Cutting with the Grain: Human Rights, Conflict Transformation and the Urban Planning System—Lessons from Northern Ireland

This article examines how the urban planning system in Northern Ireland served to concentrate segregation and systemic inequalities during the course of the recent conflict. Using documents recently uncovered from the Northern Ireland Public Record Office (PRONI), this article will show how the security forces ‘cut with the grain’ of a planning system that had historically been predicated upon segregation and exclusion in order to better control and manage politically motivated violence leaving a divided city in which systemic inequalities have been built into the fabric of the urban environment. Drawing on developments within regulatory theory this article will outline a way forward for creating an integrated post-conflict planning agenda for Belfast that takes account of the limits of traditional forms of legalism and adds learning to the debate around the relationship between systemic inequalities and the process of conflict transformation.