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At the height of 'the Troubles' in 1976 social-housing in Belfast was in a crisis situation as communities consolidated along ethnic boundaries, often with violent consequences, with some communities becoming drastically overcrowded and others falling into abject dereliction. Using declassified government documentation this paper examines how these events legitimised an emergent confluence of housing and security policy which brought into being the security-threat-community; a socio-material construct where every person is a potential insurgent and every dwelling a potential security-threat. Crucially, the paper problematises the complex entanglement of political, military, paramilitary, economic and ideological forces which shaped its formation. The discussion traces a descent through contingent events within a wider dispositif and reveals the formation of the Standing Committee on the Security Implications of Housing, a confidential government body which assessed the viability of social-housing procurement within communities in terms of the securitythreat it might present rather than the housing-need that it would address. As a complement to post-9-11 discourses concerning increasingly 'globalised conflicts' the security-threat-community reinforces the complexities of local discursivities. The paper makes visible the sophisticated socio-material effects of these operations and illustrates how they remain embedded within contemporary community structures. The paper concludes by reflecting on how this permits conflict-era forces to remain active, but largely unacknowledged, within the postconflict era. Ultimately the paper argues for a 'revaluing of the value' of this conflict-architecture within post-conflict policy frameworks.

The 'peace-walls' of Belfast represent a widely acknowledged architectural legacy of the Troubles, the period between 1969 and 1994 when sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was most extreme. This paper reveals a further crucial but unacknowledged architectural legacy. It is a Hidden City of unassuming inner-city architecture where everyday pervasiveness masks a capacity to perpetuate conflict-era forces in a post-conflict city. The first half of the paper presents a Foucauldian analysis of declassified government documents revealing the knowledge created through undisclosed systems of power-relations. Here a problematisation of accepted norms reassesses the Troubles-era urban landscape and exposes the latent significance of its sociomaterial complexity. The second half of the paper illustrates the material consequences of related hidden policy practices on the contemporary post-conflict community. It borrows from Goffman to offer an exposition of the institutionalisation of movement and meaning at play in the Hidden City. A triangulation of interviews, photography and architectural fieldwork is used to theorise the Material Event, a construction of meaning derived from the interaction between people, architecture and the wider systems of power-relations. The paper concludes by demonstrating the complexity of the systemic challenges posed by the Material Events and how these help constrain conflict-transformation practices.

Whilst "spatiality" and "architecture" have become recognized as important dimensions of urban conflict, contemporary forms of power push our gaze toward symbolic landmarks such as Belfast's "peace walls." This paper uses Belfast as a case study to instead highlight the fundamental role occupied by "everyday" urban space and architecture. It reveals evidence of an undisclosed body of divisive architecture put in place through a confidential process of security planning between 1977 and 1985 to physically segregate and spatially fragment Catholic and Protestant communities in contested areas of Belfast. Termed here as hidden barriers, they are formed from "everyday" roads, housing, shops, offices, factories and landscaping, and the ways in which they continue to promote division represents a crucially undervalued aspect of conflict-transformation planning. The paper examines the complex urban challenges that they pose, arguing for a reevaluation of the role of everyday architecture and space in conflict and peacebuilding processes.

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