South Belfast is being overwhelmed by cappuccino culture, forcing some locals away from the area, reports Fionola Meredith

Mention south Belfast to any Northerner and you'll get a bewildering range of reactions. Some view it with horror as a bottle- littered slum overrun with drunken, libidinous students, dangerous and disreputable. Others point to the recent surge in racist attacks in the south of the city, in areas such as Sandy Row or Donegall Road. Some wistfully envisage the hushed affluence of the grand avenues off Lisburn Road and Malone Road. But what does it mean to the people who live there?

Many inhabitants of BT9 - or Faubourg Malone, as the writer Denis Ireland facetiously dubbed it - cling to the notion of south Belfast as a free- thinking bohemian wonderland of bookshops, coffee shops and galleries: a place where cappuccinos can be sipped, hummus dipped and Derrida debated, geographically close but politically and intellectually removed from the less culturally "enlightened" bulk of Northern society.

This is the seductive narrative of "leafy south Belfast", a romantic vision of tree-lined Victorian terraces - "that most English of Irelands", according to poet Carol Rumens - traditionally a shabbily grand home to a community of artists, writers, academics and musicians.

But a new agenda has emerged to compete for the soul of south Belfast. It's the south city as paradigm for sophisticated urban living. The new publication, South Belfast Life, casts BT9 as the most desirable area to live, work, shop and play in the city. It provides the well-heeled young professional with an indispensable guide to consumerist south Belfast, from where to buy hand-knotted rugs to where to source sun-blushed tomatoes.

Its editor, Chris Sherry, says: "People feel a strong identity with the area. South Belfast is where they come to shop and socialise. It's a vibrant, out-and-about scene." And a new website, www.visit southbelfast.com, launched at a trendy gastro-pub on Botanic Avenue, dishes up more of the same enthusiasm.

Val Brown of the government-sponsored South Belfast Partnership Board, the organisation behind the site, believes it's all about branding the area as a cultural and commercial hot spot. Somewhat ambitiously, she even likens the city's Lisburn Road to London's elegant and expensive Bond Street. Perhaps without the loyalist flags it might look different.

As Belfast is known for its earthy sense of humour, it would be surprising if this naked aspirationalism didn't receive a certain amount of mockery. The anonymous Malone Ranger's Handbook To Lisburn Road Living, published in the Vacuum, the city's controversial arts-and-culture paper, lampoons south Belfast life with tales of "dog-day Saturday afternoons in the pseudo-Bohemian sector of south Belfast", where young urban professionals lounge "on the pavement patios of nouveau café-bistros" after their "Kama Sutra kick-boxing class at the Crescent Arts Centre", later returning to "the BT9 gaffs they share somewhere on the sleazier side of leafy Malone".

Many long-time south Belfast residents are unimpressed by the appropriation of their patch. Mary Denvir owns the well-established Bookfinders Café, on University Road. The underground ambience of this dimly lit space, its stained walls plastered with posters advertising long-past literary and artistic gatherings, is about as far from the blond-wood flooring and brushed-steel fittings favoured by the Lisburn Road elite as it's possible to imagine. Denvir is concerned that commercialism may be eroding the creative energy the area is renowned for.

Spiralling rents mean she is unable to afford to run any more evening poetry readings, once popular events at the café. "But money isn't the main thing for me," she says. "Bookfinders is a haven against racism and sectarianism; it's a place for students, writers, academics and poets to meet and talk. I'm hanging on in here."

David Torrens, owner of No Alibis bookshop, on Botanic Avenue, senses a growing dynamism in his part of the city.

"Although there are a lot of social problems here, this area has an edge, a vibrancy about it, which in the last seven years has increased greatly," he says. "I'm not talking about the very nice, pretty, cultural element, which in itself becomes a cliché. I'm talking about people working on the edges of that: people who are setting up tattoo parlours, people who are giving wall space to young artists. That definitely gives the place a buzz."

But many of the young artists and writers who bring that creative edge to south Belfast are being forced to pack up and move on, because they cannot afford to live there. Miriam de Burca, an artist, recently moved to north Belfast, having lived in the south of the city since she arrived in Northern Ireland six years ago. And she's not alone. As de Burca says: "There has been a collective move from the south to the north by the local artistic community. North Belfast is the new bohemian quarter."

North Belfast seems to be emerging as the south's grittier, seamier alter ego, a retreat for dispossessed and disillusioned former BT9 dwellers who are sick of high rents and pretentious cosmopolitanism. It's true that north Belfast has its leafy moments, albeit interspersed with derelict buildings, post-war estates and 1960s tower blocks. Unfortunately, it's harder to get a decent cappuccino there. But as one observer wryly remarked, at least Belfast's northsiders have the grim consolation of being "more working class than thou" than the moneyed dilettantes in the south of the city.

The risk for the new, "branded" south Belfast is that it becomes an empty parody of itself, resting stodgily on its self-consciously cultural heels: increasingly drained of the young artistic community that gives it colour and life, increasingly defined by upwardly mobile commercial values. And no amount of leafiness can compensate for that.