for anonymity. Semi-structured interviews not explicitly related to a specific case study are not counted in Table 1, but are in Table 2.



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S Index

A A Shared Future (publication), 29, 32, 116n2 Adams, Dennis, 14–15; Siege (artwork), 15 Adams, Gerry, 102 AECOM (consultancy), 8, 74, 81, 90n6, 153 Africa, African, 82, 84–85, 86–87, 89, 90n12, 143, 178, 193n7; Kenya, 87; Mozambique, 6; Tanzania, 87. See also South Africa African National Congress, 177. See also Mandela, Nelson Afrikaans, Afrikaner, 193n9; Afrikaner Nationalist Party, 177 Albert II (Belgium), 125 Alliance Party (NI), 29, 42n14 ‘Angel of the Road’ (artwork), 97 Angelic, The (artwork), 52 Anglo-Irish Agreement, 27 Apprentice Boys of Derry, 25, 27, 123, 126, 127, 130–34, 136, 140n3, 140n16, 147, 156, 159, 167n4, 186; Memorial Hall, 24, 131, 136 Art in Public Places Research Group, 12 Arthur Square (Belfast), 19, 72, 77, 80, 90n3. See also Cornmarket Arts & Business NI, 42n11 Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 11, 13, 29, 31–32, 38, 44, 52–53, 66n7, 67n25, 79, 93, 98, 101, 150, 154– 156, 182; Art in Contested Spaces programme, 32; Art of Regeneration project, 32 Attwood, Alex, 80

B Bahrain, 190–91; Gulf Cooperation Council, 190 Baker, Eamonn, 126, 129, 140n8 Balkans, 179–81 Barcelona, 34, 113, 153 Barr, Glen, 125–26, 128, 130 Battle of the Bogside, 25, 131 Belfast Agreement. See Good Friday Agreement Belfast Art College, 11, 12 Belfast City Centre Management, 77, 81, 84, 88 Belfast City Council, 11, 13, 28–29, 32, 43, 50, 54, 55, 63, 67n18, 90n12, 93, 99, 116n2, 169, 173, 182, 183, 193n15; Art for Arterial Routes programme, 32; Brighter Belfast programme, 32; Creative Legacies project, 32, 99, 101, 107; Peace and Reconciliation Action Plan, 116n2; Renewing the Routes programme, 32 Belfast City Hall, 23, 24, 29, 42n14, 65, 81, 84, 85, 89–90n1, 140n4, 170, 187 Belfast Telegraph, 55, 60, 61, 66n4, 82, 173 Belfast Thanksgiving Square Beacon (artwork), 36–37 Belfast Urban Motorway, 41n6, 48 Belfast: Streets Ahead project, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 80–81, 90, 183 Bentham, Jeremy, 162 ‘Beyond the Wall’ (exhibit and seminar series), 96

226

Bloody Sunday, 123, 143, 149, 156; Saville Inquiry, 156 Bogside (Derry), 15, 23–24, 123, 131, 135, 143 Bogside Artists, 15 Bogside Residents Group, 131 Bosnia and Herzegovina, Federation of, 179–80; Memorial to the Murdered Children of Besieged Sarajevo, 179; Mostar, 180; Omarska Concentration Camp, 180; Republika Srpska, 179, 180; Srebrenica-Potocˇari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, 179–80. See also Balkans Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 10, 185; ‘habitus’, 10, 19, 71, 79, 87, 152 branding, 4, 18, 33, 42n10, 47, 51, 53, 66n11, 85, 90n3, 147, 153, 165, 170, 177, 178, 182, 187, 188–91, 192n2 British Army, British military, 14, 20, 25, 31, 42n14, 94, 103, 123–24, 131, 134, 143, 149 Broadway Roundabout (Belfast), 19, 43, 45, 47–54, 61–65, 66n12, 66n14, 76, 151, 181–82, 193n11, 194 Buttress, Wolfgang, 44, 52, 56, 57–59, 62, 63, 66n11, 66–67n14, 67n17; Venus Rising (artwork), 63. See also Rise C Campbell, Gregory, 126, 131, 160 Campbell, Kevin, 188 Canada, 141n24, 150, 168n24; Halifax, 150 capital, capitalism, 2, 4, 6–7, 9, 16–17, 21, 30, 33, 36, 40–41, 43, 45–47, 49, 51, 69, 70–71, 79, 88–89, 90n7, 94, 144, 146, 162–66, 170, 172, 184– 86, 189–91; cultural capital, 152; intellectual capital, 191; symbolic capital, 7, 47, 153, 165 Carpenter, Ed, 50, 63, 66n14; Trillian (proposed artwork), 50–51, 66n14 Carson, Edward, 23, 92 Castells, Manuel, 8, 19, 45, 49, 51, 65; ‘space of flows’, 8, 16, 19, 45–46, 49–54, 55–56, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66n14, 151–52, 154–55, 173; ‘space of places’, 45, 47–49, 54–56, 59–61, 63, 65, 66n14, 152, 155

