Urban Clearance

Urban Clearance is a series of four projects of urban intervention and social interaction.
Artists from France, England, Northern Ireland and Austria were invited to Belfast by PS²- an artist group itself- to have a close look at the city and its urban and social structure.
Their survey, discoveries or sightings are used to form the subject of their projects in various open forms: as an outside intervention, as documentation or installation, as an initiative or a film presentation - a dialogue with the city and the citizens at a time of significant political and economical change.
Belfast, like all of Northern Ireland, is undergoing huge regeneration. Although the former territorial divides, empty or derelict places or no go zones still exist, there is a sense of normalization, of re-use and re-claiming of the inner city with a boom in shops and café bars, consumerism and leisure, which seems to cement the fragile transition with its political insecurities and destabilisation. The building boom in the inner city re-furbishes and creates new public spaces, pedestrian zones or recreation areas, but it also defines their function and commercializes its use; a process, which most cities permanently undergo, and which is widely debated by planners, investors, business, community- and activist groups.
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