Belfast: Designing the City Lectures

Image: Belfast: Designing the City Lectures In early 2006 we, along with and PLACE Built Environment Centre, held a series of three public lectures on the city's regeneration called Belfast: Designing the City. The lectures will provided the citizens of Belfast an opportunity to get involved in the debate on the city's ongoing development and to discover how other places have met the challenges we now face.

Lecture 1: Re-shaping Belfast for twenty-first century living

This lecture, which took place in February 2006, looked at how we can use Belfast's physical and industrial legacy to construct a city of the future. Guest speaker Douglas Gordon, a local authority architect-planner in Helsinki, Finland, outlined major development projects in Helsinki and explained how the city uses urban planning to manage growth. He also examined the issues that place Belfast and Helsinki among the main growth points in the EU.

Issue 3 of the Development Brief provides a summary of the lecture.

Lecture 2: Building Belfast's neighbourhoods of choice

This lecture, which took place in March 2006, provided an insight into how urban planners can help create vibrant and successful neighbourhoods.

Guest speakers for this lecture were Ed Carpenter, an artist based in Portland, Oregon and Joe Montgomery, Director General of the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit and the Tackling Disadvantage Group of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM).

Joe Montgomery presented an overview of the ODPM's approach to addressing disadvantage. Ed Carpenter specialises in large-scale public installations ranging from architectural sculpture to infrastructure design and was recently commissioned to create a sculpture at the Westlink Broadway roundabout in Belfast. His input provided a perspective into how public art can be used to record a city's history and make a positive contribution to regeneration. The lecture finished with a Question and Answer session for both speakers.

Issue 4 of the Development Brief provides a summary of the lecture.

Lecture 3: Building cities for people

This final lecture, which took place in April 2006, presented the role of the urban designer in creating a liveable city and thoughts on how to encourage people back to the city.

Guest speakers for the final lecture were Lars Gemzøe, an architect with Gehl Architects based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Martha Schwartz, a landscape architect and principal of Martha Schwartz Partners in Cambridge, Massachusetts and London.

Lars Gemzøe has extensive international experience of urban design. Lars presented a European perspective on urban design as a way of reinvigorating neighbourhoods.

Martha Schwartz is a landscape architect and artist with a major interest in urban projects and the exploration of new design expression in the landscape. She explored how landscape design solutions can be raised to a level of fine art and produce a wider regenerative effect to a city. The lecture finished with a Question and Answer session for both speakers.

Issue 5 of the Development Brief provides a summary of the lecture.

Contact us

Policy and Business Development Unit
Development Department
Belfast City Council
Cecil Ward Buidling
4-10 Linenhall Street
Belfast
BT2 8BP

Tel: 028 9091 8764
Email: sotc@belfastcity.gov.uk