Index

CastleCourt shopping centre, 68, 72, 84, 90n2 Catholics (NI), 2, 15, 18, 20, 21nn3–4, 23, 25–28, 31, 35, 38–40, 41n2, 41n4, 41n8, 42n16, 43, 45, 48–49, 54, 59, 60–61, 64, 65, 65n1, 84, 89, 90n2, 91n17, 92, 94–95, 98, 102, 107, 109–12, 114, 116n5, 116n20, 120, 122–28, 130–35, 137, 141n23, 143, 148–49, 159, 160, 167n1, 167n6, 173, 184 Cherry, Lesley, 100–101 Christo, 176 citizens, citizenship, 2, 3–4, 9, 20–21, 51, 64, 70–72, 73, 77, 78–80, 126– 27, 144, 145, 147, 153, 154–55, 158, 160–166, 168n24, 171, 172, 184–85, 188–90; consumer citizen, 33, 70–72, 78–82, 152, 158, 162–63, 172, 184–85, 188–89; symbolic citizen, 9, 144, 163–67, 166, 168n24, 188–89 City Centre Initiative (Derry), 133, 140n14 Cityside (Derry), 26, 118, 119, 131, 133, 142–44, 148 civic identikit, 7–9, 14, 17, 19–21, 47, 62–64, 69, 74, 77, 89, 138, 152, 153, 156, 158, 165, 169–193; of flows, 8, 17, 63, 150, 156, 158, 165, 172, 188; of place, 8, 17, 20, 99, 113–15, 138, 150, 173 Coley, Nathan, 181; ‘A Place Beyond Belief’ (billboard installation), 181 Colgan, Pat, 30, 99, 169 Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 120 communists, Communist Party, 122, 140–141n22, 175–77, 192n5 consumer, consumption, 1, 3, 7, 9, 16, 18, 19, 20, 31, 33, 35, 40, 46, 68–89, 97, 113, 144, 150, 151–53, 158, 162–63, 170–73, 175, 184–86, 188–90. See also under citizens, citizenship Cornmarket (Belfast), 69–89, 90n3, 90n7, 91n15, 151, 153, 182, 194. See also Arthur Square Corrigan, Caoimhín, 166 Corrigan, Ronan, 51, 52, 53, 62, 74– 76, 77, 80, 81, 90n7 Cottrel-Boyce, Frank, 188 Cow Parade, 169–71 Creative Exchange (art collective), 100 Croats, 179–81

Index

227

Cromwell, Oliver, 1, 2 Culture Company, 141n28, 148, 159– 60, 162, 165–66, 168n25 Cupar Way (Belfast), 97, 104, 105, 108, 112, 115; peace wall, 92–93, 94–97, 99–100, 104–5, 108–13, 116n5, 117n34, 141n27, 151, 182, 183, 194 Custom House Square (Belfast), 31, 187

Glasgow, 145–46; Liverpool, 145, 146, 148, 162 European Union, 11, 30, 31, 32, 38, 42n9, 43n99, 92–93, 97, 102, 116n2, 125, 137, 140n5, 142, 149, 160, 170; Programme for Peace and Reconciliation, 140n5. See also PEACE Ex-Prisoners Interpretive Centre, 93, 104–5, 108

