12 - Ken Sterrett: insurgent urbanism in Belfast’s time of Troubles

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Northern Irish planner and urban designer Ken Sterrett is a strong and constructive voice of dissent in Belfast, a city whose urban and social fabric is scarred by conflict. Sterrett developed his practice in a city marked by ethnic and social segregation, urban sprawl and a “silo culture” of government departments, which led to a very conservative, top-down approach to planning throughout the past few decades.

Sterrett has worked in the context of conflict and post-conflict marked by “the Troubles”, the period between 1969 and 1998 characterized by armed conflict between the British state, the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican (CNR) community and the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist (PUL) community in Northern Ireland. As part of the Local Government (Northern Ireland) Act of 1972, local governments in the territory lost planning powers, resulting in a top-down, centralized organization of government. To this day, local authorities have limited powers, including on policy issues such as roads, regeneration, housing and education – unlike their counterparts in the rest of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, where these areas are largely devolved to councils.

Sterrett started his career in the 1980s as a practitioner in social housing in Belfast, but he became increasingly engaged in practice and research that questioned and challenged the city's status quo. He worked on the peace lines – the walls that divide Catholic and Protestant communities – as a government adviser; in collaborative and engaged research, funded by regional and European grants; and in urban activism, as an expert academic and leader. His position as an insurgent voice was formalized when he became director of the Forum for Alternative Belfast (FAB) in 2009, and later a founding member of the “Save the Cathedral Quarter” (SaveCQ) campaign in 2017, with both platforms advocating for a fair, inclusive and accessible city. This was in stark opposition to the mainstream, market-led urban regeneration policies in Belfast.

His insurgence might be less apparent than those of people on the fringes or outside the discipline, but is nonetheless highly significant in three ways. First, Sterrett recognized that the problem with spatial segregation and blight in Belfast was not only related to ethnicity but also rooted in socio-economic class divisions; his practice is characterized in particular by a deep engagement with deprived communities in the city.