Belfast, Northern Ireland
Mission Title: Corporate Living - Titanic Quarter
Mission Date: 28-05-2008
SCRIPT
- Visit the Titanic Quarter construction site and talk to the people living close by.
- How is such a huge intervention in the city's landscape accepted by the people?
- Ask the people what do they think about the name of the company, if they think it's going to bring good or bad luck. Do they think the new quarter will create a new community inside the still a little fractioned northern irish society?
- Visit the Odyssey sports and entertainment center and the Waterfront Hall. Investigate how do these recent modern intervention to the city blend with the vicinities and enhance community life.
- Be sure to get good footage of all the buildings spaces, and people involved, frame your documentary as a story, an investigation, an essay.
TRAVEL BAG
What are the ramifications of a corporation building a quarter from scratch?
Belfast doesn't have a lucky mark to it. Thirty years of Troubles, the clash between the Protestants and the Catholics, has made the city an uncomfortable - and dangerous - place for a long time. The city also has the unfortunate distinction of being where the Titanic was built. As much as we might enjoy watching Di Caprio freeze to death in the movie almost a century later, there's still a sinister ring to the name of the new quarter being built in the Belfast harbor area. The Titanic Quarter is also the name of the company taking care of the £1bn project which will raise a brand new neighborhood for the city to invest in.
Besides being a rather ugly way to try and cash in on a disaster, the Titanic Quarter will cover 185-acres with new buildings hosting just about anything. Thousands of apartments, offices, cafes, restaurants, the new campus for the Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education and who knows what else. The new neighborhood is supposed to create some 20.000 jobs in the next 15 years and to attract a lot of tourists, but there has been some debate about using taxpayers' money to co-finance the private-company driven project. By 2012, the 100th anniversary of the original Titanic tragedy, we should see if it'll be worth it.
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