Return to Titanic and lost in the maze: The search for representation of ‘post-conflict’ Belfast

Urban planning and development have long been at the forefront of official efforts in Belfast to project an image of the possibility and incipient reality of a more normal city and society. This article revisits the continuing difficulties associated with government supported attempts to reimage and represent through development what has now been called the ‘post-conflict’ city. The argument is made that competing symbolic cultural endowments of space, which construct ‘Belfast’ in spatial imagination, still leave scant non-controversial representational resources for official place promotion. The use of the legacy of the Belfast built Titanic to fill this vacuum by branding ‘post-conflict’ space is explored and the conclusion reached that this is too heavy a cargo for a ship already doomed-once. Meanwhile, on what is arguably the major representational battlefield of cultures in Northern Ireland—the Maze Prison on Belfast's doorstep—the true face of the post-conflict city is on public view. This gorilla as yet awaits an extreme make-over.