A study of the long term historical background to the disputes over parades and related issues that remain central to conflict in Northern Ireland, linked to a review of current policy on the management of public space in the city and a discussion of options for the future.

IntroductionChapter 1 The origins of public spaceChapter 2 Lord Donegall’s townChapter 3 The making of a municipal cultureChapter 4 Freedom and orderChapter 5 Public space and civil conflictChapter 6 Public space and the Protestant stateChapter 7 New directions? The 1960sChapter 8 Violence and carnival: renegotiating public space 1970-2008Chapter 9 Shared space or divided future?Conclusion Public space - past lessons and future strategiesIndex

Disputes over parades, flags and similar issues have for several decades played a central part in the ongoing conflict of nationalist and unionist. Civic identity and public space, focussing on Belfast, and bringing together the work of a historian and two social scientists, offers a new perspective on these sometimes lethal conflicts. While both sides like to present their case in terms of non-negotiable, historically grounded rights, a survey of the way in which public space has been thought about and regulated over the past two centuries shows that little of what is claimed can be taken for granted. Far from being a timeless absolute, our modern idea of the public is the product of very specific changes during the nineteenth century in the character of urban living, and its regulation has been from the start a matter of contention and debate. During the twentieth century the establishment of a new Northern Ireland state, with Belfast as its capital, saw unionism and Protestantism achieve a near complete monopoly of public space. In more recent decades, this monopoly has broken down, partly as a result of political violence, but also through the influence of new ideas of human rights and of a more positive vision of political and cultural diversity. Today policy makers and politicians struggle to devise a strategy for the management of public space in a divided city, while endeavouring to promote a new sense of civic identity that will transcend long-standing sectarian and political divisions.

'[...] this is an important and welcome book that effectively illuminates a continued way forward to a shared future by recalling a complex and all-but-forgotten past. Inconvenient to both sides of the city’s sectarian divide, that past reveals present-day political self-definitions to be the product of selective historical memory.'Victorian Studies