Section 4 - Our call to action: nurturing healing through action
Chapter 25 - The Place Healing Manifesto
Chuck Wolfe
Amid pandemic and protest, the need for urban mending has become abundantly clear. Place-healing is a mending-based call to action. Place-healing appeared in recent civic expression. Spontaneous cleanup and damage repair followed violent demonstrations. Protesters crossed ideological lines to aid those injured. This type of place-healing is built on empathy, relatedness and potential to recover a sense of community. Other recent place-healing adaptations showed how the appearance and experiences of urban places can transform. Diversity, and remnants from other eras allowed for a comforting continuity. Other examples included improvised entry-ways, alfresco dining, period furniture to frame restaurant take-out windows, and bifurcated tube (subway) cars. Businesses may also live on in a different form, because they honour an ethic necessary to place-healing: respect for the people involved. Bobtail Fruit, once a fruit stall in Covent Garden, transitioned to five brick-and-mortar outlets around the city, and more recently to a web-based delivery business of quality baskets of fruit, and milk. A customer service imperative adapted to customer needs in a new form. The Place-Healing Manifesto Place-healing is the catalyst for adaptation and transition.Aisling Rusk
Chapter 26 - Leadership Horizons in Culture Futurism & Creative Placehealing
Theo Edmonds, Josh Miller and Hannah Drake
This chapter presents three types of futurist leadership horizons: exploratory, combinatory and transformational, as flexible frameworks and emerging innovation insights for creative placehealing aligned with the emerging future world of work, health, education and government, with case studies from arts, media and population health, and leadership practice tips required for working with 6 core strategies: Hope, Trust, Belonging, Creativity, Curiosity and Compassion. These are things most leaders think they understand but, in reality, few truly recognize their scientific underpinnings. Developing a high-level working knowledge of this can open a world of new possibilities: this chapter guides leaders through the process of aligning culture change with innovation efforts in order to unlock the innate creative potential of both organizations and communities of practice.
Chapter 27 – Where Healing Happens: A working theory on Body, Relationship, and Intentional Structure for Restorative Placemaking
Elena Quintana and Ryan Lugalia-Hollon
Peace Rooms are a very specific place where props, room design, and human training can all prepare the way for healing, transformative relationships and, often, racial justice. Drawing from the authors’ efforts to reduce the school-to prison pipeline in two US Cities, the chapter outlines key programmatic elements, processes, and policies needed to build and activate a Peace Room as intentional, trauma-informed places that support restorative, rather than punitive, responses to harm. They are inviting and accountable to all members of a community, with deep roots in indigenous cultures and Tribal communities. Drawing from concrete examples from Chicago and San Antonio, the chapter illustrates the role Peace Rooms have played in advancing trauma-informed restorative justice at the level of both individual school campuses and big citywide systems. It explores how dull physical spaces can be transformed to help reground relationships in trust, reconciliation, and accountability, thereby enabling interconnectedness to ourselves, each other, and nature. While Peace Rooms themselves cannot eliminate harm, they can be key anchors in larger community efforts to reduce and address harm, vital touchstones that can help to sustain healing culture and social movements.Joongsub Kim
Chapter 28 - The Art of Place
Daria Dorosh
This chapter presents a way to build a space of trust from which to take action. The chapter examines coping strategies coming from the authors art practice and that of other artists. Finding a place in the world means having space for one’s personal narrative to unfold. To facilitate that, this text provides readers with space and engaging visual cues for their own story creation as they read the chapter. We have lost our cultural narratives and have not yet replaced them. We have the tools, but it may require freeing ourselves from the management of our personal narrative by commercial interests to find our stories. Trauma and stress from economic instability, habitat insecurity, political turmoil, confinement, or simply working in a mobile culture, may be with us indefinitely. The current pandemic is underscoring the importance of finding and adapting new tools of communication to keep our connection alive. If we combine material and digital tools that can cross-pollinate knowledge tribes, we can share our coping strategies in dimensions across time and space. Having options in our tool kit is key to addressing the many unpredictable factors in our lives today. Perhaps we can consider these difficult circumstances as a springboard for imagination and reflection, and one that directs us to self- compassion as a platform for the change we need to make to continue. The trauma of displacement and confinement is fueled by fear of scarcity, but the universe shows infinite generosity if only we dare to see and implement it.
Chapter 29 - Unravelling Memories: The metaphor as a possibility of resilience
Pablo Gershanik
Gershanik’s Intimate Models Lab explores resilience through art. Working with a reconstruction process that combines art, psychology, and human rights, modelisation arose as a tool of transposition (creation of aesthetic mechanisms of intermediation with a painful experience) to work with cases of social trauma that a person, a family, or a community has suffered in recent years. This process explores to the capacity of reconstruction and resilience of us as a people through an artistic approach. Intimate Models Laboratory is a space to “reconstruct” difficult events of your experience with a playful, panoramic and resilient gaze using aesthetic tools. Through case studies two main concepts will be deployed: poetic drift, and poetic justice. Lyobomira Peycheva
Chapter 30 - Healing Place: Creative place-remaking for reconstructing community identity
Katy Beinart
This chapter investigates attempts to remediate, reclaim and transform community identity, by using spatial and artistic interventions to ‘heal’ place, examining definitions of ‘place’ and reasons for and issues around the exclusion and breakdown of communities, through the case study example of District Six Museum, Cape Town. Drawing on Gerd Junne’s ‘Architecture for Peace’ (2006) and using metaphors of healing and medicine, the author establishes a set of criteria for interventions that ‘heal’ place.
Chapter 31 - A Reconciliation Framework for Storytelling: A Trauma-Informed Placemaking Approach
Katie Boone, Wilfred Keeble, Rita Sinorita Fierro and Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo
The fish in water doesn't even know it’s wet - this applies to placemaking efforts around trauma and healing. The intergenerational trauma we carry is held and felt within the land we are on, and it impacts the processes we steward. In this chapter, the authors approach how we navigate our own social identities, personal, intergenerational, and collective trauma to support trauma-informed placemaking in the groups we work with, both individually, and as a collective. Weaving our various stories through the chapter, the authors explore truth telling and the collective healing that ensues when we tether our work in trauma to place.Ryan Lugalia-Hollon & Elena Quintara
Chapter 32 - Allowing a conversation to go nowhere to get somewhere: intra-personal spatial care and placemaking
Sally Labern, Sophie Hope and Rebecca Gordon
This chapter troubles the notion of placemaking and the role of the artist in that process, taking the form of a tripartite dialogue between socially engaged artist/scholar practitioners, through which trauma-informed placemaking is being rethought as intra-personal spatial care. The form and function of this chapter is as a slow curated conversation-to-text intentionally meanders to nowhere, presenting open -ended themes prescient to the endeavour of trauma-informed placemaking. The element of care that opens up this requires the opening of space in which to think/process/do more slowly, together. It is a ‘caring with’ and a place of resistance to ongoing spatial violence. By beginning differently, agency can become active and shouldered laterally in solidarity. The eventual curation from dialogue to text presents key themes that emerged in order to share ideas with the readers that we believe are prescient. The culmination of such collaborations – and defiance against individualism of authorship and instrumentalisation of community – can become a cumulative act of reconfiguring place in defiance of the continual traumas of exclusion in place.Jeff Poulin