It is almost 200 years since George Benn produced the first draft of his history of Belfast. Few followed him for a century and a half, but in the last fifty years, as if to make up for this, the quality and range of historical writing on Belfast has been more extensive, more probing and more innovative than for any other Irish city. Belfast's uniquely tortured history is only part of the explanation; the local presence of urban-minded scholars and the development of a superb regional archive have also been major factors. The finest showpiece of this literature is the volume of essays Belfast 400: people, place and history (Liverpool, 2013), conceived, edited and partly written by S. J. Connolly. It marked the four-hundreth anniversary of Belfast's incorporation, but had none of the trappings of an official history.

The current volume, in which Connolly is co-editor and author of some two-thirds of the text, is, one suspects, an additional dividend of that project. But where Belfast 400 was lusciously endowed with colour maps and contemporary images, here there is a severe map deficit, and readers would do well to keep their (much cheaper) copy of the earlier volume on the table. The new work is intellectually more ambitious and it raises many issues of wider import. Connolly's contribution spans nearly 200 years, his co-authors (Nagle a sociologist and Bryan an anthropologist) concentrating on the last sixty, but their common concern is the development, control and uses of public space in the town of Belfast since the growth spurt of the 1780s, and how access to supposedly neutral space was controlled, challenged and modified over the long run.

It is a highly ambitious assignment and proves to be most revealing. Although covering familiar ground on segregation, policing, sectarian conflict and the emergence of ‘Orange democracy’, the distinctive focus on public space prompts new questions. It appears that Belfast in its early industrial phase had little enough such space, lacking until the 1850s major public buildings, precincts or meeting places other than its markets, churches and cemeteries. Recreation for most townspeople took place outside the town – up on Cave Hill, in the Point Fields to the north of town, or on Queen's Island before it was engorged by Harland & Wolff. More proximate spaces, notably the grounds of the White Linen Hall and the nearby mall, were protected as the domain of ‘polite’ society, and the Botanic Gardens were restricted to members. Elsewhere ‘the rough and unregulated character’ of open spaces (pp 95–6) was the accepted consequence of massive growth. But from the late 1840s this began to change, the construction of a series of public buildings and the first wide streets creating space for crowds and processions, and with this a more visible police and the greater surveillance of public spaces and public behaviour.

Although a backdrop to the principal theme, the intensification of residential segregation across the second half of the century is re-assessed: the half-dozen summer eruptions between 1854 and 1886 were indeed milestones in that malign journey, but Connolly emphasises the shifts in the social composition of the apparently monotone conservative corporation (after franchise extension in 1868) and of the Orange Order (with its drive towards petit bourgeois respectability) as determinants in the control and uses of public space. The 1870s, the first era of fife and drum bands and of football rivalries, stand out as a trend-altering decade: the repeal of the Party Processions Act in 1872 led to some of the worst July riots of the century, and as a consequence a ban on orange or green processing within city limits. But that was quietly shelved in 1876, re-imposed in 1878, then challenged by shipyard workers who secured a volte-face, after which time marching by the loyal orders was permitted along all principal streets. The new custom house square became the great ceremonial centrepiece, but not for Catholic/nationalist groups, whose annual great parade on Ladyday from Smithfield rarely trespassed the city centre but threaded westwards to Hannahstown on Black Mountain (its particular significance is worthy of further investigation).

The Catholic parts of west Belfast were in other words disconnected from the city centre and became more clearly defined. After 1900 some small battles in the inner city were won (notably nationalist organisations gaining occasional access to the emblematic Ulster Hall). But the purchase by the corporation of the Linen Hall site in 1890 and the construction there of a massive City Hall reflected the dominant ideology. Its use as the site for the signing of the covenant in 1912 under the watchful eye of civic officials was the most palpable instance of an exclusive identification of city government with its Protestant majority.

Then in the new Northern Ireland public spaces became more explicitly off limits for all who challenged the legitimacy of partition. However, tighter control of public spaces in the centre of the city by the R.U.C. stood in contrast to the toleration within west Belfast of public Catholic – and nationalist – pageantry. Connolly's analysis ends in the 1960s, a time when it seemed that controls were loosening, crowds more mixed and, as Nagle shows, protest movements clustering around City Hall proliferated. These were unrelated, or apparently unrelated, to the old labels – C.N.D., anti-war protest, then civil rights.

Bryan's survey of the Troubles and beyond is more narrowly focused, using the evolution of May Day, St Patrick's Day and the Lord Mayor's Show as case-studies to explore the dissolution of unionist control over public space, first during direct rule, then in the peace process era. The loss of unionist dominance in the city council in 1997 followed by the obligation on all local authorities under the Northern Ireland Act of 1998 to promote community relations mark an utter break with the past in terms of the governance of public space – even while working-class segregation within the city if anything intensified (although the topography of that segregation has changed).

Two processes were operating in the background which were such a break with the past that it makes discussion of the politics of public space over the long run somewhat problematic. The first is the drastic reduction since the 1970s in the powers of the municipal authorities in Northern Ireland – over housing, planning and health – that made Belfast City Hall something of an echo chamber. The second was the hollowing out of working-class districts in the borough area, with the relative importance of the three local authorities comprising greater Belfast but outside the city boundaries, relatively wealthier and certainly far more unionist than the city itself. For both these reasons the loss of effective unionist control in 1997 was only of secondary – or ‘symbolic’ – importance to most citizens, whatever their orientation.

In Connolly's section the identity of decision-makers in the control of public space is teased out, but in the post-1960 survey the role of planners, architects, civil servants, property developers, police and political players in shaping strategic decisions affecting the city is hardly mentioned. What factors one wonders were being considered when measuring the potential social impact of the city's motorways, and who shaped the remit of the Laganside Corporation? What informed the design of the Cathedral Quarter? The only individual mentioned as having agency before the peace process is the R.U.C. chief constable, Sir John Hermon, who in the 1980s resisted loyalist insistence on the right to march on the streets. Of the other more silent agents of Belfast's transformation we would like to hear more.