by the European Commission to the sum of €1.5 million. During this annual event host cities develop their cultural infrastructure, showcase their cultural talents and attract cultural tourists. It is designed to enhance the 'development of cities', raise their 'international profile', celebrate the 'richness and diversity' of cultures in Europe and link local culture to a 'common European cultural identity' (European Commission, 2014). 2 CoC aims to increase media interest in the host city, stimulate tourism, bring community members together and facilitate professional artistic collaboration on creative projects (DCMS, 2013, 2015). Where CoC differs from ECoC is that there is no public funding attached to the award, it occurs once every four years and smaller spatial areas are eligible.

This paper explores the nature of community capacity-building in the context of local development. It challenges some of the simplistic constructions of community as a distinctive stakeholder with a shared set of values and clear identity. Even in apparently homogeneous place-based communities such as in the Catholic Ardoyne area of North Belfast there are important differences in the way in which local people interact with the organised voluntary sector. The paper concludes by highlighting the need to reach deeper into the concerns of local people, rather than the priorities of statutory funders, as a basis for service provision and local planning.

A sustained reduction in unemployment, economic growth and house price increase have reflected Belfast’s post-conflict renaissance just as readily as the global recession has exposed the fragility of construction-led growth. Rates of segregation had stabilised and new consumption spaces and élite developments further reflected the city’s engagement with globalisation and economic liberalisation. This paper explores the spatial impact of these processes, not least as gentrification has created new layers of residential segregation in a city already preoccupied with high rates of ethno-religious territoriality. A case study of south Belfast connects these shifts to the production of new mixed-religion neighbourhoods. These have the capacity to reduce the relevance of traditional binary identities, but at the same time reproduce new forms of segregation centred on tenure and class. The paper concludes by highlighting the implications for policy and practice, not least as the recession opens new spaces to present alternatives to the market logic.

Introduction Devolution in Northern Ireland emerged as a`signifier' of conflict transformation, political stability, and economic normalisation. Research, dominated by public administration accounts, saw the restoration of Stormont (Northern Ireland's Parliament) as legitimising peace negotiations and offering a progressive brand of consensus politics for a new postconflict order (Birrell, 2007; 2009; Hazlett and Hill, 2000; Osborne, 2002). Such accounts treated regional democracy axiomatically and generally failed to engage more critical political economy readings of the devolution project in which the dismantling of welfare is paralleled by inegalitarian versions of economic growth (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Harvey, 2007). We argue that the two main parties in government, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein (SF), (1) operate a Janus-faced populist rhetoric that articulates welfare protection and social mobility at the same time as promoting an increasing neoliberal order that deepens spatial and social exclusions. The establishment of the Strategic Investment Board, urban renaissance centred on spectacular (and increasingly suspect) private property projects, and the push for foreign direct investment (FDI), reflected the need to remove the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy of Direct Rule for leaner and more facilitative modes of governance and growth. In direct contrast to depictions of modernity, a more pronounced

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Abstract:The fascination with death and disaster has encouraged the development of distinctive tourism markets, the rediscovery of sites and places of past conflict and all accompanied with uneasy narratives about what they mean and how they should be consumed. The increasingly stratified tourist economy and the interplay between demand and supply has also stimulated a complex set of ontological, socio-political and indifferent responses as places and interests compete to project often selective or stylised claims for recognition. This paper reviews the experiences of tourists visiting Derry/Londonderry, the UK's first City of Culture and how they make sense of the competing interpretations of the past in museums, rituals and artefacts. The 17thC walled city, the city of violence and the post-conflict renaissance city are spatially and socially reproduced but rarely connect with each other to help make sense of the past for the present and critically, for the future. The paper concludes that the discursive content promised by the City of Culture was a missed opportunity to debate these places and events and critically, the problematized and reified narratives they each project.

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