Introduction

This volume has its origins in the 1995 Congress of the International Federation for Housing and Planning. This Congress was held in Belfast, in September of that year. The decision taken in the early 1990s to invite IFHP to Belfast was a bold step, given a context of continued ethnic conflict in Northern Ireland, punctuated as it was by occasional outbursts of violence. However this context was radically transformed when, in the later summer and early autumn of 1994, first the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and then the loyalist paramilitaries declared cease fires. In consequence it was possible for the final stages of organising the Congress to be undertaken with a greater degree of confidence than had earlier seemed possible.