The Belfast Victorian Terrace: A Sustainable Approach?

To help the building of new low-carbon housing, recent years have seen the widespread demolition of Victorian housing in UK cities. In this regard, Belfast is no different from its counterparts on the British mainland, where Compulsory Purchase Orders force people to sell and vacate their terraced homes to make way for newly constructed 'sustainable' housing. The global economic downturn has temporarily slowed down this process leaving many Belfast terraces now blocked up awaiting future demolition. This stay of execution is an unlikely but welcome opportunity to review and assess the true value to owner, streetscape and city of this important and common house-type. Important questions need to be asked. Should sound Victorian terraces be demolished? What is the genuine cost of demolition and replacement in terms of community and environment? With reference to case studies in a Belfast context, the argument will be made that new is not necessarily better, that the existing Victorian terrace is an important and valuable resource and one that, with intelligent intervention, offers a genuinely sustainable alternative to new-build housing.

Geography's medieval history: A neglected enterprise?

This paper examines the marginal place of ‘medieval geography’ in contemporary geographical scholarship. Over the past two decades, geographers' studies of the subject’s historiography have tended to focus mainly on ‘modern’ and ‘early-modern’ rather than medieval geographies. This contrasts with the early 20th century when ‘medieval geography’ was seen by geographers to be part of the discipline’s long history. Set within the context of current discussion on writing geography’s histories, the paper examines how geographers, and latterly historians, have sought to characterize and represent medieval geographies. This reveals that the subject of geography in the Middle Ages shared in the same fluidities and ambivalences that characterize geography today. The paper thus helps to challenge orthodox views of geography’s history, and argues that the connections and continuities that have shaped geography for over two millennia cautions us against taking a compartmentalized approach to historiographies of geography.

The Geography of Conflict and Death in Belfast, Northern Ireland

The conflict known as the oTroubleso in Northern Ireland began during the late 1960s and is defined by political and ethno-sectarian violence between state, pro-state, and anti-state forces. Reasons for the conflict are contested and complicated by social, religious, political, and cultural disputes, with much of the debate concerning the victims of violence hardened by competing propaganda-conditioning perspectives. This article introduces a database holding information on the location of individual fatalities connected with the contemporary Irish conflict. For each victim, it includes a demographic profile, home address, manner of death, and the organization responsible. Employing geographic information system (GIS) techniques, the database is used to measure, map, and analyze the spatial distribution of conflict-related deaths between 1966 and 2007 across Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland, with respect to levels of segregation, social and economic deprivation, and interfacing. The GIS analysis includes a kernel density estimator designed to generate smooth intensity surfaces of the conflict-related deaths by both incident and home locations. Neighborhoods with high-intensity surfaces of deaths were those with the highest levels of segregation ( 90 percent Catholic or Protestant) and deprivation, and they were located near physical barriers, the so-called peacelines, between predominantly Catholic and predominantly Protestant communities. Finally, despite the onset of peace and the formation of a power-sharing and devolved administration (the Northern Ireland Assembly), disagreements remain over the responsibility and ocommemorationo of victims, sentiments that still uphold division and atavistic attitudes between spatially divided Catholic and Protestant populations.

The contours of memory in post-conflict societies: enacting public remembrance of the bomb in Omagh, Northern Ireland

Drawing on the theoretical insights of Paul Ricoeur this paper investigates the geographies of public remembrance in a post-conflict society. In Northern Ireland, where political divisions have found expression through acts of extreme violence over the past 30 years, questions of memory and an amnesty for forgetting have particular resonance both at the individual and societal level, and render Ricoeur’s framework particularly prescient. Since the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, initiating the Peace Process through consociational structures, discovering a nomenclature and set of practices which would aid in the rapprochement of a deeply divided society has presented a complex array of issues. In this paper I examine the various practices of public remembrance of the 1998 bombing of Omagh as a means of understanding how memory-spaces evolve in a post-conflict context. In Omagh there were a variety of commemorative practices instituted and each, in turn, adopted a different contour towards achieving reconciliation with the violence and grief of the bombing. In particular the Garden of Light project is analysed as a collective monument which, with light as its metaphysical centre, invited the populace to reflect backward on the pain of the bombing while at the same time enabling the society to look forward toward a peaceful future where a politics of hope might eclipse a politics of despair.

Qualifications, examinations and assessment: views and perspectives of students in the 14–19 phase on policy and practice

This paper brings to the forefront students’ views on one of the most significant aspects of education in the 14-19 phase, specifically the qualifications, examinations and assessment they experience. In this respect the paper foregrounds students as ‘policy actors’, they are significant players in the mediation of national qualification systems rather than just subjects in their implementation. Data from a national dataset of focus groups with 243 students from the 14-19 phase is presented. Key themes are highlighted relating to young people’s experiences of qualifications, examinations and assessment at this stage of education in a context of continuous initiatives and change as well as the impact of students being on the receiving end of qualification reform in situ which can be confusing, unsettling and ultimately detrimental to future success.

The spaces of knowledge: Contributions towards a historical geography of science

Reprinted in Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory (eds), Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry, (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 27-48