D Davidson, Iain, 52 Davis, David, 118, 123 Deane, Eamonn, 23, 126, 127, 129, 130 Deane, Seamus, 118, 126 Democratic Unionist Party, 1, 21n7, 29, 126, 173 Department for Social Development, 31, 32, 36, 48, 50, 51, 52, 55, 59, 62, 66n4, 66n7, 72–82, 149, 156, 173, 175, 182, 187 Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (NI), 92, 156, 166 Department of the Environment (NI), 11–12; Belfast Development Office, 12 Derry City Council, 13, 15, 28, 32, 40 Derry Tourist Office, 159, 160 Devenney, Maurice, 125 Diamond War Memorial, 18, 20, 23, 118–141, 149, 151, 172, 184, 194 Disney, ‘Disneyization’, 8, 63, 170, 187 Doherty, Willie, 13 ‘Draw Down the Walls’ programme, 96 Drumcree conflict, 27 Duffy, Rita, 117n52; Banquet (artwork), 177n52 Duggan, Geraldine, 77, 84, 88 Durkan, Mark, 126, 160 Durkan, Mo, 32, 149, 150, 154, 164

F Falls Road (Belfast), 27, 47–48, 55, 58, 65n1, 67n20, 92, 116n5 Families Beyond Conflict, 100, 101, 102 First World War/Great War, 119– 20, 124, 126–27, 140n8, 173; Battle of Jutland, 35; Battle of Messines, 124, 125, 130; Battle of the Somme, 92, 124, 125, 140n4; and memorialization, 20, 121–24, 125–28, 139, 140n13, 184; Remembering: Our Shared Legacy from the First World War (publication), 127 Fleming, John, 158; Grass Blades (artwork), 158 Fort George (Derry), 31 Foster, Norman, 176 Foucault, Michel, 71, 162 Fountain Estate, 124, 126, 133, 163 Foyle River, 31, 118, 142, 152 Fuller, Buckminster, 63, 67n26

E Eastwood, Colum, 119, 128, 159 Ebrington Barracks, 20, 31–32, 36, 142–68, 194. See also under regeneration Ebrington Square, 144, 151, 157, 158, 161, 169, 184, 188 8th Infantry Brigade (British Army), 143 Elizabeth II, 125 European Capitals/Cities of Culture, 33, 145–46, 162, 164–65, 167;

G Gailey, Laura Marion, 140n8 Gateshead (UK), 53, 153–54; Gateshead Millennium Bridge, 153 George, Dan, 77 Germans, Germany, 89, 105, 119, 125, 175–76, 192; Berlin, 112, 175–77, 192nn5–6; German Democratic Republic, 176; German Federal Republic, 176; and post-unification regeneration, 175–77; Weimar Republic, 175, 192n5 Girdwood army barracks, 38–39. See also under regeneration Glencairn Youth Initiative, 100–102, 107 globalization, 3, 5, 7, 13, 14, 16–17, 18, 19, 36, 71, 73–74, 83, 87, 97, 113, 115, 144, 150–51, 153, 158, 165, 185–86

228

glocalization, 7–8, 19–20, 47, 55, 59, 63, 89, 152, 170 Glorious Revolution, 4ln4, 173 Golden Teapot, 155 Good Friday Agreement/Belfast Agreement, 2, 19, 21n3, 21n6, 28–29, 31, 36, 38, 39–40, 69, 72, 96, 97–98, 100, 124, 126, 127 Gormley, Anthony, 13–14, 53; Angel of the North (artwork), 53–54, 153; Sculpture for Derry Walls (artwork), 13–14 graffiti, 10, 19, 47, 59, 64, 67n28, 74, 93, 99, 103, 104–8, 109, 112–13, 124, 135, 177, 183 Gramsci, Antonio, 9 Great War. See First World War Greater Shankill Partnership, 92, 99, 100, 104, 108, 111 Greer, Trevor, 49, 60 grobalization, 7–9, 63, 170 Guevara, Che, 27 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 34 Guildhall, Guildhall Square (Derry), 32, 142–43, 156, 157, 158, 160, 187 H Haass, Richard, 29, 38 Hanson, David, 76 Harland and Wolff, 31, 32, 34–35, 186 Harte, Paddy, 125, 136, 130 Harvey, David, 5, 33, 46–47, 63 Heritage Lottery Fund, 35, 126, 127, 138, 141n29 Hewitt in the Frame (artwork), 18, 99–104, 108–11, 113–15, 117n41, 172, 183 Hewitt, John, 93, 99–101, 107, 115. See also Hewitt in the Frame Hillen, Seán, 38 Holywell Trust, 126, 127, 130, 135, 138 Hungary, 175; Budapest, 176; and post-socialist public art, 175-76; Statue Park, 176 hunger strikers, hunger strikes, 12, 26, 38, 101, 116n11. See also Maze Prison Hunter, Peter, 30, 36, 76 Husbands, Tim, 51, 53 I identity, 4, 5–6, 16, 27, 29, 36, 41n8, 45, 47, 51, 63, 64, 69, 72, 77, 82, 93, 97–99, 101–2, 108–9, 111, 113–

