‘Building Initiative’ in Belfast

interface or no-man’s land or contested territory between two communities. The ice-cream truck was used to suggest a strategy of temporary nonthreatening intervention into these spaces ‘Building Initiative’ is both the name adopted by a collaborative group of architects, urbanists and artists, and also the term they use to describe the ‘mode of agency’ chosen to inform and realise citizen-led urban regeneration in Belfast [1]. The necessity and forms of this praxis evolved in response to the city’s spatial, social and policy environment, and the inability of conventional mechanisms of architectural practice to engage adequately with this context. Building Initiative explored and pursued specific modes of agency, which it termed ‘initiatives’, within a variety of sectors including architectural, planning, educational, academic and media, and at a range of scales from local to international. This created the opportunity to work with a diversity of partner organisations and to develop a correspondingly wide range of strategies. We will look briefly at the context of Belfast and Building Initiative’s response to it, focusing specifically on the methods of working that were developed, before concentrating on one project to illustrate these methodologies and processes in application. The impact and legacy of the civil conflict remains one of the most pervasive issues affecting the urban life and physical environment of Belfast. Belfast is still a city of polarised territories. This condition has manifested itself in both the built form of the city, with the segregation of the two communities being reinforced through the distributions of infrastructure and land use, and in the absence of public debate and negotiation in relation to the city’s development. A whole range of environmental issues affecting both communities has remained neglected and civil conflict has left the province with a legacy of highly centralised and locally unaccountable structures of government. The construction industry has taken advantage of both conditions by leading the way with