1 Place and identity

There is always a threat of returning to the past of violence, hatred and depression which still engulf the city. Belfast I believe will never escape its history which is known worldwide. There is still a threat when someone of a Catholic origin enters an area of Protestant majority. That person, I think even if they act confident, are afraid and uneasy because of the reputation of what can happen because of the past. This can happen in many different versions, whether it be Protestant or Catholic.

(Catholic girl)

Northern Ireland is regarded as one of the most successful ‘post conflict’ societies in the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in its capital city, Belfast. The city, once blighted by derelict, bombed-out buildings, now projects a new, outward-looking presence. New, flagship developments abound in the city centre, making it a more aesthetically pleasing place than it was during the period of the conflict. This investment, based on the promotion of economic liberalisation and consumption, aims to create the conditions for a durable and sustainable peace. It aims to promote a neutral, apolitical city based on a neo-liberal model of peace building and reconstruction (Richmond, 2011; Paris, 2004). Undoubtedly, there have been a number of changes for the better. The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement ushered in a new era of power sharing and set in motion a period of sustained and highly significant reduction in fatalities, shootings, bombings and other incidents of conflict. However, as Lee (2013: 524) points out, Belfast remains ‘no ethnic melting pot. It might aspire to, and be in the process of becoming a city that is more liberal, pluralistic and cosmopolitan, but it still consists largely of two embittered dominant groups.’

One has only to move a short distance from the city centre to see the continuing polarisation of the two main communities. Many Catholics and Protestants continue to live in adjacent, segregated communities, often characterised by poverty, unemployment and general deprivation, where the benefits of the peace process have been limited. The reimaging of Belfast as a ‘post conflict’ city tends to gloss over these persistent divisions. These people’s voices are often absent from the discourses presenting Belfast as a pluralistic, cosmopolitan, modern and neutral city. Their perceptions and experiences of ‘post conflict’ Belfast clash with the more popular dominant discourses and hence often receive little local, national or international coverage. The purpose of this book is to visit some of these neglected communities and articulate the voices, perceptions and experiences of the young people who live and grow up in them.

‘If walls could talk’ is a popular metaphor for illuminating the often hidden aspects of ‘what happens within’, when walls surround rooms and buildings, creating boundaries between the private and the public. Its usage here relates to walls that act as frontier markers between workingclass Catholic and Protestant communities. Through the discourses of young people who inhabit these areas, the book illuminates what goes on within and between these walls. These young people’s voices need to be heard alongside the more favourable accounts of young people who live in communities that have benefited from the peace process. While both groups are part of the ‘post conflict’ generation, how this plays out in daily practices and experiences needs to be articulated and understood before Belfast can truly claim its ‘post conflict’ status.

Despite Northern Ireland’s new status as one of the most successful examples of the resolution of what was once seen as an intractable conflict, the peace walls which separate Protestant and Catholic areas remain in place, and are one of the most enduring and visible legacies of the conflict. However, despite their longevity, these walls are not recorded on any official maps. Sporadic rioting also continues to flare up, particularly around parades, demonstrating the fragility rather than the durability of the peace process. The involvement of young people in these riots is particularly perplexing, given that this group has grown up against a backdrop of paramilitary ceasefires, the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and the establishment of a power-sharing political framework. The overall purpose of this book is to explore these contradictions by presenting young people’s perceptions and experiences of the physical and symbolic divisions that exist in ‘post conflict’ Belfast and the ways in which they (re)produce, negotiate or challenge them in their everyday lives. The book examines the micro-geographies of young people and draws attention to the social practices, discourses and networks that directly or indirectly (re)shape how they make sense of and negotiate life in Belfast.¹

This involves recognition that space and place are intimately connected, that neither can exist without the other (Agnew, 2011). Space and place have multiple and often contradictory meanings. Space is a more abstract concept than place. It is unlimited, everywhere, unending and all encompassing. Place is the physical embodiment of space but refers to much more than mere physical landscapes. While place is often bounded and specific to a location, its distinctiveness relates to the way people interact within emplaced spaces to create and experience a sense of belonging. People give and invest meaning to place. However, while we acknowledge the importance of people in place, the physical landscape in which everyday life occurs is much more than a mere backdrop. The physicality of place is an important interpretive lens through which everyday life is accomplished. Landscapes themselves play a core role in constructing the fabric of social life. Place is the ‘cause’ as well as the ‘outcome’ of social action (Tickmayer, 2000). It is an agentic player in the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of everyday life. In calling for an ‘emplaced sociology’, Gieryn (2000) appeals to sociology to make ‘space for place’. This involves uncovering the processes whereby place acts as a catalyst for everyday action. It involves recognition that the spatial and the social are inextricably intertwined (Kidder, 2009).

