Issue and Opponent: In 2016, the Belfast City Council contracted Castlebrooke Investments to build Tribeca Belfast, a 12-acre redevelopment plan to revitalize Belfast City Centre through retail, office, and hospitality space. Tribeca Belfast was a 500 pounds urban regeneration scheme located beside St Anne’s Cathedral, in Belfast, Ireland. The planned Tribeca development was designed mainly for foreign investors and was overwhelmingly opposed by Belfast citizens. All across the world, projects like Belfast’s Tribeca are being built for the benefit of investors with only the very flimsiest pretense of helping out locals. In Belfast, for example, the city government approved Tribeca on the condition that Castlebrooke finance 37 off-site units of social housing. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive budget includes £500 million annually for public housing. But in a form of systemic corruption common to cities that want to keep social housing to a minimum, almost all of it ends up going to private landlords rather than building real solutions.
Dilemma Action: In February 2020, The Yes Men created a fake brochure that was distributed all over the Belfast Chamber of Commerce’s urban revitalization conference and throughout the city. This brochure highlighted the issue of building expensive, exclusive housing projects only intended to serve a small percentage of the population by presenting a concrete alternative project, that would house around 20000 homeless people. Two of the members presented themselves as part of the Belfast City Council and “canceled” the multimillion-pound Castlebrooke Investments project falsely saying it will be replaced by a Sunflower Village of 250 social homes with sustainable technology, communal greenspace with indigenous flora, fauna, and space for wildlife and cycle paths. Bus-stop adverts and billboards for the project in question, “Sunflower EcoVillage,” had appeared the night before all over Belfast; brochures then began popping up at official events, and a website spread quickly on social media.
Outcome: Castlebrooke issued a statement saying that the news of that project was fake. The Yes Men encouraged people to join them to plant sunflowers and celebrate the launch of Mackies Sunflower EcoVillage, next to the Innovation Factory in Belfast. The City Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Castlebrooke openly ignored public calls for change, disputed the allegations within the brochure, and expressly defended the Tribeca project. Plans for Tribeca Belfast were approved by the council in January 2020 and went ahead as planned.