Community Planning in Contested Public Places: the case of Belfast

This paper focuses on the potential of an approach centred on the intergration of urban design and community planning tools in order to analyse, interpret and manage conflicting neighbourhoods whose residents show distinct cultural features. A consolidated community planning tool, such as the visual mapping, has been selected as privileged source of observations to be adapted to contested public places in order to capture the demand of transformation of such complex context. This paper aims at supporting the participatory process in the rehabilitation and redevelopment of public places in contested areas. This tool could be applied within visual mapping procedures in order to better address the dialogue between communities and the physical and spatial component of the visioning and transformation process.