Agnew challenges the notion of an increasingly ‘placeless’ global world where ever-increasingly sophisticated technologies create virtual spaces and, in the process, render actual places irrelevant. This view is shared by Withers (2009: 639), who argues that ‘in the face of “globalisation”, questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever’. Agnew’s typology of place outlines three recurring features intimately connecting space to place: place as a particular ‘location’, place as a ‘locale’ where everyday life is practised and a ‘sense of place’ referring to how people identify with place and develop a strong sense of belonging. All three definitions are prevalent in this research, reflecting Agnew’s (1987: 28) observation that ‘a key tenet is that the local social worlds of place (locale) cannot be understood apart from the objective macro-order of that location and the subjective territorial identity of sense of place’. Location refers to the broader structural framework in which local social worlds are constituted. It involves paying attention to the wider historical, economic, political and social processes which impact on physical geographical locations. How a location comes into existence paves the way for Agnew’s second definition, that of ‘locale’. For Agnew, ‘locale’ refers to the geographical settings within which everyday social interactions occur. It is within the locale that social relations are structured, managed and negotiated. It is within the locale that everyday knowledge is acquired and transmitted. Locales are dynamic rather than static, referring simultaneously to the rootedness of attitudes and behaviour and the ongoing tensions and social transformations that occur at the level of the everyday. Agnew’s third definition, ‘sense of place’, takes this analysis a step further by emphasising how places are experienced and understood by their inhabitants. His overall conception of place provides a useful framework for bringing together location with the lived realities of people who occupy place.

Therefore, while places are made up of spaces, more importantly, they are constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through social relationships and social practices. Spaces are little more than ‘empty abstractions’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 12), while places are ‘drenched in cultural meaning’ (Preston, 2003: 74). Places are experienced, remembered, understood and imagined by the people who occupy them (Soja, 1999). Places are lived spaces and they play a core role in shaping identities and relationships. They are fundamentally embedded in identity: so much so, that Casey (2001: 684) suggests that ‘there is no place without self and no self without place’. Place matters to people. It functions as the background raw material for the creative production of identity (Cresswell, 2004). It becomes a backdrop to the shaping of local, regional and national identities. While identities are multiple and dynamic, nonetheless, they emerge within and from place and impact on the past, present and future (Casey, 1993). Paying attention to the place-rooted dimension of identity construction is a core underlying feature of this book’s framework. Addressing this neglect provides a necessary challenge to accounts which emphasise global aspects of identity while ignoring their place-rooted dimensions.

Hence, while place has a physical reality, it also embodies social and symbolic meaning and becomes the location within which socio-political relationships and actions are structured, contested and reworked. In understanding how people perceive and manage everyday life in divided cities, generation is prioritised as an important structural variable, influencing socio-spatial relationships and practices. Until recently, generation has been largely neglected in the adult-focused research on how young people’s perceptions of space and place impact on daily life and spatial practices. However, ignoring young people’s ways of seeing is likely to result in incomplete accounts of daily life in divided cities. Hence, a core purpose of this book is to bring young people’s perspectives into understandings of socio-spatial knowledge and experiences of divided landscapes. Space is likely to be produced, experienced and managed in a multitude of different ways and brings into play different socio-spatial strategies, depending on the wider positioning of daily users of space. How do young people develop spatial literacy? How do their localised, everyday micro-geographies differ from those of adults? Can these differences shed light on the salience or disruption of wider political processes around territory and boundaries? These are the kinds of questions which this book sets out to confront. As Harvey (1996: 261) reminds us, ‘place, in whatever guise, is like space and time, a social construct’.

