ESRC research projects
Skills for managing spatial diversity
Queen's University Belfast
Dr Brendan Murtagh
- Challenges our current understanding that race, religion and poverty interlock to produce ‘wicked' urban problems.
- Offers a model of practice to
1. Inform the national debate on community cohesion
2. Inform the management of ethnically diverse places
3. Inform the skills sets that may help professionals and practitioners resist the pulling effects of residential segregation.
The Egan Review established a particular set of generic and technical competencies linked to sustainable communities in England, although the work has wider implications for the delivery of area-based policies in the rest of the United Kingdom.
The approach fits with the conceptualisation of planners as mediators of spatial relations in which collaborative practices and discursive methodologies hold powerful prescriptive appeal.
This research proposal challenges this paradigm for its capacity to understand and respond to the way in which race, religion and poverty interlock to produce 'wicked' urban problems.
Drawing on experiences in Northern Ireland, the project offers models of practice to inform
- The national debate on Community Cohesion
- The management of ethnically diverse places
- The skills set that may help professionals and practitioners resist the pulling effects of residential segregation
We suggest that Northern Ireland offers a useful research laboratory to understand the connection between planning and ethno-religious segregation and how these lessons connect to the wider national debate on skills, parallel lives and citizenship rights.
We are also conscious that Northern Ireland has much to import in understanding the skills needed for sustainable development and the support infrastructure required to supply a more complex set of competencies and knowledge in the spatial planning arena.
Our methodology is based on an interactive approach with the key stakeholders and an emphasis on ensuring that the user community is engaged in the design and delivery of the empirical work:
- An Initiation Seminar will help scope the issues, refine research instruments and assist with fieldwork implementation.
- A quantitative e-survey of groups and practitioners involved in the management of segregated places will be complemented by a series of case studies drawing on experiences in the public, community and the private sector.
- A programme of semi-structured interviews within national focal points in England, Wales and Scotland and with regional policy makers will explore the type and mix of competencies required to manage spatial diversity and identify strategic supply gaps in the Northern Ireland system in particular.
- An audit of the principal providers of education and training for spatial planning in the region, to see how and where supports are offered, in what substantive areas, at what level and whether they emphasise particular skills and practices.
- The research will also locate the work in Northern Ireland within both national and international reviews of practice in policy areas and places stratified by ethnic segregation.
We will finalise the programme of research with a second structured seminar in Northern Ireland to both disseminate and validate findings. We also propose to hold a seminar, in London, potentially in partnership with the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), in order to highlight the implications of the work for wider national debates on planning for ethno-spatial diversity.
The research outputs will provide strategic advice to the skills debate in Northern Ireland and will offer normative guidance to the development of competencies in dealing with ethno-spatial segregation at a national level.
ESRC is the UK's largest research funding agency for social and economic issues.
