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Divided Cities
FRANK GAFFIKIN
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
INTRODUCTION: CHANGING
URBANISM
As a concept, “divided city” has increasing
purchase in contemporary urban scholarship,
even as its meaning remains equivocal. To
appreciate it better, understanding the chang-
ing composition of the urban is important.
Definition of the city realm is increasingly
problematic in the Urban Age, since it is
not reducible to human settlement outside
the rural. The idea of “metropolis” rec-
ognizes that urban built environments in
advanced economies have tended, over the
last half-century, to extend beyond original
municipal limits in variations of sprawl,
which can network economically interdepen-
dent metropolitan areas. While the dominant
account of the industrial city since the 1960s
has been one of debility and even impend-
ing mortality, its fatality has proved to be
miscalculated. Rather than decay, the city
has metamorphosed into an untidier mode,
whereby the spatial unit of urban analysis
extends beyond central cities to at least cover
hinterlands of suburban and ex-urban habi-
tat. As Knapp (2006, 61) comments: “Old
dichotomies between centre and periphery,
urban and rural, settlements and open space,
are fading. … Cities, suburbs, towns and
rural areas grow increasingly together into
a new poly-nuclear and fragmented urban
patchwork.”
This reconstituted territoriality, com-
prising less compact, low density urban
growth, has also become manifest in Europe,
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0080
leading to a novel cityspace that mingles
dispersal and agglomeration, characterized
as postmetropolis (Soja 2000). Taking this
spatial pattern further, individual cities have
to be contextualized, increasingly, in their
regional framework. Thus, for example, Euro-
pean balanced growth policies lean toward
a polycentric network of large urbanized
development corridors that hold potential
synergies and economies of scale and scope.
Such multiscalar clustering raises questions
about the changing geography of urban
governance, and about how such composite
urbanism can attain smart connectivity in
policy and planning. However, it also raises
an intriguing paradox for cities divided on
ethnonationalist lines, suggesting that con-
temporary telecommunication and transit
offer the prospect of an increasingly “flat” and
borderless world, ever more liberated from
national polity (Friedman 2005).
A pronounced indicator of this global-
ization is the recent form of “global cities,”
as nodal postindustrial production sites of
global finance and business services. An
emergent facet of this “global” impact is
the mongrel city, comprising multiplicity of
ethnic populations, stemming largely from
migration. Such diversity holds the likelihood
of either more palpable discord around poli-
tics of identity and territory, or deliberate fos-
tering of the cosmopolis, where pluralist nego-
tiation across fundamental rifts may mold
mutually enriching interculturalism, within
acknowledgment of civic interdependence
(Sandercock 2003). Such prospects may prove
particularly challenging in megacities, con-
centrated in the Global South – gargantuan
urbanism with its latent conflict relating
to massive and disparate populations.
This intensity and density have produced

2 DI VIDED CITIES
precarious habitats and obscured spaces that
host informal squatter settlements, whose
legitimacy generates contest.
In summary, the splintered, mutated,
and discordant sociospatial form of the
contemporary city can prompt ambiguous
territorial identity, boundary, and cohe-
sion. While urbanization, industrialization,
modernization, and democratization were
discernibly connected in Western metropoli-
tan experience, this normative pattern cannot
be assumed, since city growth in the planet’s
most destitute parts is not always attended
by similar enhanced civic opportunity, a
disjuncture engendering acute social inequity
and conflictive potential. In all of this, it is
helpful to appreciate not only how the spatial
is socially constructed, but also how the social
is spatially constructed (Davoudi and Strange
2009).
SPATIAL TYPOLOGY
In conflictive cities, five main types of space
can be specified:
1. Ethnic: Signified and separatist, and
stamped as belonging to one specific
clan, this terrain is reflected most obvi-
ously in segregated communities, prone
to mutual mistrust, if not hostility. Tribal
references and associations prevail over
ties that bind across traditional enmity.
2. Neutral: Providing a secure, safe preserve,
outside territorial claims by any specific
protagonist group, it carries potential
for cross-community use and encounter,
without the prospect of substantial or
sustained engagement around divisive
allegiance.
3. Shared: This ensures safe dialogic arena
for proactive deliberation across the
divide. Candidly related to competing
interpretation of the contest’s roots
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and expression, it offers recognition
and inclusion of difference. Thereby,
forthright mutual challenge can be
encouraged – often as agonistic conver-
sation – without assurance of conversion.
4. Cosmopolitan: Offering space that tran-
scends local animosity, this embraces
a more global contour and perspective.
Multiple cultural identities are on display.
Diversity is celebrated and interrogated
within a witness of common humanity.
From such cross-pollination spring new
hybridities. It recognizes that, as humans,
we cannot be tied down to one simple
designation or affiliation.
