People, power and planning in public places: the making of Covenant Day

Abstract

Cities have been heralded as the spatial manifestation of differentiated land uses and activities. The planning system has tried to establish some interpretation of sense for the public good within this paradoxical and contested place. There is no singular ‘public’, however, that occupies the city. The concentrated heterogeneity of life creates a tension for land use planning – on the one hand, seeking to respond to the vibrancy that resides within city ‘messiness’, yet on the other hand, executing contemporary governance decisions that pursue the ‘sanitising’ of places into more ordered forms. Public places, mirroring the complexities of urban societies, have undergone significant transformations in their design, use, management and ownership structures contributing to the acknowledged decline of the urban public sphere. With the belief that a lack of understanding of the nature of public places is a root cause behind its deterioration, there is the need for the complex urban narratives to be investigated. This paper explores public places in an attempt to better understand the imaginaries and landscapes of public places through a new institutional framework with the arguments developed through a case study of the Covenant Day parade in Belfast, 2012.

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