The Leader - January/February 2008 - (Page 74) i Nd Ustr Y t r a cker by richard kadzis Belfast’s titanic Quarter a case stUdY For iNteGrated sUstaiNaBle developmeNt liNked to heritaGe The place is Northern Ireland, inside Belfast’s historic Titanic Quarter. I’m on the movie set of City of Ember, and the thought strikes me: The Tom Hanks-produced sci-fi film with Bill Murray and Tim Robbins – scheduled for release in 2008 – is about the transcendence of a post-apocalyptic society from a cave world beneath the earth to a renewed world of sun and air. Maybe it’s also an allegory for how this once war-torn city is finding its way back to the mainstream of the global economy. Like the subterranean society in the feature film, a roadmap to rediscovery and reclamation is needed. And the irony is, the massive sound stage at the edge of the Port of Belfast is actually on that map. It’s an eerie, almost mystical, kind of place, because it sits on the dry dock where the fabled ocean liner, the Titanic, was built in the early 1900s. The film’s story line is about redeeming the sins the world thrust fictionally on our children. Only for Belfast, the sins – war and conflict, the misuse of land and community – are all too real. They are in fact being redeemed ‘Yesterday we built ships, today we build cities.’ — Michael Graham, MRICS, Director of Corporate Real Estate for the Titanic Quarter LTD 2 0 0 8 the le ade r 74 J aN Ua rY / F e B rUa r Y
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