5. Dead: Often, large tracts of land that are
subject to deep discord are abandoned
indefinitely for delayed development
until some agreement can be reached
about their use. This “lost city” is usu-
ally subject to blight, impasse, and
neglect, and usually not even given the
opportunity of “meanwhile” use, thereby
fragmenting the urban fabric further.
In turn, this spatial typology is linked to six
dominant discursive themes in divided cities
(Yiftachel and Yacobi 2003):
1. Identity: Distinctive and often tribal
senses of belonging can emphasize
enmity to the attachments of opponents,
with “external force creating internal
cohesion.”
2. Equity: Contests around equality and
discrimination between the contesting
groups can cloud more effective ways of
assessing need.
3. Security: Issues of community safety and
justice systems are viewed in partisan
terms.
4. Territory: Physical terrain becomes
both the actual battlefield and symbolic
marker for group dominance or survival.

5. Proprietary: The issue of ownership of
place – whether it be a local neighborhood
or society at large – particularly marks
those contested spaces locked into wider
sovereignty disputes.
6. History: The past is an active spirit, per-
sistently haunting the present and future
of societies, multilayered with ancestral
animosities. Contending narratives of
that troubled history can be an obsessive
fixation with a legacy that can’t be “fixed.”
PUBLIC POLICY RESPONSES
In examining how city government tackles
this kind of division and segregation, it can
be seen that policies often tend to be based on
flimsy evaluation, rather than robust analysis.
The spatial scale and model of intervention
keeps changing, within a tendency to not
distinguish between development in a place
and development of a place. Little connection
operates between the urban programs for
deprived areas and the wider city regenera-
tion. Scant concern is paid to quality rather
than quantity of investment and develop-
ment. In responding to unrest and violence,
there can be underappreciation of how
rewarding bad behavior can encourage more
bad behavior. Problems with delivery per-
sist, whereby proliferation of plans seems to
generate a law of diminishing returns – with
more, less is used. These deficits suggest
the need for a more comprehensive under-
standing of how city division and conflict are
generated (Massey 2005).
ORIGINS AND FORMS OF DIVIDED
CITIES
In general, four distinct origins and forms of
city division are evident:
1. With reconfiguration of mature econom-
ies in the last half-century – portrayed
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DI VIDED CITIES 3
as the shift to late capitalism, disorga-
nized capitalism, postindustrialism, or
the informational society – has come
increasing bifurcation of the labor mar-
ket and related sociospatial segregation
between rich and poor. In its starkest
form, the flourishing gated communities
of the wealthy and the languishing
ghettos of the underclass are deemed to
constitute a dual city, inherently unstable
and prone to conflict.
2. Radical urban transformation in the
Global South, due mainly to mas-
sive expansion of nascent industrial
economies, has augmented sociospa-
tial inequity while amplifying con-
tested informal development, thereby
imperiling extensive urban areas with
prospective hostilities (Caldeira 2001).
3. Together with greater portability of cap-
ital, labor, trade, and information, the
world is living with substantial migration
flows, often from poorer to richer coun-
tries. Such demographic re-formation
begets enhanced ethnic and religious mix
in even once quite uniform urbanism,
and since dispossessed settlers tend to
band together in mutually supportive
communities, some cities are becoming
host to separatist locales that challenge
their citizens’ facility to accommodate
cohesion amid diversity.
4. Defrosting of the Cold War was attended
by the implosion of authoritarian regimes
that had once locked mutually resentful
ethnonational identities within single
polities. As with the decolonializa-
tion process, such emancipation has
reawakened dormant ethnic enmity,
auguring upsurge in disputes about
borders and sovereignty. Places like
the Balkans, Chechnya, and Ukraine
join those more persistent combat
zones of Israel–Palestine, Kashmir–
India–Pakistan, Cyprus, Northern

4 DI VIDED CITIES
Ireland, and the Basque Country. Such
macro ruptures tend to be grounded
most fiercely in the main urban centers,
such as Jerusalem, Sarajevo, Grozny,
Nicosia, Belfast, and Bilbao.
Much of the world’s urban conflict can be
situated within this typology. Though variant
in context and manner, such clashes share
interlinked issues: history, identity, territory,
legitimacy, equity, and security. Analysis of
these struggles tends to be framed within
the political (e.g., addressing the tenets of
good governance needed to attain pluralist
democracy as the best means to secure con-
ciliation between protagonists); the economic
(e.g., exploring the material basis for class
and power inequalities, seen to support the
division); and the cultural (e.g., highlighting
the way opposing customs and claims of eth-
nic groups trigger mutual antipathy) (Bollens
2007).
DISTINGUISHING “DIVIDED” CITIES
All cities are divided, in that their “publics”
and stakeholders have disparate access to
urban resources and vested interest, related
to class, ethnicity, and gender. Accordingly,
a distinction needs to be drawn between
two main forms of urban contested space.
