Christian Gottlob Neefe and the Bonn National Theatre, with New Light on the Beethoven Family

When the Bonn stage was closed after the death of Elector Max Friedrich in 1784, the director of its theatre company, Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Großmann, decided to leave the city to further his career elsewhere in the Rhinelands. During the next few years, he was kept informed about developments in Bonn by two of his erstwhile colleagues, Christian Gottlob Neefe and Nikolaus Simrock, whose correspondence paints a vivid picture of musical life in the city during the later 1780s. The new Elector, Maximilian Franz, permitted a visiting troupe to perform during Carnival each year, but repeatedly delayed the decision to re-establish a resident troupe. In 1787 Christoph Brandt, a singer in the Bonn Hofkapelle, attempted a home-grown initiative, perhaps to test the market for a new permanent company. Although this failed almost immediately, a single, well-attended public rehearsal of Monsigny’s Le Déserteur was given, in which Johann van Beethoven made what was probably his last stage appearance. In a letter dated 14 May 1787, Simrock rated his performance ‘zimlich gut’. In the event, a new Bonn troupe was not recruited until 1789, when it featured the young singer Magdalena Willmann. Neefe and his musical colleagues were relieved finally to be able to resume their theatrical careers.

The Contemporary Urban Condition: Understanding the Globalizing City as Informal, Contested, and Anchored.

In attempting to expand the vocabulary of urban description and understanding, and to offer a new composite conceptual framework for a more integrated urban planning and policy, this essay addresses the informal, contested, and anchored dimensions of the urban in turn; second, it seeks to increasingly link the three within the new global context; and finally, it attempts to draw these strands together in a proposed reconceptualization of the contemporary city within a world where the global is urbanizing and the urban is globalizing.

Bio-port Free Energy City

In an age of depleting oil reserves and increasing energy demand, humanity faces a stalemate between environmentalism and politics, where crude oil is traded at record highs yet the spotlight on being ‘green’ and sustainable is stronger than ever. A key theme on today’s political agenda is energy independence from foreign nations, and the United Kingdom is bracing itself for nuclear renaissance which is hoped will feed the rapacious centralised system that the UK is structured upon. But what if this centralised system was dissembled, and in its place stood dozens of cities which grow and monopolise from their own energy? Rather than one dominant network, would a series of autonomous city-based energy systems not offer a mutually profitable alternative? Bio-Port is a utopian vision of a ‘Free Energy City’ set in Liverpool, where the old dockyards, redundant space, and the Mersey Estuary have been transformed into bio-productive algae farms. Bio-Port Free Energy City is a utopian ideal, where energy is superfluous; in fact so abundant that meters are obsolete. The city functions as an energy generator and thrives from its own product with minimal impact upon the planet it inhabits. Algaculture is the fundamental energy source, where a matrix of algae reactors swamp the abandoned dockyards; which themselves have been further expanded and reclaimed from the River Mersey. Each year, the algae farm is capable of producing over 200 million gallons of bio-fuel, which in-turn can produce enough electricity to power almost 2 million homes. The metabolism of Free-Energy City is circular and holistic, where the waste products of one process are simply the inputs of a new one. Livestock farming – once traditionally a high-carbon countryside exercise has become urbanised. Cattle are located alongside the algae matrix, and waste gases emitted by farmyards and livestock are largely sequestered by algal blooms or anaerobically converted to natural gas. Bio-Port Free Energy City mitigates the imbalances between ecology and urbanity, and exemplifies an environment where nature and the human machine can function productively and in harmony with one another. According to James Lovelock, our population has grown in number to the point where our presence is perceptibly disabling the planet, but in order to reverse the effects of our humanist flaws, it is vital that new eco-urban utopias are realised.

Relaunching Titanic: Memory and Marketing in the New Belfast

Relaunching Titanic critically considers the invocation of Titanic heritage in Belfast in contributing to a new ‘post-conflict’ understanding of the city. The authors address how the memory of Titanic is being and should be represented in the place of its origin, from where it was launched into the collective consciousness and unconscious of western civilization.

Relaunching Titanic examines the issues in the context of international debates on the tension between place marketing of cities and other alternative portrayals of memory and meaning in places. Key questions include the extent to which the goals of economic development are congruous with the ‘contemplative city’ and especially the need for mature and creative reflection in the ‘post-conflict’ city, whether development interests have taken precedence over the need for a deeper appreciation of a more nuanced Titanic legacy in the city of Belfast, and what Belfast shares with other places in considering the sacred and profane in memory construction.

