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This research project is primarily a case study about planning practice and its affect on peacebuilding activities in Belfast and Jerusalem. The primary method of data collection is semi-structured interviews with planners, policymakers, and community leaders involved in peacebuilding activities in the study cities. The primary data collection is triangulated with a literature review and a number of supplementary planning documents, books, and videos on the subject matter. The data has been analyzed using the lens of fundamental human needs, as laid out by Max-Neef, who sees all human needs as equally important rather than hierarchical as some human need theories are. Both Belfast and Jerusalem have centralized planning systems based on the British Town Planning model. Planning in both cities is frequently viewed as a contentious issue, most especially around housing issues. In both cities, one population group is characterized as “bursting” at the seams in terms of housing need, while the other population group feels endangered. Security issues are critical in both cities resulting in the building of security barriers, which ultimately change patterns of free movement in the city and affect the imagined city of both sides of the conflict. The barriers affect the ability to meet other fundamental human needs as well, such as the need for participation and understanding. Despite the clear problems in these cities, there are some indications of success as well. Northern Ireland ran a hugely successful public consultation on the direction the citizens want the government to go in. The resounding answer was for a shared future and some planners and urban leaders have taken this to heart and are working hard to build and define shared spaces in the urban fabric. This work is happening at all levels of the community and several excellent projects have been a positive result of cross-community work aimed at building understanding. In Jerusalem several organizations and various planners are working on similar goals to empower the disadvantaged Palestinian community and instill more justice in the planning system.

This research project is primarily a case study about planning practice and its affect on peacebuilding activities in Belfast and Jerusalem. The primary method of data collection is semi-structured interviews with planners, policymakers, and community leaders involved in peacebuilding activities in the study cities. The primary data collection is triangulated with a literature review and a number of supplementary planning documents, books, and videos on the subject matter. The data has been analyzed using the lens of fundamental human needs, as laid out by Max-Neef, who sees all human needs as equally important rather than hierarchical as some human need theories are. Both Belfast and Jerusalem have centralized planning systems based on the British Town Planning model. Planning in both cities is frequently viewed as a contentious issue, most especially around housing issues. In both cities, one population group is characterized as “bursting” at the seams in terms of housing need, while the other population group feels endangered. Security issues are critical in both cities resulting in the building of security barriers, which ultimately change patterns of free movement in the city and affect the imagined city of both sides of the conflict. The barriers affect the ability to meet other fundamental human needs as well, such as the need for participation and understanding. Despite the clear problems in these cities, there are some indications of success as well. Northern Ireland ran a hugely successful public consultation on the direction the citizens want the government to go in. The resounding answer was for a shared future and some planners and urban leaders have taken this to heart and are working hard to build and define shared spaces in the urban fabric. This work is happening at all levels of the community and several excellent projects have been a positive result of cross-community work aimed at building understanding. In Jerusalem several organizations and various planners are working on similar goals to empower the disadvantaged Palestinian community and instill more justice in the planning system.

The Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and the Irish Football Association (IFA) were founded in the 1880s and throughout the history have become more than mere sport organizations. Mainly because of the violent history of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, both associations became entrenched in the respective cultural memories of the two competing identities of Northern Ireland. The large-scale violence ended in 1998 with the signing of the Belfast Agreement that was meant to bring peace and inter-communal cooperation to the region. This paper analyses the development of the two associations after 1998 in the context of the theory of cultural memory created by Jan Assmann. It concludes that the IFA has changed profoundly since the end of the Troubles. It left its post in the unionist-protestant cultural identity and now represents part of the new Northern Irish identity which transcends the social division and is still in an early stage of development. The GAA, on the other hand, went the other way and decided to strengthen its position among nationalists and Catholics in spite of its anti-sectarian and anti-racist ethos and gestures. This difference stems mainly from different history and structure of both associations and the fear of the GAA of becoming marginalized by the British sports if it...

In this thesis I present new insights into aspects of Peter Guthrie Tait's life and work, derived principally from largely-unexplored primary source material: Tait's scrapbook, the Tait–Maxwell school-book and Tait's pocket notebook. By way of associated historical insights, I also come to discuss the innovative and far-reaching mathematics of the elusive Frenchman, C.-V. Mourey. P. G. Tait (1831–1901) F.R.S.E., Professor of Mathematics at the Queen's College, Belfast (1854–1860) and of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (1860–1901), was one of the leading physicists and mathematicians in Europe in the nineteenth century. His expertise encompassed the breadth of physical science and mathematics. However, since the nineteenth century he has been unfortunately overlooked—overshadowed, perhaps, by the brilliance of his personal friends, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) and William Thomson (1824–1907), later Lord Kelvin. Here I present the results of extensive research into the Tait family history. I explore the spiritual aspect of Tait's life in connection with The Unseen Universe (1875) which Tait co-authored with Balfour Stewart (1828–1887). I also reveal Tait's surprising involvement in statistics and give an account of his introduction to complex numbers, as a schoolboy at the Edinburgh Academy. A highlight of the thesis is a re-evaluation of C.-V. Mourey's 1828 work, La Vraie Théorie des quantités négatives et des quantités prétendues imaginaires, which I consider from the perspective of algebraic reform. The thesis also contains: (i) a transcription of an unpublished paper by Hamilton on the fundamental theorem of algebra which was inspired by Mourey and (ii) new biographical information on Mourey.