Section 1 - Understanding and developing our trauma-in-place sensitivity
Chapter - Towards Trauma Informed Placemaking; Mutual Aid, Collective Resistance and an Ethics of Care
Lynne McCabe
This chapter presents a first-person account of resiliency in the Gulf Coast region, presenting the concept of Mutual Aid as a voluntary, reciprocal, sharing, of resources, skills, and ideas, and as something well understood within the Gulf Coast Region. While many look at the Gulf Coast, and other regions similarly impacted by climate change, as places in need of rescue, the chapter presents the community practices developed within the Gulf Coast’s impacted communities as a resource as the effects of climate disasters begins to spread globally. This chapter shares examples of disaster resistance and recovery as both a resource for future disasters and in opposition to the top-down governmental response rooted in heteropatriarchal white supremacy.
Chapter 2 - (em)Placing Trauma: The Wounds Among Us
Jacque Micieli-Voustinas
This chapter revisits a growing spatial turn within trauma studies, as well as the introduction of trauma studies to the field of human geography. Human geographers have been foundational in theorizing the spatial processes of traumatic events as they impact afflicted communities and places. But trauma is by no means place-bound, traveling with and through the bodies of the traumatized across spaces and time, trauma is both in-situ and ex-situ, as human geography has aptly documented. Offering a reevaluation of the interdisciplinary spatial fields of trauma studies, this essay also considers the proliferating discourse of trauma in contemporary daily lives amidst the compounding nature of novel COVID-19, as well as the global movement for Black Lives.
Chapter 5 - Trauma: the counterproductive outcome of the Land Restitution Program
Juan David Guevara-Salamanca and Gina Jimenez
The Colombian armed conflict has produced the uprooting of peasants and farmers displaced from their lands that had to move to the cities where they survived in a hostile environment. These displacements ruptured spatialisations by leaving rural territories abandoned and later occupied by armed actors. These abandoned territories are places of violence and of collective trauma.
In 2011, the Colombian government created a program to recognize the victims of dispossession and abandonment of lands and their property rights on their farms – the Land Restitution program (LRp). This chapter discusses the LRp as a narrative/discourse that creates an overlapping and saturation of trauma, conversing with critical approaches of collective and institutional trauma, and discussing the complex web that surround the victims, their subjectivities (re)produced, the bureaucratization of the LRp and the limited role of the land as a non-human actor of the program.
Chapter 6 - Landscapes of Repair: creating a transnational community of practice with Sheffield and Kosovo-based researchers, artists and civil society on post-traumatic landscapes
Amanda Crawley Jackson, Korab Krasniqi, and Alexander Vojvoda
Landscapes of Repair (2021) was a knowledge exchange project between forumZFD Kosovo and researchers from the arts and humanities at the University of Sheffield, in cooperation with Kosovo artists, researchers, cultural workers and civil society activists. Through an online exhibition featuring the work of 6 Kosovo-based artists and architects, and a programme of international cross-sector talks and masterclasses, Landscapes of Repair gave space to questions on the role of informal networks of communities, cultural workers, artists and civil society activists in tangible, transformative interventions in dealing with traumatic pasts in public space. This chapter critically reflects on the methodologies and tools of knowledge exchange through a decolonial lens as a means of building a transnational forum for trauma-informed reflection and praxis with regard to the creation and re-appropriation of public space in post-conflict Kosovo.
Chapter 7 - The Filipino Spirit is [Not] Waterproof: Creative Placeproofing in Post-Disaster Philippines
Brian Jay De Lima Ambulo
With a complicated confluence of geographical positioning, exposure, vulnerability, lack of coping and adaptive capacities, the Philippines is one of the world’s most disaster-prone and climate vulnerable countries. Drawing a deeper inquiry from the world’s strongest typhoons to ever be recorded, Super Typhoon Yolanda (2013) in Tacloban City, this paper examines the Philippines' vulnerability to natural disasters, focusing on the critical analysis of the prevailing resilience narratives, such as ‘The Filipino spirit is waterproof’, and the need for comprehensive and long-term disaster risk reduction strategies. It argues that these narratives oversimplify Filipinos' experiences, potentially obscuring the root causes of vulnerability, such as socio-economic inequalities and poor governance, and allowing powerful actors to evade accountability. The concept of creative placeproofing is introduced as an alternative approach that bridges post-disaster recovery and placemaking by combining creative placemaking and trauma-informed placemaking.