One is where the quarrel relates to issues of
pluralism, concerning imbalances in power,
welfare, and status among rival groups.
The other kind is about sovereignty, where
universal disputes about equity, rights, and
social entitlement are entwined with eth-
nonationalist conflict about the state’s very
legitimacy. Here, the question of “whose
city” is lodged within a bigger contest about
“whose country.”
Distinction between cities divided on
socioeconomic or ethnoreligious lines and
those conflicted around sovereignty is often
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underobserved. Yet, the difference is telling.
For instance, promoters of city peacebuilding
emphasize the need to nurture a sense of
common belonging, rooted in a politico-legal
concept of citizenship. Yet, in sovereignty
disputes, citizenship itself is the very foun-
dation of the conflict (Fenster 1996). Thus,
policy intervention in deeply divided cities
like Belfast and Jerusalem confronts two key
challenges: first, the perennial problem in
regeneration of how spatial concentrations of
poverty can give way to more socially mixed
communities, while minimizing negative
externalities associated with gentrification;
and second, how to operate regeneration and
reconciliation in tandem.
In this context, the concept of identity
is assuming greater recognition in a period
marked by contradictory impulses of uni-
formization and differentiation, reflected in
both the spread of globalism and the revival
of tribalism and nationalism (Maalouf 2000).
The former offers scope for multiple identi-
ties and hybridities, though within a power
structure that mostly privileges objects and
idioms of neoliberal capitalism. In the face of
the atomization that can attend the vastness
and remoteness of the global, the latter offers
putative comfort of local bonding and cultural
clarity that counterposes the camaraderie and
shelter of familiar solidarities with the dis-
tance and dominance associated with global
determinations. Identity finds spatial expres-
sion in territory, which itself is socially con-
toured. While in many instances territory will
be considered natural and given, it is when its
tenure, meaning, and authority are contested
that the role of power in its formation is most
evidently depicted (Camina and Wood 2009).
THE ROLE OF PLANNING IN DIVIDED
CITIES
Given this important issue of power, plan-
ning and policy in divided cities cannot

function in an apolitical way, with no explicit
appreciation of the spatial impact of conflict
based on territory and identity. Moreover,
policies of inclusion and cohesion can oper-
ate inadvertently at odds with each other,
since compensatory programs designed
to rectify inequality between groups can
problematize policies designed to bring
contesting groups together. In this regard,
“local community” can be an inappropriate
spatial unit of analysis and intervention in
the context of sectarian geographies. Public
policy geared to such enclaves may encour-
age each segregated area to attempt to push
its position at the expense of the “other”
community, thereby deepening separatism
and rivalry. A civic rather than ethnic per-
spective can be crucial in moving beyond
tribal enclaves, within an appreciation of
how planning can unintentionally intensify
rather than moderate contested space, and
how long-standing precepts of good plan-
ning and design can play a significant role in
embedding reconciliation in the development
process.
In pursuit of better means to address con-
tested space, a new planning framework
can be helpful. It is one that is proac-
tive rather than reactive; has capacity to
both make place and mediate space; goes
beyond land-use planning and specific site
development to a more integrated and com-
prehensive approach; embeds good relations
as a central objective in its practice; oper-
ates in a multidisciplinary way; involves
from a formative stage of plan-making a
range of agencies across private, public, and
voluntary sectors; challenges forthrightly
any form of sectarian/racist gatekeeping in
the development process; and in linking
community and spatial planning, builds
in delivery and impact evaluation from
the start.
Moving a city from its divided past to a
shared future implies a shift from managing
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DI VIDED CITIES 5
to transforming the division, a step change to
deeper pluralism with less insular communi-
ties anchored in exclusivist ethnonationalist
affiliation. In turn, this ambitious conver-
sion is taken to evolve strategically over the
long term, with complementary structural
change in agencies like planning, together
with deliberate fostering of a cultural shift
in society toward a more cosmopolitan,
open, hybrid, globally focused future. In
such a trajectory, public space plays a piv-
otal role in congregating diverse publics
under a common civic entitlement and
responsibility.
SEE ALSO: Gated Communities (CIDs); High
Tech Zones/High Tech Developments; Image of
the City; Urban Regime Theory
REFERENCES
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Camina, M., and M. Wood. 2009. “Parallel Lives:
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FURTHER READING
Calame, J., and E. Charlesworth. 2009. Divided
Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar,
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and Nicosia. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania.
Davis, D., and N. de Duren, eds. 2011. Cities and
Sovereignty: Identity Politics in Urban Spaces.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gaffikin, F., and M. Morrissey. 2011. Planning in
Divided Cities: Collaborative Shaping of Con-
tested Space. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Haddock, B., and P. Sutch, eds. 2003. Multicultur-
alism, Identity and Rights. London: Routledge.