Human Rights as War by Other Means. Jennifer Curtis

supply, demand was exacerbated by displacements, and the emerging anger with urban redevelopment decisively turned this activism toward housing. Early activism coalesced around claiming housing rights and defending neighborhoods from redevelopment. A rights discourse developed about the state’s responsibilities regarding housing, along with more fraught claims for the rights of communities to “hold” territory and steer public housing plans, inflected by ethnosectarian territoriality.

       Regeneration, Not Gentrification

      In 1961, the UK ratified the European Social Charter, a treaty that expanded the social and economic rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights.¹⁸ The charter sets out basic rights of individuals in respect to housing, health, education, employment, and nondiscrimination. These rights were not enforceable during the 1960s. The European Social Charter was revised in 1996, and the European Committee of Social Rights, a quasi-judicial enforcement mechanism with a collective complaints procedure, was established in 1998 (see Cullen 2009). Nevertheless, like other western European countries in the postwar era, the UK had a system of social entitlements, including public housing. As with other aspects of the social safety net developed in the early and mid-twentieth century, Northern Ireland’s government was slow to match British welfare provisions. Adequate and affordable housing was especially scarce. The civil rights campaign, with its emphasis on anti-Catholic discrimination in housing allocation and the link between property ownership and voting rights, barely scratched the surface of profound housing inequalities and deprivation.

      Plans to increase public housing provision and address the infrastructural housing difficulties of Belfast developed slowly from the 1950s onward. In the late 1960s, the Ministry of Development and the Belfast Corporation contracted Travers Morgan and the Building Design Partnership (BDP) to produce a roads plan and housing redevelopment plans, respectively. The subsequent plans required massive house clearances, with blocks of flats and fewer houses replacing the old stock and motorways cutting across the city in concentric “ring roads.” The plans projected a “car culture,” and the Falls and Shankill Roads, beloved of their denizens, would be reduced to arterial routes sprinkled with “district shopping centers” housing large multinational retailers. The plans dictated the destruction of both the physical and social existence of communities, and, not surprisingly, residents in the affected areas found the plans unacceptable. Yet it is unlikely that opposition would have been so forceful, or successful, had conflict not erupted, making direct action a conceivable and viable practice (see Wiener 1976). When the Ministry of Development unveiled the plans in the 1960s, there were few objections at initial public consultations, from either Divis or Shankill residents.

      The plan called for local government, and later the NIHE, to purchase large swathes of the poor housing in these areas, which was a mix of public and privately owned rentals. The mill owners and Catholic Church, as major landlords, would receive significant compensation. Meanwhile, tenants would be provided public housing, with far more legal rights over the properties than existing tenants. Yet the plan would displace even more people. Organized opposition to the plan in the 1970s by residents of Divis (lower Falls) and the Shankill cemented rights discourse as an intrinsic part of everyday politics in these areas. Without legal recourse under the European Social Charter of the time, activists used new methods of direct action to mobilize for decent, affordable housing. They also asserted rights of local people to traditional forms of housing, in traditional areas of residence. As activists became more confident, they asserted the right of social housing tenants to direct the planning and construction of housing. Their tactics included direct action, research and documentation, media campaigns, and lobbying professional planners directly.

      The NIHE took over the management of public housing from local councils in 1971. In the postwar estates—New Barnsley, Moyard, Springmartin, and Glencairn—construction was so poor that residents developed health problems. New Barnsley children suffered from dysentery because inadequate sewage facilities tainted the water supply. Glencairn children had high rates of asthma, partly because of the inadequate heating systems. Moyard flats and maisonettes were a disaster, with flooding, leaks, vermin, and, again, high rates of dysentery and asthma. In all three areas, residents compiled surveys of conditions and shared their data with the NIHE to lobby for repairs or replacement housing. But they also went to the media with their complaints (Irish News, August 16, 1974, 12). This increased emphasis on documentation and publicity became a significant and effective tactic of housing campaigns.

      Residents saw the plans as part of a deeper conspiracy between security forces and city planners to engineer out of existence the troublesome interfaces of west Belfast. They viewed the plans as slum clearances, putting nationalists in flats and moving loyalists to outlying estates. Most importantly, the plans would destroy social structures that were inseparable from the physical structure of the terraces and the streets as communal space. The hostility of people in the lower Falls and Shankill to the flats cannot be overstated. Despite the poor condition of terraced housing, campaigners did not want wholesale demolition; they wanted to improve the physical structures that shaped social life—and they wanted to take the lead in planning how to preserve their houses and streets. The initial efforts of local redevelopment groups, however, did little to alter the course of government plans, despite intense lobbying. Large swathes of terraced housing were demolished, and flats were indeed built in the lower Shankill and Divis.