Section 3 - Crafting Spaces of Resilience and Restoration
Chapter 16 - Trauma-Informed Placemaking: In Search of an Integrative Approach
Joongsub Kim
In the United States, we have long-standing policies and practices in the built environment that have caused trauma in underserved communities of color. This chapter focuses on an integrative methodology for trauma-informed planning and design practice, informed by concepts of social justice, kindness, and hope. Placemaking is often used to promote community engagement, but, this chapter argues, placemaking is not the most effective approach to addressing trauma. Placemaking and place-cultivating share many common characteristics: particularly, both promote community engagement. However, place-cultivating is more effective in addressing trauma because it advocates relevance, equity, and governance coupled with community engagement. Zohreh BayatRitzi, Rezvaneh Erfani & Samira Torabi
Chapter 17 - Theorizing Disappearance in Narrative Ecologies as Trauma-Informed Placemaking
Marwa N. Zohdy Hassan
This chapter examines imaginary and fictionalized cities and the micro- practices of resistance narrativized within, arguing that the pre-existent, fictionalized layer of reality can be accessed through Trauma theory, Science Fiction theory, Performance theory and Memory Studies. Real cities have always had, within their ontological fabric, pseudo-heritages and pseudo-memories, yet they are largely experienced through their pre-existing power discourses. This chapter proposes that marginalized narratives can take place in the mainstream canon despite the segregation performed by repressive and/or ideological state apparatus. If, within real cities, there are pre-existent, fictionalized cities which are revisited through the self-narratives of life performativities - because memories are always already textualized - then marginalized accounts can survive forced disappearances.
Chapter 18 - Abandoned landscapes as places of potential for Nature Therapy: Glendalough, Ireland
Lyubomira Peycheva
This chapter discusses an ambitious piece of research as it aims to classify an abandoned mining site/famous touristic site in Ireland – Glendalough - as an area of potential for nature therapy. The chapter considers that abandoned areas do not have to become permanent scars in the landscape; instead, they can be reimagined and re-purposed to serve for the benefit of humanity’s mental health and ecological restoration. The research sought to uncover the links between natural spaces and human mental wellbeing and went on to highlight the importance of the presence of nature in our everyday lives and that people developed a greater appreciation for nature in times of uncertainty for the future during the COVID-19 Pandemic. This indicates that in hardships people found their way back to nature, immersed into it, became part of it and found solace in it. The research concludes that we have inherent connection to nature, and when re-connected to it, we experience joy, inner peace, enter a state of relaxation, and ultimately appreciate life (ours and nature’s) more. Harry Ross, Lynda Rosenoir Patten, Isis Amlak & Toby Laurent Belson
Chapter 19 - The Promise of Trauma-Informed Migrant Placemaking: Arts-based Strategies for Compassion and Resilience
John C. Arroyo and Iliana Lang Lundgren
This chapter broadly examines how fear and invisibility influence agentic immigrant strategies in new immigrant destinations across the US experiencing varying degrees of immigrant trauma. What concerns and/or opportunities do immigrants encounter when they evoke placemaking practices to reshape their built environment for safety and security? How do elements of tacit, intergenerational traditions influence how placemaking practices offer meaning for immigrants in a culture of anti-immigrant fear and tension? Where immigrants live in the U.S. plays a critical role in how they adapt to their host society – and how their host society reacts to their presence in a policy context. In a 21st century America defined by exponential diverse population growth and polarizing attitudes about immigration, ethnically oriented placemaking serves as both agent and canvas for expressions of cultural self and trauma-informed placemaking. I argue that despite an era of pervasive fear and heightened deportation tensions surrounding immigrant communities, new immigrant destinations provide immigrants flexible opportunities to assert their identity in suburban and exurban geographies unprepared for seismic population dynamics.
Chapter 20 - Painting Back – Creative Placemaking in Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley
Friederike Landau-Donnelly
The chapter discusses the complex relations between historical racial discrimination, paired with (predominantly white) settler colonialism, and contemporary efforts at reconciliation in the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The chapter unpacks responses against some of the past and ongoing intersectional socio-spatial violences in Vancouver through public art and acts of creative placemaking in the neighborhood of Hogan’s Alley, formerly populated by Black residents, as well as entertainment, culinary, religious and cultural facilities. Specifically, the chapter examines the mural Hope Through Ashes: A requiem for Hogan's Alley by artist Anthony Joseph, commissioned by the Vancouver Mural Festival in the context of the unique curatorial Black Strathcona Resurgence Project in 2020, which spans 45 meters across the materialized instruments of Hogan’s Alley’s destruction, i.e., the Georgia Viaduct. In short, the chapter argues that places bear multiple wounds inflicted by colonialism and racism within themselves, and that public art can stimulate mo(ve)ments of resurgence through creative placemaking, that enable space for healing.
