ABSTRACT
In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, opening the way for a cessation of thirty years of low-grade civil war, and taking some inspiration from Lord Rogers’s Urban Task Force (UTF) report the following year, Belfast, at the turn of the millennium, proclaimed itself as the ‘Renaissance City’ (BCC 2002). The city can be forgiven for the oversight that this epithet had already been claimed by Detroit in the rebuilding drive that eventually followed its image collapse after the urban riots in 1967. Events in that city were subsequently to mock such a rebranding of place (Neill 2006a). Belfast, as this chapter will argue, has more hope, but remains afflicted with a lack of real self-confidence and a poverty of aspiration in asserting its identity as a unique place. A kinder critic might point out that expectations must be tempered with an awareness of the road already travelled. As late as 1992 the Belfast novelist Glenn Patterson, in his book Fat Lad, described the city’s tourist image as a ‘ghoulish fairground with a murderous significance ascribed to every street corner’ (Patterson 1992: 203). This is in stark contrast to at least the physical renaissance, which Belfast, over fifteen years later, presents to the world. The new Belfast brand logo, launched in 2008, celebrating this turn around, but with lack of originality in the concept (a red welcoming heart sign with echoes of New York’s brand), was justifiably met with an ambivalent response (O’Hara and Wilkie 2008).