The focus of this book is on how everyday life is accomplished by young people living in divided cities, using Belfast as a case study. As Webber (1964: 147) acknowledges, ‘it is interaction, not place that is the essence of the city and of city life’. However, the phrase ‘everyday life’ is notoriously difficult to define. At one level, it is used to mean everything and anything, making it a woolly, rather useless concept. Most of those who use the term ‘are often reluctant to explain exactly what it means’ (Felski, 2000: 77). While the concept of daily life has a long history dating back to ancient Greece, Lefebvre (1991) argues that it is a specific modern phenomenon, its distinctiveness emerging with the impact of industrialisation and capitalism shaping everyday life in previously unrelated ways. The flood of people migrating into newly emerging cities, brought together under new conditions of modernity, has rendered everyday life into a series of mundane and repetitive acts. Everyday life practices are recurring practices: they occur daily, weekly, monthly, yearly (Lefebvre, 2008). As Felski (2000: 84) argues, ‘repetition is one of the ways we organise the world, make sense of our environment, and stave off the threat of chaos. It is a key factor in the gradual formation of identity as a social and intersubjective process. Quite simply, we become who we are through acts of repetition.’ These acts of repetition may, at times, mean holding on to a threatened, traditional way of life. At the same time, repetition coexists with resistance and transformation.

Everyday life is usually localised in place (Sztompa, 2008: 31). Everyday life occurs at certain locations: at home, in the street, community and city centre. It also incorporates a temporal dimension. This not only refers to the length of time attached to encounters and events but is additionally shaped by location of time, in terms of day or night, or different times of the year. Hence, everyday life is spatial, temporal and contextual. Everyday life is also an embodied accomplishment. It actively engages our bodies. Our bodies move through spaces and places and, through interacting with other bodies, we construct, co-construct, deconstruct and reconstruct taken-for-granted identities. In each context we may behave differently and interact differently. But more importantly, for the most part, our daily accomplishment of everyday life involves habits and routines of which we may not always be reflectively aware. We employ common-sense assumptions and routines to structure and impose order on our everyday lives. As Felski (2000: 91–2) points out, ‘the contemporary city may constitute a chaotic labyrinth of infinite possibilities, yet in our daily travels we often choose to carve out a familiar path, managing space and time by tracing out the same route over and over again’. These habits and routines reflect not just practices but attitudes as well. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992) amply illustrates this. The habitus refers to taken-for-granted ways of thinking about and acting upon the social world. According to Bourdieu (1987), people habitually reproduce the structures of everyday life. In other words, their past history, their culture and their past experiences impact on their current state of mind and behaviour.

This does not mean that behaviour is therefore rendered as predictable. Since people are agents, alternative choices are always possible. However, agency is practised within the field of structurally provided possibilities and therefore, to some extent, subsequent choices are likely to reproduce existing structures. In this vein, Massey (1994: 155–6) argues that the landscapes of everyday life involve a mixture of macro and micro social relationships, with the fusion-producing effects that are particular to specific localities. As Epstein and Johnson (1998: 116) point out, ‘active work always occurs under socially given conditions which include structures of power and social relations, institutional constraints and possibilities but also available cultural repertories’. This relationship can be both complementary and antagonistic. Daily life always includes practices that are subversive or demonstrate resistance (de Certeau, 1984). Reay (2000: 433) suggests that Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus can be viewed as ‘potentially generating a wide repertoire of possible actions, simultaneously enabling the individual to draw on transformative and constraining courses of action’.