Index

15, 120, 127, 130, 138, 143, 148, 152–53, 155, 170, 175, 177, 180, 181, 184, 186, 190, 193n8; building/ construction of, 17, 18, 46–47, 149, 163; civic, 3, 99, 181; Commission on Identity, Culture and Tradition, 29; communal, 101–3; cultural, 29, 121; national, 5, 84, 177; of place, 8, 34, 152, 181–84 ‘If Walls Could Talk’ project, 92–93, 108; Changing Faces (artwork), 93, 116n13; The Face (artwork), 93 Ilex (urban regeneration company), 31, 32, 148–49, 152, 154, 156–57, 164, 166, 167n6 International Fund for Ireland, 32, 116n2 ‘International Meeting of Styles’ event, 104–7 International School for Peace Studies, 126, 130 INTERREG (EU funding programme), 30, 42n9 Irish (language), 39, 42n14, 173 Irish Free State, 23, 41n1 Irish Republic. See Republic of Ireland Irish Republican Army, 27, 124, 167n6; Provisional IRA, 16, 26, 27, 38, 48, 68–69, 76, 89n1, 123, 124, 136, 149, 159; Real IRA, 159, 167n16 J James II (England), 25, 41n4, 95, 123, 143 Jeanne-Claude, 176 Jenkinson, Peter, 154 jumpstyle, 83–84; Irish Jumpstyle (group), 83–87, 91n17 K Kelly, Bernie, 52 Kelly, Liam, 13 King Billy. See under William III Kinney, Liam, 55, 67n25 Kit (artwork), 32, 34, 42n11 Košice (Slovakia), 165 L Lagan River, 30, 34, 36, 187 Laganside Corporation, 30, 31, 36; Laganside Art Trails, 32 Landry, Charles, 8 Lefebvre, Henri, 4, 88, 123, 172 Libeskind, Daniel, 38, 191

Index

lieux de mémoire, 120, 122, 138. See also memory Lisburn, 38, 84, 90n12, 141n29 London 2012 Summer Olympics, 158, 168n24, 180, 188 Long Kesh. See Maze Prison Long, Naomi, 32 Low, Setha, 94; ‘social production of space’, 94, 97–99, 99–108, 113, 156; ‘social construction of space’, 72, 94, 99, 108–113, 152, 156–57 Lower Newtownards Road, 39, 182, 186 Lower Shankill Estate, 1; Lower Shankill Road, 99, 103 loyalism, loyalists (NI), 23, 25–28, 29, 38–39, 41n2, 47–48, 50, 54, 60, 65, 76, 92–93, 94–95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 108–9, 123, 125, 126, 130, 132–33, 139, 149, 183, 186, 190, 192n3. See also unionism, unionists Lundy, Robert, 123, 131–33, 140n16 M Magic Jug (proposed artwork), 80–81 Maiden City Festival (Derry), 147, 167n4 Mandela, Nelson, 109, 178–79, 193n8 March, Vernon, 119, 141n24 Marseilles, 165 Marx and Engels statue (Berlin), 192n5 Maskey, Alex, 140n4 Maze Prison, 38, 141n29, 191; H blocks, 38, 136. McAleese, Mary, 125 McAvera, Brian, 13–14 McCausland, Nelson, 173 McCracken, Henry Joy, 91 McDermott, Stella, 129, 141n29 McDonald, Jackie, 186 McDonough, Roisín, 44 McElhinney, Mary, 126 McGonagle, Declan, 13, 154–55, 162 McGuinness, Martin, 38, 46, 124, 160 McKinney, Noirin, 150, 154, 155 McLuhan, Marshall, 110, 112 McMenamin, Brendan, 13, 15, 149, 152–54, 164 McMullan, Tonya, 183 Melville, Kerry, 54, 66n4 memorialization, 121, 156, 167n6, 179, 184 memory, 4–5, 6, 36, 62, 90n7, 97, 109, 120–22, 124, 129, 134, 137–39, 143, 176, 179, 190; collective, 122,

