Healing Place: Creative place-remaking for reconstructing community identity

With increasing urbanization, cities show the scars of ongoing or recent conflict
and violence or spatially reflect exclusion and segregation. Regeneration projects
usually focus on economic reconstruction and physical rebuilding; while
reconciliation projects usually focus on social and legal issues (Simpson, 1997;
Winton, 2004). Creative place- remaking – a term I use intentionally in order to
acknowledge the ‘dynamic and dialectic relationship’ between community and
place (Anguelovski, 2014) – has the potential to address the ‘healing’ of places
where conflict or violence has taken place, or is an ongoing problem.
This chapter investigates the possibilities for the role of artists and architects
as ‘healers’ of community identity through an approach to place- remaking that
foregrounds the community’s relationship with ‘place’ and art and culture as
tools for ‘healing’ place. If public space exists through social interaction (Massey
and Rose, 2003), how can creative spatial interventions create these interactions,
spark interdependencies between people and space, and build societal/ community identities which ‘heal’ places? I offer criteria for ‘healing’ place that could be used by place- remaking practitioners, based on Gerd Junne’s ‘dimensions for an architecture of peace’ (2006).