The Model City

Forum for Alternative Belfast is a community interest company that campaigns for a better connected built environment in Belfast. On the 2nd of May an exhibition showcasing their work opens in The Golden Thread Gallery. The show features a three dimensional model of Belfast's centre.

Making the model city.

Four coats of acrylic were required, then a high-viscosity top-coat.

In the model, vacant sites will be highlighted in and proposals made for how these sits could be converted and made to live again. Painting the mini buildings was a time consuming job. Forum for Alternative Belfast asked for volunteers to help them with it. I assisted one day and it was fascinating to see the model in development.

The exhibition will run until June 8th. It will be accompanied by a public talks. Go to The Golden Thread Gallery's website for details.

To the Waters and the Wild

CROW (City Right of Way) is a collaboration between artists Mike Hogg and Aisling O'Beirn. They organise monthly walks, usually in areas of Belfast. The walks are free and open to anyone. Participants often suggest the routes or they are developed in collaboration with other organisations. This month I joined one of their walks, heading away from Strandmillis along the Lagan's towpath. About 20 people formed our party, a good percentage of them being children. They youngsters enjoyed the snow and, luckily, none of them fell in the river. We went as far as a wooden area in Belvoir Park, the oaks there are said to be the oldest in Belfast.

The route

Waiting for the kids to catch up

Among the oaks, Justin Nicholl (of Grow, a North Belfast community garden cooperative) identified an abundance of wild garlic. I brought some home and added it to my dinner.

Links: CROW (City Right of Way) and Grow Community Garden.

Ulster's Diamonds

I grew up near Donegal Town. Locals always called the open area in the middle of the town The Diamond. It was mainly used for car parking and was more of a triangle than a diamond. Streets ran from three corners

 

A map of Donegal Town from 1901.

 

 Coleraine, 1611.

Lately I've learned that there are many other town diamonds in Ulster. The centre of Ulster's plantation towns were usually given that name. The outer limits of Coleraine might vaguely suggest a diamond but its central zone, the part that is actually called The Diamond, is a rectangle. This map from 1611 shows it well. Why did the term diamond come into use?

 

Postcard of Coleraine.

Diamonds were the town's market areas and markets were central to the Plantation project. It was believed that control, regulation and commerce would help build a new society. I wonder if the hard, angular associations of the word diamond appealed, in some fundamental way, to the designers of the plantation? Still now, I feel, the word diamond suggests a nexus, lines and angles meeting in one unbreakable centre. Such a solid word was bound to appeal to those wishing to anchor themselves into the ground.

The Star Factory

I heard Iain Sinclair on BBC Radio 4 lately given his personal view of the term psychogeography. Basically, psychogeography was whatever you wanted it to be. This got me wondering if there is an official definition of the term. As a concept, it has been around longer than one might expect. It seems to have its roots in 1950’s France. The theorist, writer and filmmaker Guy Debord said psychogeography was: "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals."

This concern with precision and laws is not usually found among those who would define psychogeography today. The contemporary trend is it towards playfulness, inventiveness. Most are happy to accept as psychogeography almost any creative effort that makes us look at our surroundings afresh. One writer suggests that to play psychogeographer you could open up a street map … “place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out in the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour.”

Oregon - Orient - Orkey - Palestine - Paris.

Whatever the definition, Ciaran Carson’s book The Star Factory is a psychogeography of Belfast. One observation I particularly enjoy in the book is about the index of street names accompanying a map or atlas. Carson points out some of the strange juxtapositions that indexing creates for Belfast. Places far apart in the solid material of the city are thrown together and new connections spark in the mind “like the way we could hear the roar of the crowd at an international fixture in far-off Windsor Park.”

Carson goes on:

... streets named after places form exotic junctures not to be found on the map of the Empire: Balkan and Ballarat, Cambria and Cambrigde, Carlisle and Carlow, Lisbon and Lisburn, and so on, though Madras and Madrid, till we eventually arrive, by way of Yukon, at the isles of Zetland, whereupon we fall off the margins of the city.

Reclaim the Westlink

Forum for Alternative Belfast is a Community Interest Company that campaigns for a better and a more humane built environment in Belfast. One of their current projects is attempting to improve the Divis Link intersection. This is currently a patch that really lets you know this city is for cars, brutally excluding any other mode of getting around. "It is important that people in the city challenge the design of these over-scaled junctions that disempower the walker and the cyclist," says the Forum.


From the website of Forum for Alternative Belfast.

This diagram of the existing (blue) and proposed (yellow) pavements shows the Forum's proposal of what space could be reclaimed at the junction, helping to make it walkable and a living link between the west and the city centre. This is just a small part of their proposal, see the Forum for Alternative Belfast website for more.

Belfast Sound Map

I love the Belfast Sound Map. Go, listen to the city. A factory's quitting-time siren on the Duncrue Road; cyclists and walkers on the Lagan Towpath; wind blowing through tubular-steel gates on Black Mountain; road works on Cromac Street. It's all there, and more.


The overview map, clicking on a tag plays a recording.
 
The long whine of a siren breaks the quiet on Duncrue Road. Time to go home.

Anyone can contribute a digital recording of their own to the map. You upload it via the website. The Belfast Sound Map continues to grow.

The URL is www.belfastsoundmap.org.

Another Internment

20 years ago this year saw another kind of internment in Ireland, very different to the one Northern Ireland came to know in the 1970s. A case known as the X case set a striking precedent, a young female was barred from exiting the country because she was believed to be on her way to get an abortion. This cartoon map commenting on the situation (below) was publish by the Irish Times originally in 1992 and reprinted by them earlier this year. The newspaper reports that marches and demonstrations against the ruling extended from Dublin to Irish embassies and consulates around the world. In the netherlands politicians spoke against this "gross violation of human rights." An Australian senator called the situation "barbarous." It lead the French press to question Ireland's membership of the EC.

Eventually, fear that the girl might take her own life was considered grounds enough to allow her to travel. Fallout from this decision reverberates on but 20 years later the judgement has not yet been legislated for.

In Northern Ireland abortion is not available either. However, as this cartoon map indicates, there is no fence along its shore stopping anyone traveling to Britain for an abortion.