Restricted Access to Remembrance: Problematic Usages of Industrial Memories in Belfast's Titanic Quarter

Abstract

The paper addresses the contemporary usages of collective memory in the Titanic Quarter's project in Belfast, Northern Ireland. In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, elected officials proposed urban revitalisation policies that aimed to mitigate the effects of deindustrialisation and the ethnonational conflict. On the old shipyard wastelands, public authorities were relying on the redevelopment of the built environment to suggest a shared urbanity but also a shared past, a connection with a common space, mobilising the myths and memories of the Titanic to achieve this. Yet, in a globalised world where memory increasingly surpasses national borders, it bears into question who is the targeted audience of this revitalised urban memory? Through careful observations in the neighbourhood and its flagship museum, the paper aims to criticise the use and manipulation of a conflictual working-class memory to sidestep Northern Ireland's sectarian divide.