While Relaunching Titanic focuses on the conflicted history of Belfast and the Titanic, it will have lessons for planners and scholars of city branding, tourism, and urban re-imaging.

Three narratives in search of a city: Researching Belfast's 'post-conflict' transitions

This paper highlights the role of narratives in expressing, shaping and ordering urban life, and as tools for analysing urban conflicts. The paper distinguishes analytically between two prominent epistemological meta-narratives in contemporary urban studies and multiple ontological narratives in a given city-in this case Belfast. The first meta-narrative represents cities as sites of deepening coercion, violence and inequality and the second sees them as engines of new forms of transnational capitalism. Both are marked by the strategy of specifying 'exemplar' or 'paradigm' cities. The core of the paper addresses how these two meta-narratives map onto and interact with, three contemporary ontological narratives of urban regeneration in Belfast. We conceive of narratives-epistemological and ontological-as analytical tools and objects of analysis but also as tools for social action for competing political and economic interests and coalitions. While in the urban studies literature Belfast is typically studied as an exemplar 'conflict city', it is now being promoted as a 'new capitalist city'. In the context of post-Agreement Belfast, we explore not only the 'pull' of exemplar narratives but also resistances to them that are linked to multiple and hybrid senses of place in the city. We conclude that any significant move beyond the exigencies of rampant commodification or recurring inter-communal antagonism must firstly, encourage new forms of grassroots place-making and, secondly, reform of Belfast's (and Northern Ireland's) fragmented governance structures. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Exhibiting Maritime Histories: Titanic Belfast in the Post-Conflict City

The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 represents one of the most infamous maritime disasters in the history of shipping. Yet despite it entering the public imagination in the decades after its sinking, until recently it has all but been erased from the collective memory of the people of Belfast, the city in which it was built. In a post-conflict context, however, Belfast has begun to re-imagine the role of the ship in the city’s history, most particularly in the re-development of the docklands area and its designation as the Titanic Quarter, and through its landmark project the Titanic Belfast museum. This paper will trace the economic, social and political context from which the Titanic was built, and the role that this played in silencing any very public commemoration of its sinking until after the signing of the Belfast Agreement. The ‘story’ told in the new museum will be analysed from this perspective and will illustrate how the wounds of the Troubles continue to inform the interpretation of the city’s divided past.

THE ARTIFICIAL URINARY SPHINCTER - A NEW SOLUTION FOR INCONTINENT PATIENTS

Treatment of urinary incontinence with the artificial urinary sphincter has been available in centres such as London and Liverpool for a number of years. This service is now available in the department of urology of the Belfast City Hospital. Twelve patients have had successful implantation of an artificial urinary sphincter for urinary incontinence, and ten are now fully continent. One patient with Wegener's granulomatosis developed active disease in his urethra which has precluded activation of the device. One patient has had the device removed because of erosion into the urethra.

City of Dreams? Belfast, planning and the ‘myth’ of development

The future of Belfast is found in its plans – beginning with 1945 planning proposals to the recently adopted Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan, these documents have aimed to encourage and channel urban development processes to secure collective outcomes that enhance the public interest. Central to this objective has been the idea of ‘development’ and in this paper we interrogate the representation of this concept in the urban discourse of Belfast. We seek to do this by first exploring how ‘development’ and associated concepts are articulated in key spatial policy documents and then contrast these with examples of some of the key physical, spatial outcomes of economic processes that have occurred in the last ten years. The paper will review the dominant trajectories of urban change in Belfast, consider their implications and relate these to the official goals and aspirations represented in planning strategies and regeneration visions for the city. In doing this we draw on the recent work of Marcuse (2015) to identify how ideas of ‘development’ and ‘growth’ have been used to anonymise, harmonize and homogenise the outcomes of these spatial processes. The paper will conclude by considering how Belfast’s urban discourse acts to suppresses alternative visions of the city and explores the potential consequences of this for the new governance arrangements for planning in Belfast.

