Judges, Conflict, and the Past

Drawing upon interviews with senior judicial figures in Northern Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere, this article considers the role of the judiciary in a political conflict.1 Using the socio-legal literature on judicial performance and audience as well as transitional justice, the article argues that judges in Northern Ireland ‘performed’ to a number of ‘imagined’ audiences including Parliament, ‘the public’ and their judicial peers - all of which it is argued shaped their view of the judicial role. In light of ongoing efforts to deal with the past in the jurisdiction, and the experiences of other transitional societies, the article argues that the judiciary can and should engage in a mature, reflexive and, where appropriate, self-critical examination of the good and bad of their own institutional history during the conflict. It also argues that such a review of judicial performance requires an external audience in order to encourage the judiciary to see truth beyond the limits of legalism.

Utopia Incomplete: British New Towns and Craigavon

The New towns initiative in the UK and Northern Ireland, enshrined in the Act of 1946, was derived out of a stream of philosophical thought that was a reaction to modernity, paritcularly Victorian industrialisation. This was developed through the writings of Ruskin and Morris and crystalised by Ebenezer Howard in his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow, which culminated with the design of Letchworth by Parker and Unwin (completed 1914). Letchworth however, was a more than just a physical and spatial entity: it was actually a policyscape, a novel economic and social policy landscape that regulated development in a modern and scientific way.

These themes of the scientification of urban design, and the regulation of urban development through policy, run through the whole New Town movement, right up to the development of the eco-towns of today. New Towns, in fact, can be seen as an embodiment of modernity, as well as a reaction to it .

Lost in Transition? Emerging forms of residential architecture in Kathmandu

Kathmandu has been the last few cities in the world which retained its medieval urban culture up until twentieth century. Various Hindu and Buddhist religious practices shaped the arrangement of houses, roads and urban spaces giving the city a distinctive physical form, character and a unique oriental nativeness. In recent decades, the urban culture of the city has been changing with the forces of urbanisation and globalisation and the demand for new buildings and spaces. New residential design is increasingly dominated by distinctive patterns of Western suburban ideal comprising detached or semi-detached homes and high rise tower blocks. This architectural iconoclasm can be construed as a rather crude response to the indigenous spaces and builtform. The paper attempts to dismantle the current tension between traditional and contemporary 'culture' (and hence society) and housing (or builtform) in Kathmandu by engaging in a discussion that cuts across space, time and meaning of building. The paper concludes that residential architecture in Kathmandu today stands disoriented and lost in the transition.

Of no fixed form: The Irish Pavilion at Venice 2014 and beyond

This paper explores the theme of exhibiting architectural research through a particular example, the development of the Irish pavilion for the 14th architectural biennale, Venice 2014. Responding to Rem Koolhaas’s call to investigate the international absorption of modernity, the Irish pavilion became a research project that engaged with the development of the architectures of infrastructure in Ireland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Central to this proposition was that infrastructure is simultaneously a technological and cultural construct, one that for Ireland occupied a critical position in the building of a new, independent post-colonial nation state, after 1921.

Presupposing infrastructure as consisting of both visible and invisible networks, the idea of a matrix become a central conceptual and visual tool in the curatorial and design process for the exhibition and pavilion. To begin with this was a two-dimensional grid used to identify and order what became described as a series of ten ‘infrastructural episodes’. These were determined chronologically across the decades between 1914 and 2014 and their spatial manifestations articulated in terms of scale: micro, meso and macro. At this point ten academics were approached as researchers. Their purpose was twofold, to establish the broader narratives around which the infrastructures developed and to scrutinise relevant archives for compelling visual material. Defining the meso scale as that of the building, the media unearthed was further filtered and edited according to a range of categories – filmic/image, territory, building detail, and model – which sought to communicate the relationship between the pieces of architecture and the larger systems to which they connect. New drawings realised by the design team further iterated these relationships, filling in gaps in the narrative by providing composite, strategic or detailed drawings.

Conceived as an open-ended and extendable matrix, the pavilion was influenced by a series of academic writings, curatorial practices, artworks and other installations including: Frederick Kiesler’s City of Space (1925), Eduardo Persico and Marcello Nizzoli’s Medaglio d’Oro room (1934), Sol Le Witt’s Incomplete Open Cubes (1974) and Rosalind Krauss’s seminal text ‘Grids’ (1979). A modular frame whose structural bays would each hold and present an ‘episode’, the pavilion became both a visual analogue of the unseen networks embodying infrastructural systems and a reflection on the predominance of framed structures within the buildings exhibited. Sharing the aspiration of adaptability of many of these schemes, its white-painted timber components are connected by easily-dismantled steel fixings. These and its modularity allow the structure to be both taken down and re-erected subsequently in different iterations. The pavilion itself is, therefore, imagined as essentially provisional and – as with infrastructure – as having no fixed form. Presenting archives and other material over time, the transparent nature of the space allowed these to overlap visually conveying the nested nature of infrastructural production. Pursuing a means to evoke the qualities of infrastructural space while conveying a historical narrative, the exhibition’s termination in the present is designed to provoke in the visitor, a perceptual extension of the matrix to engage with the future.

