Streets for people, or why we should reuse buildings in the city centre

Cities are constantly changing, and city centres are the pinnacle of that change. In the last hundred years these changes have been dramatic, transforming city centres from a complex combination of uses into exclusively retail and leisure areas. Meanwhile, most residents of city centres fled to the suburbs, removing much of the livelihood of central areas. These transformations has been stronger in Northern Europe and especially in English speaking countries, where zoning policies were instrumental in urban development since the 1960s. This process along with the rise of shopping malls left many city centre streets lifeless, which in turn caused the dereliction and demolition of significant heritage areas and buildings. Belfast is no exception, where the broad process of suburbanization and zoning since the 1970s produced a city centre for either retail or dereliction, where much built heritage has been lost or is at risk of being lost.

Flexible fault ride through strategy for wind farm clusters in power systems with high wind power penetration

This paper investigates a flexible fault ride through strategy for power systems in China with high wind power penetration. The strategy comprises of adaptive fault ride through requirements and maximum power restrictions of the wind farms with weak fault ride through capabilities. The slight faults and moderate faults with high probability are the main defending objective of the strategy. The adaptive fault ride through requirement in the strategy consists of two sub fault ride through requirements, a temporary slight voltage ride through requirement corresponding to a slight fault incident, with a moderate voltage ride through requirement corresponding to a moderate fault. The temporary overloading capability of the wind farm is reflected in both requirements to enhance the capability to defend slight faults and to avoid tripping when the crowbar is disconnected after moderate faults are cleared. For those wind farms that cannot meet the adaptive fault ride through requirement, restrictions are put on the maximum power output. Simulation results show that the flexible fault ride through strategy increases the fault ride through capability of the wind farm clusters and reduces the wind power curtailment during faults.

Almost nothing, almost anywhere: the metal shed in Ireland

This paper argues that the modern barn in Ireland is a complex social and architectural phenomena that is without, or has yet to find, a satisfactory discourse. Emerging in the middle third of the twentieth century, the modern barn – replete with corrugated iron and I-sections – continues to represent a presence in the Irish landscape whose ubiquity is as emphatic as its flexibility. It is, however, its universal properties that begin to suggest connections with wider narratives. The modernising aspects of the barn that appear in the 1920s and 30s begin to conflate with a rhetoric of architectural modernism which was simultaneously appearing across Europe. But while the relationship between high modernism’s critique of what it divined as the inspirational qualities of utilitarian buildings – Walter Gropius on grain silos, Le Corbusier on aircraft hangers etc. – has been well-documented, in Ireland this relationship perhaps contains another layer of complexity.
The barn’s consolidation as a modern type coincided with the search for a nation’s cultural identity after centuries of colonial rule. This tended to be an introspective vision that prioritised rural space over urban space, agriculture over industry, and imagined the small farm as a central tenet in the construction of a new State. This paper suggests that the twentieth-century barn – as a product of the mechanisation of agriculture promoted by the new administrations – is an iconic structure, emblematic of attempts to reconcile the contradictory forces and imagery of modernity with the mores of a traditional society. Moreover, given a cultural purview that was often ambivalent or even hostile to the ideologies and forms of modernity, the barn in Ireland is, perhaps, not so much the inspiration but the realisation of an architectural modernism in that country at its most pervasive, enduring and unself-conscious.

Farming, identity and well-being: managing changing gender roles within Western European farm families

This article is concerned with how men and women on farms socially construct their gender and work identities through interaction with each other and public representations of themselves. It is argued that identity is a process, and like gender, it is socially constructed through ‘doing’ identity.
Farming has changed tremendously over the last forty years in Europe. The position of women in the labour market and on the family farm has also undergone significant changes. In Western Europe, women in general and women on family farms are more likely to be active in the labour market than they were forty years ago. While it remains the case that all of their labour on the farm is not properly recorded, they now also have visible, paid employment. Scholars have been surprised that farm women’s gender identity has not changed more significantly with this changed labour market presence. This article argues that in order to understand this limited change we need to understand how men and women in family farms verify and reinforce farming work identities and farming gender identities. It is argued that while off-farm work does not ‘look’ like gender deviant work, it is because it questions the male breadwinner role. An analysis of this helps us understand why the discourse of the family farm remains so dominant and so persistent. In 2012 and 2013, a qualitative study was undertaken in Northern Ireland to examine the gender implications of the EU rural development programme on farms and rural areas. Some of the data gathered as part of this study is interpreted to shed light on how and why particular work and gender identities are constructed within the farm family.

Space and Place: Lessons from National School Buildings in the North of Ireland

Forms of integrated schooling are currently promoted in post-conflict Northern Ireland, but an earlier attempt to establish secular education in Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the Irish National Schools system – is often forgotten. A preliminary archaeological study of former National Schools indicated differences in size, placement and external appearance between rural and urban buildings, possibly linked to the expression of divergent cultural and religious traditions in conflict with the reforming principles of the national system. This paper uses archaeological and anthropological perspectives to examine the social and cultural significance of such schools, including the first recorded excavation of an Irish National School, in relation to their past and current significance for education, identity, landscape, place and kinship.