ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the historical trends of defending certain areas of the city, noting that defence has always been a pre-occupation in urban areas. Social scientists' concern with space has led them not just to study the characteristics of individual places but also the processes that territorially divide or appropriate portions of space for specific purposes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, another city which experienced such 'walling' on a much larger scale was Belfast, this time due to religious differences between social groups. The 'hardening' and subsequent 'softening' of the urban landscape of central Belfast over the past thirty years has been linked to an assumption that territoriality can be expressed though the built environment. The chapter explores the contemporary meaning of territoriality as applied to the city, indicating that it should be used as no more than an analogy for describing the fragmentation of the city for defensive purposes.