These perspectives are applied to an understanding of young people’s perceptions and experiences of growing up in Belfast. Historically, the spatial perceptions and experiences of children and young people have received scant attention from geographers, architects and political and social scientists. This is particularly due to the misconception that young people have little active influence on the workings of states, nations, federations and constructions of territories and boundaries. Yet clearly, young people have always been actively part of ethno-territorial, regional and national movements, whether as icons for struggles, as active participants or as future adults who need to be effectively socialised into endorsing adult beliefs about constructions of sameness and difference around which many divided cities are shaped. The traditional location of young people as non-political is itself a political act. Where the focus does extend to include young people, it is often through the triple lens of children as victims, perpetuators or transformers of conflict. Children’s location as victims or perpetuators of political violence and their role as future citizens in disputed places have valuable political currency. In divided cities, children are born into pre-existing conflicts instigated and perpetuated by antagonisms between former generations. Children’s positioning as victims of pre-existing conflicts often finds expression in the rationale for peace, in many divided societies, for the sake of the children or the next generation. It is also reflected in the location of children in divided societies as having ‘lost’, ‘stolen’ or ‘abnormal’ childhoods. Cheney (2005), for example, points out that war becomes a space where contradictory notions of childhood are strategically utilised by a variety of government and aid agencies to end war and rehabilitate children into a post-conflict society. Children are often portrayed as the passive victims of adult conflicts, and their own experiences, perceptions and active participation in conflict activities is relatively muted. This also depends on one’s working definition of political conflict. There has been greater international focus on children as victims in war zones, while less attention has been paid to relatively low-key, recurring acts of violence over a prolonged period and their impact on children living in chronically divided societies. During the Northern Ireland conflict the state took on a management role which aimed at restricting the impact of the conflict to an acceptable level of violence. One could argue that this management role now transfers to the current situation, where the goal is an acceptable level of peace, which involves largely ignoring places that fall short of maintaining this objective.

Some young people may internalise the prejudices of previous generations and actively engage in conduct which perpetuates hostile relationships: children’s minds ‘often become the terrain for adult battles’ (Stephens, 1995: vii). Children may feel obligated to the previous generation to continue a struggle to right the perceived wrongs of the past, to hold on to and defend previous gains or to make new demands; they may engage in action which prolongs animosity between competing groups with differing claims to scarce resources. Studies from other conflict cities, such as Nicosia, Mostar, Beirut and Jerusalem, illustrate how young people sometimes feel duty bound either to forget or to remember the past in order to ensure that if the injustices of the past cannot be rectified for their parents they may be rectified through the actions of future generations, or that the gains of the past can be consolidated and defended in the present through the actions of new generations. In relation to Northern Ireland, the present research asks: How do the manifestations of traditional rivalry impact on the physical and symbolic territories and boundaries that young people subsequently occupy? How do young people manage and resist such divisions? Within these spaces, do young people make distinctions between place and territory, and how do their perceptions influence their spatial practices?

These questions acknowledge that memories are not transmitted passively from one generation to another. At each telling and retelling of a group’s history, the possibility always exists for not mere acceptance but contestation and negotiation. Young people do not passively internalise adult discourses. If we accept that young people, like adults, are active agents, then they too have the capacity to accept, reject or modify the dominant messages that they receive (Prout and James, 1990). Each successive generation creates new opportunities to transcend the past and actively contributes to transforming and moving beyond the uneasy relationships of the past. Young people have the potential to actively contribute to conflict-transformation processes, and the accomplishment of such transformations is dependent on their acceptance by new generations. However, young people often play a marginal role in peace processes. For example, in McCabe and Bourke’s (2002) research, young people stated that they felt excluded from Northern Ireland’s peace process and felt that they were considered as onlookers rather than as participants in conflict resolution. Hence, this research examines young people’s three-fold role as victims, perpetuators and transformers of conflict, and the connections between the three.

To understand young people’s daily lives, we need to examine the wider historical, political and cultural processes within which those lives are embedded. We also need to examine adult–child relations and how these reflect historically durable generational relationships based on power and processes of inclusion and exclusion. However, while age is a key variable here, I do not want to imply that young people experience divided cities in universal ways. Rather, young people’s experiences are likely to be internally differentiated by gender, class, ethnicity, religion and location, each of these factors impacting singly or multiply to create a variety of socio-spatial meanings, behaviours and practices. Young people are likely to carry around in their heads a cocktail of cultural and subcultural knowledge which shapes and informs their everyday lives. While these dispositions are durable, they are also transformable. While childhoods are often made by adults for the children within their societies, nonetheless, young people have a capacity for agency and resistance (Philo, 2003: 107). Hence, childhood, like the habitus, is in a constant state of becoming. Each new generation has the capacity to practise what Hays (1994: 64) refers to as ‘structurally reproductive agency’. In her view, this ‘is made possible under particular historical circumstances – when portions of what were once deeper social structures become particularly malleable and provide occasion for collective refashioning’. Hence, throughout this book, how young people growing up in the ‘post conflict’ stage of Northern Ireland rework adult discourses, and the extent to which local and city-centre space, particularly the transformation of the city centre into a neutral consumption space, impacts on their spatial attitudes and behaviour are examined.