Chapter 21 - Wanna Dance? Using Creative Placemaking Value Indicators to identify COVID-lockdown-related Solastalgia in Sydney, Australia
Cathy Smith, Josephine Vaughan, Justine Lloyd, and Michael Cohen
Using a Valuing Creative Placemaking (VCPM) methodology and associated toolkit, this chapter explores the traumatic experiences of the pandemic’s impacts on public space through a case study of a creative placemaking-led intervention, Wanna Dance. Developed by City People (and led by one of the co-authors of this paper, Michael Cohen) in Sydney for the duration of June 2021, Wanna Dance invited the community to temporarily occupy public space by dancing in an inner-city laneway during a period where dancing indoors was intermittently a banned activity. To consider the project and the relationship between creative placemaking and the reoccupation of public space in COVID-lockdown affected cities more broadly, the chapter turns to the notion of solastalgia: the disruption of place attachments due to their entanglements with significant traumatic events, whose sites are also referred to a traumascapes. The intersections between trauma-informed placemaking and creative placemaking are identified and evaluated, as an example of how placemakers might highlight, value and thus better respond to negative or traumatic experiences of place.Jacque Micieli-Voustinas
Chapter 22 - Healing from trauma in post-disaster places? Placemaking, machizukuri and the Role of Cultural Events in Post-Disaster Recovery
Moéna Fujimoto-Verdier and Annaclaudia Martini
Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture is one of the places hardest hit by the disaster that affected the North-eastern part of Japan in 2011. This chapter focuses on the Reborn-Art Festival, a biannual festival inaugurated in 2017, looking at how and in what ways the locals involved in the Festival, directly or indirectly, negotiate trauma and placemaking processes after the disaster. Cultural events can be considered as transient but essential placemaking tools, where displaced communities can meet, and through active or passive participation, form a new imaginary of the town. This new imaginary can greatly help interaction between people in the community, creating networks between communities and with visitors, allowing recovery from mental and emotional damages and also supporting economic activities. Our findings reveal that while the RAF can be considered as a successful event, which has potential to aid processes of trauma-healing, local’s engagement is ambivalent, resulting in placemaking as well as healing processes that are unequally enacted.
Chapter 23 - Placemaking, performance and infrastructures of belonging: the role of ritual healing and mass cultural gatherings in the wake of trauma
Anna Marazuela Kim and Jacek Ludwig Scarso
Pandemic isolation, polarising politics and growing disparity in the right to spatial goods, whether through borders of national control or global capitalism, continue to exert a profoundly deleterious effect on the infrastructures of belonging at the foundation of a healthy, inclusive society, diminishing the psychological agency that would enable us to challenge these conditions. This article brings affect theory on depression as a public and political phenomenon into dialogue with ideas placemaking as an infrastructure of belonging, to consider how mass cultural gatherings in the urban context might foster the conditions for re-envisioning and re-founding, the potential for inclusive, civic life.
Chapter 24 - Rethinking Placemaking in Urban Planning Through the Lens of Trauma
Gordon C. C. Douglas
This chapter develops trauma as a key conceptual frame for urban planning. In addition to the litany of traumatic actions and events that define the history of planning itself, the author posits that trauma and traumatic histories are key concepts for teaching and understanding some contemporary placemaking efforts. What's more, particular acts of placemaking, both formal and informal, can speak directly to traumatic contexts while expressing and empowering the voice and identity of those often excluded from urban citizenship. The chapter draws lessons from the author’s experience leading a unique urban design studio course motivated by the crises of 2020 - from pandemic urbanisms to the Movement for Black Lives to extreme climate events. It also analytically examines three specific cases of trauma-informed placemaking in order to refine the meaning and relevance of the term. The author draws out the value of these cases for planning practice and pedagogy as well as their real-world significance as acts reclaiming place and community for marginalized groups. The author argues that this sort of placemaking, as a response to traumatic events, sometimes even as an act of resistance to them, poses important questions for mainstream planning and demands that we reconsider the real meaning and value of placemaking in urban development.Mina Para Matlon, Jean Greene, Carlton Turner & Erica Kohl Arenas