229

124–25, 143, 179; public, 5; social, 126–27. See also lieux de mémoire Mittal, Lakshmi, 180 Moore, William, 127, 131, 133–34, 136 Morton, William, 128, 159 Multi Development UK, 72, 73, 76 murals, 1, 2, 11–12, 15, 26–27, 31, 39, 42n10, 48, 61, 90n12, 98–104, 107– 9, 111–12, 115, 116n5, 117n41, 117n52, 172, 174–75, 182, 183, 187, 189–90, 194. See also ‘If Walls Could Talk’ project; Re-Imaging Communities programme Murray, Ruby, 199 Museum of Free Derry, 131, 133 Mute Meadow (artwork), 18, 20, 32, 144, 150–58, 167n14, 184, 194 N National College of Art and Design (Dublin), 154 National War Memorial (Canada), 141n24 nationalism, nationalists (NI), 13, 15, 21n3, 21n6, 23, 25–27, 29, 39, 41nn2–3, 42n14, 47–49, 50, 54, 55, 65, 67n20, 90n2, 97, 119, 120, 122–28, 130, 131, 133, 137, 140n18, 141n24, 149, 154. See also republicanism, republicans Nazis, 140–141n22, 192n6 Nchoba, Dudu, 188 Needham, Richard, 187 neoliberalism, 4, 9, 162, 166, 189 New Belfast Group, 50, 51 New York City, 14, 45, 46, 89, 90n6, 170, 171, 187 Newborn (artwork), 181 Ní Chuilín, Carál, 166 Northern Ireland Assembly, 21n6, 29, 52, 97, 126, 148, 152 Northern Ireland Executive, 28. Northern Ireland Housing Executive, 39, 42n5, 55, 59, 61, 66n4 Northern Ireland Office, 11, 42n15, 94 Northern Ireland Tourist Board, 81, 193n15 O Ó Donnghaile, Niall, 44 Oboussier, Claire, 152–54. See also Mute Meadow Odyssey Arena, 30, 63, 187 Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister, 28–29, 116n2,

230

Index

150; Together: Building a United Community (publication), 29 Omagh bombing memorial, 38 One Regeneration Plan (publication), 31, 148, 150, 163, 168n26 Orange Order, 25, 27–28, 38, 41n8, 68, 101–2, 126, 131 Orchard Gallery (Derry), 13, 154 ‘Our Time, Our Place’ (tourist campaign), 160, 161, 169

Q Queen’s University Belfast, 46, 81

P Paisley, Ian, 21n7, 46 Paisley, Rhonda, 13, 21n7 Parades Commission, 28, 29 Park Centre (Belfast), 47, 61, 64, 65, 67n20 PEACE (EU funding programmes), 30, 42n9, 60, 116n2, 140n5, 170 Peace Bridge, 26, 31, 142–44, 148, 150, 153–54, 157–58, 160, 184, 188 peace lines, peace walls, 18, 20, 25, 29, 40, 41n6, 49. See also under Cupar Way People’s Gallery (Derry), 15 Phaophanit, Vong, 152, 156. See also Mute Meadow Phoenix Rising (proposed artwork), 76–77 Pogacˇnik, Marko, 129 Poland, Polish, 59, 143, 192n3 Police Service of Northern Ireland, 56, 60, 61, 65, 84, 88, 118, 158, 183 post-conflict, 1, 9, 15, 18, 20, 21n2, 31, 33, 40, 46, 61–62, 64–65, 87, 94, 98, 107, 120, 130, 133, 136–39, 144, 154, 160, 162, 172, 177, 192n3; landscape, 30, 32, 139, 191; public art practice in international contexts, 175–81; reconciliation, 133, 137, 147, 185; regeneration, 94, 172, 173; society, 17, 69, 172; state, 2, 173, 181; symbols, 30, 37, 56; space, 162, 180 postmodern, postmodernity, 4, 37, 46, 62–64, 171 power, 3, 4–7, 9–10, 20, 21n3, 21n6, 23, 28, 45, 46–47, 61, 70, 72, 86, 97, 98, 113, 120–23, 131, 137, 139, 179, 181, 189 Pristina (Kosovo), 181 privatization, 33, 34, 71, 79, 89, 162, 185, 189 Protestants (NI), 1, 2, 18, 20, 21n4, 23, 25–27, 31, 35, 38–39, 40, 41n2,