While there has been scant academic focus on young people’s microgeographies, existing research suggests that young people are likely to experience everyday life in cities in ways that differ from the experience of adults. A small body of research focuses on the importance of streets, indoor shopping centres and vacant spaces in immediate localities as key places where teenagers hang out and perform varying identities (Percy-Smith and Matthews, 2001; Wooley et al., 1999; Matthews et al., 1998). Often, young people lack the resources to move outside local areas and thus find it more difficult, as compared to adults, to establish more geographically spread social networks. Instead, they often build up attachments to local areas based on peer-group friendships and kinship ties which induce feelings of familiarity and safety and turn local spaces into intimate locations. Within these spaces, young people create their own micro-geographies, particularly in terms of trying to gain spatial autonomy from adult surveillance and control. ‘It is in the course of such informal interaction, away from parents and teachers, that significant aspects of young people’s personal and social identities are affirmed, contested, rehearsed and reworked’ (Hall et al., 1999: 506). Young people often use or colonise space in ways not anticipated by adults, turning vacant and derelict places into exciting venues for meeting up away from the adult gaze, turning shopping centres from places of consumption into places where teenage groupings can be formed and maintained and turning street corners into territorial markers of group identity. In forming competing identities, young people often reappropriate global teen culture in local ways, using clothing, jewellery, sporting preferences and so on as markers of inclusion and exclusion. This research examines whether these processes operate along different lines in politically divided cities and whether group affiliation takes on wider, politically motivated territorial dimensions.

Chapter 2 attends to the methodology employed in the research. The chapter outlines the mixed-methods approach used throughout the datacollection phase, which was aimed at gathering visual and narrative data in ways that would stimulate and engage the young people who took part in the study. The research draws on ‘the new sociology of childhood’ as its theoretical framework. This involves seeing young people as competent social actors in their own right and recognises that children and young people do not simply reflect adult assumptions about the everyday world but develop their own ways of seeing and knowing. It prioritises young people’s points of view and uses methodologies which encourage young people’s voices to be heard. The study utilised a range of methods, including questionnaires, focus-group discussions, essays and photo prompts, and the combination of these methods, including an evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses, is discussed in the chapter. How each method (individually and collectively) contributed to the overall aims and objectives of the research is outlined and the contribution of the methodology to wider debates around involving children and young people in research is evaluated.

Chapter 3 explores the historical development of Belfast as a segregated city, focusing particularly on the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ in 1969 and the subsequent division of territory by peace walls. The chapter outlines how territory has always been contentious in Northern Ireland. The very conception of the province of Northern Ireland in 1921–22 was the result of the careful distribution of territory to ensure a Protestant/Unionist majority, and the manipulation of space played a central role in the organisation and distribution of political and economic power. Right from the formation of Northern Ireland, Belfast was characterised by a degree of segregation between Catholics and Protestants with the emergence of distinct working-class, residentially segregated areas. Residential segregation functioned as both a cause and a consequence of the conflict and translated the distrust existing between the two communities into the ‘Troubles’ which erupted in 1969 and persisted until (and beyond) the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (1998). The chapter demonstrates the continuing segregated nature of Belfast in terms of housing and education. Public housing estates in Belfast are dominated by one or other community, with over 80% of inhabitants being either Catholic or Protestant (Shuttleworth and Lloyd, 2008). Moreover, around 94% of school-aged children attend Catholic or Protestant schools (DENI, 2008). These structural features of segregation impact particularly on the spatial practices of the young people who grow up in segregated areas.

