Section 2 - Exploring the dimensions of trauma-informed placemaking
Chapter 8 - Ethical Placemaking, Trauma, and Health Justice in Humanitarian Settings
Lisa A. Eckenwiler
This chapter reviews ethical critiques of refugee camps for their complicity in perpetuating injustice against traumatized populations and moves on to argue that humanitarians should embrace the ideal and practice of ethical placemaking (EPM) for its potential to respond to health injustice in this context. EPM is interpreted here as an obligation of transitional justice and is offered as a remedial responsibility – an ‘ethic of the temporary’ – for advancing health justice, for it can mitigate the harms linked to formal encampment and segregation in urban enclaves and moreover, create an environment that supports the capability to be healthy for traumatized peoples. Current efforts by UNHCR are reviewed, along with the ideas of architects concerned with displacement that do not focus on health and trauma but to some extent align with the ideal and practice of EPM, applauding them and suggesting how they might go farther to advance health equity in the short- and long-term. Examples of EPM, including an intervention aimed at women sufferers of gender-based violence in conflict zones, are also offered.
Chapter 9 - Beyond dark tourism: reimagining the place of history at Australia’s convict precincts
Sarah Barns
How Australians think about the histories of our places, and our connection to them, is in flux. For custodians of convict-era institutions, there is a need to confront histories of state sanctioned dispossession, violence, trauma and abuse, to reveal how colonial impositions of power relied heavily on Benthamite forms of control to subordinate vulnerable populations, including most notably Australia’s First Nations people. But what if Australia’s convict precincts looked beyond the popular tactics of ‘dark tourism’ and reimagined these sites as places of restorative social justice and compassionate care? Such provocations are increasingly a part of contemporary dialogues around the value and purpose of Australia’s convict heritage precincts, as programs of urban placemaking and revitalisation seek to define new First Nations and community programming outcomes in rapidly changing community contexts. How, then, might a deeper engagement with the troubled meanings etched into these places open up possibilities of wider dialogue – and care practices – with more diverse and perhaps vulnerable communities today?
Chapter 10 - Equitable Food Futures: Activating Community Memory, Story, and Imagination in Rural Mississippi
Carlton Turner, Mina Matlon, Erica Kohl-Arenas, and Jean Greene
This chapter tells the story of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture) in Utica, Mississippi. Sipp Culture uses art, agriculture, and collaborative action research as integrated approaches to comprehensive community and cultural transformation. The chapter introduces the regional context and story of Sipp Culture, and then focuses on a collaborative action research project Equitable Food Futures aimed at documenting and activating community agricultural knowledge and assets towards a more sustainable, equitable, and healthy food culture and economy. Integrating oral histories, arts-based, descriptive, and survey research to unearth and share Utica’s agricultural and food stories and assets, this project seeks to restore community memory and make visible existing community knowledge around healthy ways of feeding the community, both physically and spiritually. Engaging with a history of slavery, sharecropping, and subsequent discriminatory agricultural policies and practices that have driven the drastic loss of Black farmland over the past century, Equitable Food Futures supports a communal process of healing from traumatic relationships with the land towards a renewed relationship that advances Black food sovereignty, leadership, and liberation. Ultimately, the project demonstrates how creative methodologies can catalyze historic and new knowledge in ways that inspire a more expansive imagination of healthy, locally owned, and equitable food futures.
Chapter 11 - Language Is Leaving Me – An AI Opera of The Skin
Ellen Pearlman
Language Is Leaving Me - An Opera Of the Skin is a work-in-progress immersive performance combining AI, computer vision, biometrics and epigenetic, or inherited traumatic memories of cultures of diaspora. It uses GPT-3, an artificial intelligence algorithmic database containing over 6 billion parameters using predictive verbal models to form sentences. The work will combine these models with computer vision transformation technologies like VQGan and CLIP that work with visual data sets by converting speech to images. The opera/work in progress interrogates the tensions between traditional forms of verbal, non-verbal, inherited and symbolic memories with their AI algorithmic manifestations. Using short films containing personal epigenetic stories and visuals emanating from the 1000 year old geographic ‘Pale of Settlement’ of Eastern European Jews, the work illustrates how memory and meaning are erased by complex smoothing algorithms and transformation technologies that recategorize and decontextualize cultural and individual identities. An AI music composition technology will create an accompanying soundtrack based on live human biometric indicators, thus linking the human to the machine, and memory to place.
Chapter 12 - Trauma and healing in the post-conflict landscape of Belfast
Aisling Rusk
This chapter explores ways in which trauma-informed place-making has taken place within the existing built environment of the contested, post-conflict city of Belfast, enacted by the ordinary people of that place, as part of their collective healing. It considers two contrasting scales - a landmark building, the locally iconic, frequently bombed Europa Hotel, and the back alleys of houses – and temporalities - after two traumatic events during the Troubles, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Typically, places where atrocities occurred in Belfast city centre have been obliterated in an effort to forget these places of pain and shame. The chapter highlights how existing built fabric, reconceived, can contribute to healing after collective trauma, questioning what policy-makers and place-shapers can learn from these bottom-up interventions and interpretations.
Chapter 13 - Anticolonial Placemaking
Karen E. Till and Michal Huss
This chapter advocates anticolonial placemaking practice and argues that those who have inherited past and ongoing chronic place-based trauma should lead placemaking practices. Despite advances in participatory practice, ‘experts’ remain seen as the leading ‘placemakers’. The authors draw upon anticolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and geographical theory to argue for an understanding of places as meaningful small worlds inhabited by multiple lives responsible to each other and the places in which they live(d). The chapter describes anticolonial tours and community mapping projects led by Palestinian and Traveller researchers in the wounded cities of Yaffa and Dublin, whereby participants and partners learn from emergent place-based stories of hope and pain to imagine more just futures.
Chapter 14 - Placehealing in Minneapolis: Before and After the Murder of George Floyd
Teri Kwant and Tom Borrup
Social, physical, and psychological landscapes in Minneapolis were radically changed after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 during a time when a global pandemic already devastated the lives of so many. Located on traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of Indigenous Dakotah people, Minneapolis, like many cities, attempts to erase historical realities of those killed, driven from their homelands of thousands of years, and enslaved. Based in colonialism, practices designed to erase and forget people and events continue. Through the example of Minneapolis this chapter examines the nature of place trauma and how place-making interventions can be employed across spectrums of cultural sensitivity, historic awareness, and acknowledgement of spiritual and sacred meanings. In the wake of significant recent unrest and destruction, contrasts in these approaches and outcomes are explored.
Chapter 15 – Our place, Our History, Our Future
Julie Goodman, Theresa Hyuna Hwang and Jason Shupbach
This chapter examines the regenerative practices occurring in the City of Philadelphia in the post-pandemic era. Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American project, and America’s sixth largest and poorest city, has been plagued by endemic poverty, racist policies and extreme violence in the years leading up to the pandemic. The pandemic has amplified the loss of black and brown business-owners produced a major uptick in violence. This article will summarize recent efforts to combat these negative forces with a focus on the asset-based, healing-engaged empowering and groundbreaking efforts of organizations Village for Arts and Humanities and Monument Lab. Through an honest assessment of these organizations work, a broader story of the history of our place, our history and the potential future will be told.