This article explores the role of public policy in contested cities and the effects urban strategies have on the magnitude and manifestations of ethnonational conflict. It is based on interviews in the polarized cities of Jerusalem, Belfast, and Johannesburg conducted in 1994 and 1995. An integrative analytic approach combining the perspectives of political science, urban planning, geography, and social psychology is utilized. The article explores the proposition that a city is a prism, not a mirror, through which conflict is ameliorated or intensified. A city introduces a set of characteristics—proximate ethnic neighborhoods, territoriality, economic interdependency, symbolism, and centrality—that can bend or distort the relationship between ideological disputes and the manifestations of ethnic conflict. Findings indicate that dialectics, contradictions, and unforeseen consequences are produced when nationalism intersects with an urban system. Israeli policy-making in Jerusalem paradoxically produces spatial conditions of urban and regional instability antithetical to Israel's goal of political control. British policy-making in Belfast may achieve short-term abstinence from violence, but it is insufficient in a city of obstructive ethnic territoriality and differential Protestant-Catholic needs. In apartheid Johannesburg, implementation of racist ideology exposed the faultlines and limits of ordering urban space. Now, policy-makers seek to address distressing levels of unmet human needs amidst market-based “normalization” processes that threaten to reinforce apartheid's racial geography.
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