Driving the social divide: planning in Belfast reinforces the city’s segregation | Essay | Architectural Review
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Proving roads and urban planning can be as divisive as walls: twenty years since the peace process began Belfast remains a city disunited
Expanding around mills, shipbuilding and other industries, Belfast is a radial patchwork of arteries developed into streets, with tracts of terrace housing laid out in former fields and estate boundaries. It is a city largely without a plan but that once had spatial coherence and connectivity along its streets. To the visitor, Belfast may initially appear similar to many other UK cities both in its Victorian-era brick fabric and in its contemporary disparate developments. Yet one soon encounters the dominance of roads and a realisation that surface car parks are not the exception but a norm that surrounds and peppers the city at every turn. This is a city redesigned for the car and for commuters living in the wider suburban and metropolitan area. In this, Belfast shares the characteristics of many American cities.