New Irish speakers and the ‘gaelicisation’ of Belfast

New Irish speakers in Belfast play a crucial, complex part in the revitalization and change of both the city and Irish within Northern Ireland. This paper examines the role of new Irish speakers in transforming Belfast, whose emergence from a post-conflict period involves a reassessment of communal cultural expressions. Markers of ethno-national identity are bitterly contentious locally, and yet increasingly celebrated, in line with international trends, as high status cultural forms and potentially profitable tourist attractions. Irish in Belfast currently occupies an ambiguous position: divisive enough for a sign reading ‘Happy Christmas’ in Irish to be experienced as an insult by some city councillors, yet a secure enough part of the establishment for a neighbourhood to be officially rebranded as the Gaeltacht Quarter.
When, how and where new Irish speakers use the language in Belfast has implications for the relationship of Irishness to the Northern Irish state and for the place of Belfast within regional frameworks across the UK, Ireland and Europe. Adult learners and young people exiting Irish medium education have an impact on life in Belfast beyond its small population of Irish speakers. Urbanisation fuelled by new speakers, which shifts the balance of Irish language resources and speakers away from traditional rural Gaeltacht areas and towards cities, also has implications for the language itself. Recent increase in new Irish speakers in Belfast is due to expansion in the Irish-medium sector as well as to adult learners, whose decisions contribute to the school expansion.
Urbanisation, multilingualism and intergenerational shift combine in Belfast to produce new linguistic norms. Moreover, in a minority language community where hierarchies of ‘authenticity’ are weighted towards the rural and the native speaker, where the rural and the native have traditionally been conflated, and where indigeneity is a central concept to contested nationalisms, the emergence of a self-confident, youthful Irish speaking community in Northern Ireland’s biggest city involves a recalibration of the qualities signifying ‘gaelicness’. As students, professionals, hobbyists and activists, new Irish speakers in Belfast occupy a vital position at the crux of changing ideas about place, language and identity.

New suburbia: designing in urban resilience by closing resource cycles

By utilising a research by design methodology, the paper develops a process-based and phased design to develop a new emergent form to these neighbourhoods, one in which new productive systems are embedded into the city, at a small-scales. These include a peak-load hydro-electric project in Ligoneal; a productive landscape in Glen Cairn and a city-wide energy refurbishment utilising neighbourhood waste streams.

The three projects illustrate different ways in which place-based solutions can enact urban transformation through a process of rigorous visualisation of process, and its attendant changes in content and form of the neighbourhood, These designs, based around a process-based strategy plan, allow for a roadmap for development to be created that could change the modus operandi of an area over a relatively short period of time,. The paper demonstrates that even modest investments of productive technologies at a local scale can fundamentally change the form and the economic and environmental operation of the city in the future, and create a new resilient city, one that can have resilience built-in. This resilience allows the neighbourhood to be less externally dependent on resources, economically active and more socially just.

Teenagers' Perceptions and Experiences of Belfast as a Divided City

In this ‘research project’ case study, we provide an empirical example of how quantitative and qualitative methods were combined within a single study and discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of our combined methodology which included questionnaires, photo-prompts and focus-group interviews. Our intention in using mixed methods was to enhance understandings of the meanings of space, place and territory on the everyday lives of young people growing up in Belfast. How do young people negotiate space in politically divided cities such as Belfast? Is territory important, and if so, why is it important? How do we construct an appropriate and relevant study design that can not only describe, but explain what place, space and territory mean to young people, and more importantly, how it impacts on their everyday lives? How useful is it to apply a mixed-methods approach to finding answers to these questions? We explain why and how we used a mixed-methods approach and illuminate some of the issues we encountered. We demonstrate how mixed methods can provide not just complementary but also new insights into the topic under investigation. We hope that the case study encourages you to experiment, or at least consider, the potential of using mixed methods.

Demand-side characterisation of the smart city for energy modelling.

This paper presents a new methodology for characterising the energy performance of buildings suitable for city-scale, top-down energy modelling. Building properties that have the greatest impact on simulated energy performance were identified via a review of sensitivity analysis studies. The methodology greatly simplifies the description of a building to decrease labour and simulation processing overheads. The methodology will be used in the EU FP7 INDICATE project which aims to create a master-planning tool that uses dynamic simulation to facilitate the design of sustainable, energy efficient smart cities.

PatchCity: Procedural City Generation using Texture Synthesis

PatchCity is a new approach to the procedural generation of city models. The algorithm uses texture synthesis to create a city layout in the visual style of one or more input examples. Data is provided in vector graphic form from either real or synthetic city definitions. The paper describes the PatchCity algorithm, illustrates its use, and identifies its strengths and limitations. The technique provides a greater range of features and styles of city layout than existing generative methods, thereby achieving results that are more realistic. An open source implementation of the algorithm is available.