R Ramsey, Pat, 125 reconciliation, 2, 16, 18, 30, 42n9, 61, 92, 98, 105, 116n2, 121, 128, 130, 139, 140n5, 142, 144, 147, 150, 151, 164, 172, 173, 175, 177–80, 186, 189, 190; discourse, 20, 121, 124, 128–29, 137–38, 149, 152, 170, 184. See also under postconflict; South Africa regeneration, 10, 12, 18, 19, 30, 32, 34, 40, 49, 50–51, 53–54, 58–59, 66n4, 69, 71, 72–74, 79, 90n3, 92–93, 94, 116n5, 145, 150, 152–54, 156–58, 162–63, 165, 172, 174, 182–83, 186–87, 190–92; culture-led, 7–8, 20, 33; and Ebrington barracks, 36, 148, 149; economic, 7, 145, 182; and Girdwood army barracks, 38; urban, 7, 9, 31, 89, 173, 191 Regional Development Strategy for Northern Ireland 2025 (publication), 33 Re-Imaging Communities programme, 31, 67n25, 98–99 Remembrance Sunday, 118–22, 124– 25, 127–28, 134, 135, 141n27 replicability, replication, 8, 46–47, 76, 88,114, 165, 170, 174, 191 Republic of Ireland, 6, 27, 41n1, 125 Republican Action Against Drugs, 158–60 republicanism, republicans (NI), 12, 13, 15, 23, 25–28, 38–39, 41n2, 46, 47–48, 54, 55, 60, 94, 95, 98, 104, 107, 109, 116n5, 116n11, 120, 122– 24, 128, 131, 135–37, 149, 158–60, 167n16. See also nationalism, nationalists Rise (artwork), 18, 19, 43–65, 66n11, 66–67n14, 151, 181–82, 184, 194; Rise: Belfast (short film), 62; Rise Monitoring Group, 60. See also Buttress, Wolfgang

41n4, 41n8, 42n16, 43, 45, 48–49, 54, 59, 60–61, 64, 65, 89, 90n2, 92– 95, 97, 98, 100, 102, 107, 108, 110, 113–15, 116n5, 119–20, 122–31, 133–37, 140nn3–4, 142, 143, 149, 159, 163, 167n1, 167n4, 173, 183, 184

Index

Ritchie, Margaret, 55, 77–78, 124 Roads Service, 49, 50, 52, 66n7 Robb, Deirdre, 51–53, 77, 100–102, 107–8, 116n11 Robinson, Peter, 1, 38, 160 Royal British Legion, 118–20, 126, 127 Royal Ulster Constabulary, 25, 27, 89–90n1, 131 Russia, 6, 176; Park of the Arts, 176; Peter the Great statue, 176; and post-socialist public art, 176 S Sandy Row (Belfast), 173–75, 186–87 Saphy, Rahim, 84–86 Scott, James, 120–121, 128, 136–37, 139 Second World War, 118, 141n29, 148, 150 sectarianism, 1, 2, 8, 12, 19–20, 21n2, 22, 26, 29, 31–32, 35, 45, 49, 54, 56, 67n28, 69, 72, 91n17, 97–100, 110–11, 114–15, 120, 128, 143, 172, 179, 185, 186 segregation, 26, 28, 39, 40, 41n6, 48, 64, 113–15, 139 Serbs, 179–81 Seymour, Dermot, 13 Siege of Derry, 25, 27, 133, 136, 140n3, 143; Siege Museum and Shared Space Visitors Centre (Derry), 136 Sinn Féin Party, 13, 29, 42n14, 44, 52, 55, 102, 135, 140n4 16th Irish Division (British Army), 122, 124–25 Small, Roz, 107, 183 Smith, Plum, 93, 104–5, 107–8 Social Democratic and Labour Party, 42n14, 124, 126, 128, 159 South Africa, 2, 6, 87, 109, 124, 177–79, 188, 189, 193n8; Blood River Monument (KZN), 177; Durban, 178, 193n7; King Shaka International Airport, 178; Ncome Monument, 177; Pretoria, 178; Tourism Board, 193n8; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 178 South African Heritage Resources Agency, 177 SouthWest Action Team, 59–61 Spero, Nancy, 14–15 Spiers, Roy, 50, 53, 66n7 Spirit of Belfast (artwork), 18, 19, 69–70, 72, 76–89, 91n16, 182

