This article explores how the design
and layout
of the urban environment can have significant social impacts on working class communities whose access to employment
and other necessary services depends largely on public transport
and safe walk-able streets. It does so by considering a case study
of Belfast. Although Belfast has a distinctive recent history as the site
of political violence
and territorial division, it also has a spatial configuration that emerged out
of a modernising roads
and redevelopment programme in the 1960s
and 1970s. However, an underst
anding
of contemporary Belfast, particularly its urban structure
and form, requires an analysis
of how the social impacts
of such ubiquitous regional
and urban
planning practices were not addressed. The article argues that a culture
of ¡®politically safe?bureaucratic inaction developed during the ¡®war years?has been sustained in the ¡®new democracy? In turn, this has had significant consequences for the functioning
of the city. Major areas
of derelict l
and around the city core together with the impediments created by regional road infrastructure have combined to create a doughnut city that, on the one h
and, facilitates a commuting middle class, while on the other, discriminates against the poorest inner city communities.
The article goes on to examine how an activist urban design group, known as the Forum for Alternative Belfast, has responded to these challenges. It focuses particularly on action-research undertaken during its 2010 Summer School which aimed to address issues of disconnection in inner North Belfast that affect some of the most territorialised and deprived communities in the city.