Wounded Spaces: When Planning Degraded Cairo’s Urban Memory

This paper examines the position of planning practices operated under precise guidelines for displaying modernity. Cultivating the spatial qualities of Cairo since the 1970s has unveiled centralised ideologies and systems of governance and economic incentives. I present a discussion of the wounds that result from the inadequate upgrading ventures in Cairo, which I argue, created scars as enduring evidence of unattainable planning methods and processes that undermined its locales. In this process, the paper focuses on the consequences of eviction rather than the planning methods in one of the city’s traditional districts. Empirical work is based on interdisciplinary research, public media reports and archival maps that document actions and procedures put in place to alter the visual, urban, and demographic characteristics of Cairo’s older neighbourhoods against a backdrop of decay to shift towards a global spectacular. The paper builds a conversation about the power and fate these spaces were subject to during hostile transformations that ended with their being disused. Their existence became associated with sores on the souls of its ex-inhabitants, as outward signs of inward scars showcasing a lack of equality and social justice in a context where it was much needed.

Objects of Transcendence: Scots Protestantism and an Anthropology of Things

This anthropological essay takes as its ethnographic point of departure two apparently contrasting deployments of the Bible within contemporary Scotland, one as observed among Brethren and Presbyterian fisher-families in Gamrie, coastal Aberdeenshire, and the other as observed among the Orange Order, a Protestant marching fraternity, in Airdrie and Glasgow. By examining how and with what effects the Bible and other objects (plastic crowns, ‘Sunday clothes’, Orange regalia) enter into and extend beyond the everyday practices of fishermen and Orangemen, my aim is to sketch different aspects of the material life of Scottish Protestantism. By offering a critique of Bruno Latour’s early writing on ‘quasi-objects’ via Alfred Gell’s notion of ‘distributed personhood’, I seek to undermine the sociological assumption that modernity and enchantment are mutually exclusive.

‘Harmonising the precaution out of the precautionary principle? The need for maintaining flexibility and an interpretative role’

The precautionary principle has the potential to act as a valuable tool in food law. It operates in areas of scientific uncertainty, calling for protective measures where there are potential threats to human health (or the environment). However, the manner of the principle’s incorporation and implementation within legislation are key to its effectiveness and general legitimacy. Specific considerations include the role and nature of risk assessments, assessors, sources of evidence, divergent opinions, risk communication, other legitimate factors and the weighting of interests. However, more fundamentally, the crystallisation of approaches and removal of all flexibility would undermine the principle’s central tenets. Firstly, principles crucially play a guiding and interpretative role. Secondly, reflexive modernisation and continuing scientific uncertainty call for the precautionary principle’s continued application – precautionary measures do not end the precautionary principle’s relevance. This can be partially achieved through the legislation so as to facilitate later precautionary measures, e.g. through temporary authorisations, derogations and safeguard clauses. However, crucially, it requires that the legislation also be interpreted in light of the precautionary principle. This paper investigates the logic behind the Court of Justice of the EU’s judgments and the circumstances that enable or deter the Court in taking, or permitting, stronger precautionary approaches. Although apparently inconsistent, a number of contextual factors including the legislative provisions and actors involved influence the judgments substantially. The analysis provides insight into improving the principle’s incorporation to facilitate its continued application and maintenance of flexibility, whilst bearing in mind the general desirability of objectivity and legal certainty.

Bringing down the walls: Is the notion of ‘promoting shared space’ commensurate with effective transformation of contested places in Belfast?

This article is a reflexive and critical examination of recent empirical research on effective practice in the management and ‘transformation’ of contested urban space at sectarian interfaces in Belfast. By considering the development of interfaces, the areas around them and policy responses to their persistence, the reality of contested space in the context of ‘peace building’ is apparent; with implications for local government as central to the statutory response. Belfast has developed an inbuilt absence of connectivity; where freedom of movement is particularly restricted and separation of contested space is the policy default position. Empirical research findings focus attention on the significance of social and economic regeneration and fall into three specific areas that reflect both long-term concerns within neighbourhoods and the need for adequate policy responses and action ‘on the ground’. Drawing on Elden and Sassen we reconfigure the analytical framework by which interfaces are defined, with implications for policy and practice in post-conflict Belfast. Past and current policy for peace-building in Northern Ireland, and transforming the most contested space, at interfaces in Belfast, is deliberately ambiguous and offers little substance having failed to advance from funding-led linguistic compliance to a sustainable peace-building methodology.