Chapter 4 presents the first of three empirical chapters which address the extent to which teenagers in Belfast view the city as a divided or shared space. Whether the conflict is based on religious, ethnic, economic, social or political divisions has provoked heated debate (see Coulter, 1999 for a review of this literature), but the consequences of these divisions remain evident in interface areas. Interface areas are locations where working-class segregated Protestant and Catholic residential areas are located next to each other. The inhabitants of interface areas each mark their own territory in order to defend, support and preserve their differences (Boal, 1976). At times the state played an active role in facilitating (and in some cases actively encouraging) such segregation and, in the process, maintained and reproduced class and sectarian divisions within Belfast’s urban landscape (Murtagh, 2001). According to Shirlow (2003: 77), ‘Northern Irish society is still influenced by the ethno-sectarian control of territory … communal difference, segregation and exclusion still predominate over the politics of shared interests, integration, assimilation and consensus.’ Interface areas remain areas where Catholics and Protestants largely live segregated lives. They are characterised by the physical marking of territory through walls, flags and murals, and the core focus of Chapter 4 is the impact of these physical markers on the young people who grow up and live in these areas. The chapter discusses young people’s attitudes to the marking of territory through a range of visual ethno-national emblems and assesses the extent to which this influences their spatial movements.

Of course, most cities are divided along some dimension or another. For example, some cities contain ‘gated communities’ where those who are economically better off detach themselves from their poorer neighbours. Such spatial divisions are a feature of many affluent societies. Other markers of difference, including religion, ethnicity, race, income and age, often result in spatially divided cities and thus, to some extent, Belfast is no exception (Goldsmith and Blakely, 1992). Drawing on the divided cities of Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia, Calame and Charlesworth (2008) argue that the divisions evident in Belfast are also features of these other politically sensitive cities. Each city has been divided by various partition lines and barriers. However, one crucial aspect of the peace walls in Belfast is that most of them originated as makeshift, grass-roots structures. The particularly heightened tensions and outbreaks of violence that occurred in the streets within and between the Catholic Falls Road and Protestant Shankill Road during 1969 led to local communities erecting a number of barricades to keep the ‘other’ out. These barriers, using discarded furniture and burnt-out cars, topped by barbed wire, were placed at the entrances and exits to Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods which soon evolved into no-go areas. The makeshift barriers were gradually replaced by more formidable constructions put up by the army and the local housing authority, often at the request of local residents. Hence, they cannot simply be compared to the walls of other segregated cities such as Berlin (formerly), Nicosia and Jerusalem. The origins of Belfast’s walls fundamentally impact on strategies to remove the barriers, as community support is essential. Chapter 4 highlights how local (adult) communities on both sides of the divide remain unconvinced that the walls (and barriers) are no longer necessary. This sets the scene for the account of young people’s experiences and perceptions of the ‘peace walls’ which are the central focus of the chapter.

Chapter 5 focuses on young people’s place-rooted subjective perceptions and experiences of growing up in interface areas by exploring in more detail how the physical marking of territory impacts on young people’s attitudes to the other main community. Hence, while Chapter 4 focuses on the physical features of the landscape, Chapter 5 outlines how young people erect mental barriers, whereby lamp-posts, shops, street corners, local parks and derelict places emerge as less-visible boundaries utilised to promote the construction of in-groups and out-groups based on traditional ethno-sectarian divisions. The chapter illustrates how young people develop subjective mental maps of their own and other adjacent areas and use this knowledge to create peer-focused information networks of places of safety and risk. Young people’s interactions with these real and imagined representations of identity sit uneasily beside Belfast’s reimaging as a ‘post conflict’ city and are daily reminders that Belfast remains a divided city.

Young people often experience their localities in terms of peer-led constructions of territories and boundaries, and often develop a street literacy about which places to hang out in and which to avoid (Cahill, 2000). Matthews et al. (1999) view streets as a ‘thirdspace’, a kind of borderline space that provides young people with a backdrop against which to negotiate the tensions between childhood and adulthood. This often brings young people into conflict with adults over appropriate land use (Ward, 1978). Marginal spaces within immediate localities are often reclaimed by young people as ‘alternative centres’ (Bottrell, 2007: 597). These are places where young people can meet up, build networks, establish status among their peers and manage a range of social identities. In politically contested cities it is important to examine whether these strategies reflect typical teen manifestations or whether they reflect wider, historical, ethno-sectarian dimensions, or a combination of both.

