ABSTRACT
It is appropriate that a book on accommodating ethnic differences should be produced in Belfast, a city in which social cleavages are embedded in its geography, history and institutions, but which currently offers the prospect for social change. One of the happy by products of an unhappy situation is that the recent troubles have advanced our understanding of the dynamics of segregation. Just as the Belfast Royal Victoria Hospital has become one of the leading centres for the surgery of bullet wounds and kneecap injuries, the Geography Department of the University, particularly in the work directed by Fred Boal, has become one of the international centres for research on the causes and consequences of segregation. In a series of papers that have become classics in the literature, Fred Boal and his colleagues have demonstrated the social behavioural Himalaya that separates groups that live within a few metres of each other (Boal, 1969; 1970).
