LOS ANGELES VS. BELFAST: HOW DO YOU MOVE FORWARD IN A DIVIDED CITY?

LA hasn’t burned since the 1992 riots. The ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland largely ended in 1998. Ever since, the political leaders of Belfast and Los Angeles – two cities notorious worldwide for urban violence – have promised the end of bitter divisions within their cities. In 2013, the Northern Ireland government pledged to dismantle by 2023 all of Belfast’s “peace walls” – gates and fences and barriers separating Protestant and Catholic communities. But the walls still stand, most schools and social housing are still segregated, and Northern Ireland can’t even form a regional government.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, residents tell pollsters that race relations are deteriorating. And city government seems paralysed in the aftermath of a historic scandal – a secret tape of public and labor officials making offensive and racist statements about virtually every ethnic group in L.A.

What explains the persistence of racial and religious conflicts in these cities, despite decades of effort to end them? What strategies have worked in LA and Belfast to reduce divisions – and which have backfired? And what if anything can Belfast and LA learn from each other, and from the world, about how to find reconciliation and achieve cooperative governance?

Los Angeles speakers: Joumana Silyan-Saba, Director of Policy and Enforcement for the Civil + Human Rights and Equity Department (LA Civil Rights); Jody Agius Vallejo, Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California (USC), and Associate Director of USC Equity Research Institute & Chair-Elect of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association.

Belfast speakers:Professor Duncan Morrow, Director of community engagement, Ulster University; Stephen Wilson, artist and photographer, Peace Line Stories.