In this presentation, Visualising Peace student Eleni Spilliotes discusses the research she has been doing into place-making as a form of peace-making. She draws on publications from a wide range of disciplines, and considers examples of place/peace-making in several different countries and contexts. Below the video, you can find a summary of the publications she discusses. These are also available in our Visualising Peace Library.
McEvoy-Levy, Siobhan. “Youth Spaces in Haunted Places: Placemaking for Peacebuilding in Theory and Practice.” International Journal of Peace Studies 17, no. 2 (2012): 1–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41853033.
Defining public space as a sociospatial construct, this journal article analyzes the relationship between placemaking and peacebuilding in the post-conflict landscape. McEvoy-Levy argues that placemaking practices are not necessarily peaceful, as public spaces are continuously redesigned by the power relations that unfold within them, and thus placemaking often takes the form of spatial control. Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this article reframes territoriality as a war placemaking practice. McEvoy-Levy investigates the link between wartime infrastructure, segregation, and destruction, and intra-group identity formation and conflict narration, which makes communities resistant to normative peacebuilding strategies once a war has ended. Furthermore, this article argues that post-conflict securitization perpetuates discourses of conflict, traumatizing younger generations who must navigate an environment of physical and social barriers, memorialized violence, and adult territoriality. Top-down placemaking interventions, which are not based on the everyday experience of navigating a specific post-conflict built environment, further alienate and radicalize younger generations who lack spatial agency and placemaking authority. This article proposes a more democratic and collaborative form of placemaking, conceptualized as an ongoing process of cross-community civic engagement and reconciliation, rather than the implementation of a standard set of peace-building typologies. By foregrounding multidirectional memory in the urban regeneration of public space, its institutions, and its visual symbolism, placemaking can break the cycle of transgenerational trauma by producing new spatial narratives.
Schneekloth, Lynda H., and Robert G. Shibley. “Implacing Architecture into the Practice of Placemaking.” Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) 53, no. 3 (2000): 130–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1425631.
This journal article examines the “expert discourse” of the architecture discipline, arguing that practitioners operate in isolation from the people they serve, engaging in a cycle of performative experimentation as a means to gain professional recognition. Schneekloth and Shipley argue that the architecture profession can only become a mechanism for social change when it is integrated into a broader framework of placemaking. As the architecture profession continues to idolize the Vitruvian “starchitect,” everyday placemaking practices in domestic and community spaces are devalued and gradually deteriorate. This article explains that placemaking requires the participation of a variety of actors, including architects, government organizations, and community groups, and access to different types of knowledge including material, local, and situated knowledge. Therefore, architectural expertise can be applied to the design of placemaking processes themselves, which require organizational, interpersonal, and creative problem-solving skills. By both embracing the contradictory nature of a diverse knowledge pool, as well as the democratic spirit of a more inclusive practice of placemaking, this article visualizes an architecture that transcends expert discourses, born from postmodern and modern theory, but bound to neither. Schneekloth and Shipley’s focus on the systemic issues of the contemporary architecture profession provides valuable insight into why peacebuilding architecture is rarely successful. Furthermore, since placemaking projects develop collaborative relationships and celebrate diverse types of place-knowledge, placemaking can itself be used as a peacebuilding tool.
Sanmugeswaran, Pathmanesan. “How are Tamil Villages Reconstructed? Ethnography of Place-Making in Post-war Reconstruction in Sri Lanka.” In Rebuilding Communities After Displacement, edited by Mo Hamza, Dilanthi Amaratunga, Richard Haigh, Chamindi Malalgoda, Chathuranganee Jayakody, and Anuradha Senanayake, 269-288. Cham: Springer, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21414-1_12.
This paper presents research on Tamil placemaking practices, arguing that the post-conflict reconstruction of Tamil Hindu villages is a process in which Jaffna Tamils cultivate a post-war sense of place by recollecting their pre-war sense of place. Placemaking interventions are often represented in the literature as incubators for radical forms of participation and collaboration. But, by using the term “village-temple consciousness” instead of placemaking, Sanmugeswaran situates placemaking practices as intergenerational, sacred knowledge within Tamil Hindu communities. The model houses provided by top-down peacebuilding projects in post-conflict Sri Lanka do not follow the placemaking practices of these communities, which are derived from architectural guidelines found in Hindu text. Thus, using their pre-war village life as a model, these communities engage in a process of tense, disordered, and uneven reconstruction without external support or a collaboratively constructed plan of action. Furthermore, nostalgia-based placemaking reproduces structures, like the Tamil caste system, which paradoxically excludes lower castes from placemaking. By legitimizing and institutionalizing the culturally specific and holistic nature of indigenous placemaking practices in post-conflict reconstruction, communities would be empowered to remember their past, but also to imagine a better future.
Massey, Doreen. “A Global Sense of Place.” Marxism Today 38 (1991) : 24-29. https://banmarchive.org.uk/marxism-today/june-1991/a-global-sense-of-place/.
In this landmark essay, Massey theorizes sense of place as a global phenomenon, challenging the postmodern notion that sense of place cannot withstand time-space compression. She identifies this misconception as indicative of the Western worldview, as globalization has transformed indigenous sense of place for centuries through the process of colonization. Thus, Massey views place as a social construct, visualizing places as the nodes of a vast social network that is superimposed over earth’s geography. Therefore, place is not a stable entity, rather it is both imagined and remembered, contested and regenerated, a point at which flows of people, capital, culture, and knowledge converge. Massey’s concept of a global sense of place provides a framework for visualizing spatial injustice as place networks reveal global power relations. Therefore, placemaking practices must negotiate an entire web of place relations, which casts doubt on the popular imagery of local, bottom-up place-based peace initiatives.
Gillick, Ambrose, host. “Juliet Davis: Care, urban design and the city.” A is for Architecture (podcast). October 5, 2022. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/juliet-davis-care-urban-design-and-the-city/id1588790585?i=1000581725045.
In this podcast episode, guest Dr. Juliet Davis discusses her sociological research on the relationship between urban design and care ethics, the topic of her recent publication, The Caring City: Ethics of Urban Design. Establishing care as an activity fundamental to human life, Davis questions why the urban design discipline, which shapes the environment in which human life unfolds, does not view care as a moral imperative of architectural practice. One of the main obstacles she discusses is that care has become associated with specific typologies, like the nursing home and the hospital, and specific social actors, namely care workers and women, and thus urban design lacks a broader framework of relationality. Furthermore, she argues that by widening the definition of care, while also recognizing its cultural specificity, the ethics of care could be integrated into an interdisciplinary, organic, non-prescriptive, and contextual design process. Thus, urban designers should collaborate with users to make their environment more conducive to the web of care relations which already exist across the space. Davis’ view of design as and for care seems to suggest a link to discourse at the intersection of placemaking and peacebuilding, which views the making of place as a peacebuilding process.