231

St. Columb’s Cathedral, 23, 127, 129, 155, 159 St. Columb’s Park, 143, 150, 158, 168n25 Stewart, Joe, 108 Stoker, Bob, 48, 51–52, 55, 60, 63, 65 subject, subjectivity, 3, 4, 10, 21, 70– 71, 83, 130, 184, 189–90 Sweeney, Kerrie, 193n15 Switzerland, 171, 191; Zurich, 171 T Temple, Trevor, 126, 127, 135, 139 territorialization, 4, 6, 40, 45, 83, 86, 98–99, 130, 190; sectarian, 8; spatial, 39; symbolic, 69 36th Ulster Division (British Army), 124–25 Titanic (film), 187 Titanic (ocean liner), 2, 32, 35, 42n10, 52, 90n5, 101, 182, 187 Titanic Belfast, 34, 35, 42n13, 53, 182 Titanic Quarter (Belfast) 31, 32, 34– 35, 40, 42n11, 51, 64, 187 Titanic Studios, 34 tourism, tourists, 2, 4, 6–9, 15, 18, 33–36, 38, 40, 42n9, 43, 44, 51, 53, 58–59, 62, 64, 66n11, 70, 78–79, 81, 90–91n12, 92, 94–97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111–13, 115, 116n5, 117n52, 131, 134, 138, 145, 147, 148, 150–53, 158, 160–67, 168n24, 169–70, 173, 176, 178, 182–83, 184–91, 193n15; cultural tourism, 7, 20, 33, 53, 101, 115, 152 tourist gaze, 9, 35, 97, 111, 115, 141n27, 186 tricolour (flag of the Irish Republic), 91n17, 95, 125, 130 Troubles, the, 2, 14, 22, 26, 30, 32, 37, 38, 41n6, 47, 59, 68, 90n1, 110, 123, 129, 131, 135, 143, 148–51, 160, 161, 167n6, 191 Tsereteli, Zurab, 176 TSWA (public art programme), 13–14 Turner Prize, 14, 148, 154, 166 U UK City of Culture, 20, 33, 40, 138, 142–167, 167n3, 168nn24–26, 188– 89; UK City of Culture Working Group Report, 167n3 Ulster Defence Association, 26, 49, 103, 111, 112, 125, 139, 186

232

Ulster Unionist Party, 29 Ulster Volunteer Force, 26, 39, 67n25, 95, 102–3, 108, 109, 111; Red Hand Commando, 104, 108; Shankill Butchers, 26 Union flag, Union Jack, 29, 65, 101, 115, 116n13, 122, 125, 130, 183 unionism, unionists (NI), 22–25, 27, 29, 38, 39, 41n2, 41n8, 42n14, 46, 48, 92, 93, 97, 120, 122–24, 125, 128, 131, 135, 137, 140n1, 143, 149, 160. See also loyalism, loyalists V vandalism, 107, 127, 135–36, 170, 178 Victoria Square (Belfast), 31, 51, 69, 72–75, 79–81, 83, 86, 88–89, 90n5, 187 Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington, D.C.), 74 Village, Greater Village (Belfast), 43, 48–49, 54–55, 56, 59–62, 65, 66n4, 67n25, 175; Greater Village Regeneration Trust, 59–60 Vineyard Church/Vineyard Movement, 86, 87–88; Healing on the Streets, 86

Index

Vittorio Emanuele II Monument (Rome), 5 W Walsh, Louise, 12; Monument to the Unknown Woman Worker (artwork), 12 Waterloo Place (Derry), 32, 155, 159 Waterside (Derry), 26, 119, 142, 149, 167n1 Westlink (Belfast), 41n6, 43, 48–50, 54, 60, 66nn7–8, 67n28, 97 Westminster, 29, 52 Wheeler, Eleanor, 52, 173–74, 193n15 William III (England), 25, 41n4, 95, 123; ‘King Billy’, 173, 187 Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland, 25, 123, 140n3, 143 WorldHost programme, 168n24 Y Yardmen, The (artwork), 186 Young, James, 9, 53, 137 Yugoslavia, 179–81 Z Zulu (people), 177–78