The will to forget and the demise of everyday streets in Belfast

Belfast, like most cities around the world, had a vibrant, lively and compact street life before the advent of the car. Despite the poverty sustained through industrialisation in the long 19th century and deindustrialisation since the early 20th, its streets bore the complexity and richness of their inhabitants and were harbingers of strong communities. Now, most of that street life happens either as a purely commercial phenomenon or in the peripheral arterial roads around the city centre. This might be an easily recognised phenomenon around the world, but the case of Belfast adds another layer due to its contested nature. The centuries’ long ethnic divide was exacerbated through the Troubles (1968-1998), and had a serious impact on the city’s fabric. But this impact did not end with the direct physical damage to the buildings. Rather, it intensified with planning decisions around motorways and commercial development that transformed the fabric of the city, from a walkable, communal and dense fabric to a motorised, divided and privatised one. Those infrastructural changes transformed the lives of local communities, pushing the middle classes to car dependant peripheries and the working classes to cul-de-sac inner city neighbourhoods. In this process, the fabric of everyday streets, both residential and commercial, was decimated.
The decay and demolition of institutional, industrial, commercial and residential built fabric in Belfast can be traced to the ‘will to forget’ the past. The strive for 'normalisation' and shared space after the Troubles included the deliberate erasure of material evidence of the conflict. This can sometimes be explained by iconoclasm, as discussed by Adrian Forty or Robert Bevan, in the case of symbolic buildings such as the Crumlin Road Courthouse or the Grand Central Hotel; but most times the decay and demolition is a product of a generic and everyday will to forget, to have a ‘clean slate’ and a ‘blank canvas’ as is commonly expressed in planning decisions and media communications since the 1960s and still present today.
In this paper we will investigate a series of streets in Belfast. We will discuss how their built fabric has suffered decline and demolition due to weak heritage regulation and lack of community participation, assuming these processes as a ‘will to forget’ the past and look at a renewed future.