A recurrent theme across the data was young people’s perceptions that relationships between the two main communities were still influenced by sectarianism and sectarian attitudes. In interface communities young people discussed how they routinely used a range of body markers to identify Catholics from Protestants and vice versa, and these are outlined in the chapter. At times, sporadic rioting occurs at the boundaries between interface areas. The presence of young people rioting on the streets of Belfast continues to perplex policy makers and calls into question the salience of Belfast as a ‘post conflict’ city. Sometimes these incidents are dismissed as ‘recreational’, as little more than a release from boredom for some teenagers who have nothing else to do. However, as the chapter will demonstrate, scratching beneath the surface of this initial response reflects messier and more complex processes at work. While participation in ‘recreational’ rioting is for the most part highly localised, it is deeply connected to broader political processes and has its roots in the wider historical basis of Northern Ireland. The practice reproduces and reinforces traditional patterns of sectarianism, and this will be outlined and illustrated.

Finally, the chapter focuses on young people’s knowledge of the past and the role that inter-generational memories play in their attitudes to the past and to each other. The chapter outlines how young people both reproduce and challenge the memories of the former generation. This underlines how traditional discourses are not effortlessly reproduced but are constantly unpacked and questioned. The young people’s discourses remind us that boundaries are neither fixed nor static. While boundaries are on one level a spatial phenomenon, they require accompanying ongoing narratives to defend their presence or justify their absence. Where conflicts are protracted, these narratives cross generations, but at each retelling of the past the opportunity exists to reshape the present and the future.

Chapter 6 turns attention to the city centre of Belfast. City centres are often conceived as neutral spaces because they are prime locations for commercial interests, which often reflect global consumption processes rather than local interests. They are also seen as ‘shared’ spaces because they function as settings where a range of diverse cultural groups can effectively use centrally located public space in non-threatening ways. Hence, city centres are prime locations for facilitating encounters among different groups of people. Belfast’s claim to be a ‘post conflict’ city owes much to the rebranding of the city by property developers, bankers, businessmen and politicians as a place for foreign investment, regeneration and tourism. Shops, restaurants and ostentatious leisure developments abound in the city centre, creating an image of a dynamic, modern, neo-liberal city that has left its troubled past behind (O’Dowd and Komarova, 2009). Moving outside the local residential neighbourhoods and into city-centre spaces and places reveals the invisibility of children and young people in urban planning. Matthews (1995) highlights how teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18 are virtually absent from environmental planning. They are generally excluded from public spaces or, at most, are provided with token spaces decided upon by adults and often reflecting adult interpretation of teen spaces. The reality is that these spaces are often inappropriate to teenagers’ needs. Where teenagers try to transcend these purpose-built public spaces they are regarded with suspicion by a variety of adults, including shoppers, shopkeepers and security guards, who often monitor and control access to city-centre spaces of consumption. Teenagers in full-time education are often regarded as non-consumers and hence are regarded as ‘out of place’ in commercial spaces (Sibley, 1995). However, young people increasingly live in a globalised world where consumption tastes and preferences have become a core aspect of international marketing strategies and play a major role in enabling young people to define who they are (Zelizer, 2002). The chapter explores teenagers’ perceptions and experiences of Belfast as a ‘post conflict’ consumerist city by illuminating how young people use city-centre spaces and the extent to which different identities are created, performed, maintained, reinforced, crossed and transformed through spatial practices.

Chapter 7 brings together the main arguments of the book by providing an overview of young people’s multi-dimensional experiences of growing up in Belfast. In Belfast, teenagers’ experiences and perceptions of space are shaped by the political relations of space, but they respond to these in contradictory ways. One of the greatest challenges facing Belfast in its attempts to create a shared city is the legacy of residential and educational policies and practices which continue to reflect and at times reinforce separatist spaces. The outcome of these practices makes it difficult for young people to transform exclusive local practices into inclusive practices when accessing and using other parts of the city. The chapter discusses how place cannot be separated from the actions of those who occupy it; nonetheless, teenage identities are fractured and diverse, and hence possibilities always exist for transforming local and city-centre space. The chapter ends by teasing out the policy implications of the research.

Everyday life links the micro to the macro. The accomplishment of everyday life reveals wider processes of modernity, globalisation, identity formation, power, resistance and subversion. Young people’s everyday spatial movements can tell us much about the visible and invisible borders of politically contested cities and how they are maintained, strengthened, challenged, contested and crossed. These themes are illuminated throughout the chapters that make up this book.