Projections 4: Responding to Disaster: Trauma, Recovery, and Remembrance

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Charlesworth

FROM PATHOLOGIST TO SOCIAL REFORMER: THE ROLE OF DESIGN PROFESSIONALS IN WAR-DIVIDED CITIES DR ESTHER CHARLESWORTH Visiting Lecturer in Architecture, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Executive Director, Architects Without Frontiers (Australia)

ABSTRACT This article examines the multiple roles of design professionals (which here includes architects, planners, urban designers and landscape architects) in the reconstruction of a range of war-divided cities, and the potential for designers to assist peace-making efforts in the period immediately after conflict. The aim of this examination is to propose a planning and design framework to effectively respond in future cities destroyed and partitioned by war and civil conflict. My investigations highlight the limitations of traditional design practice in post war reconstruction and argues that such practices: (1) are detrimental to the quality of the urban environment and to those living in still polarised cities; (2) limit architectural contributions to the larger and longer-term peace-building process, and (3) deny cities and their people access to the design expertise that may help redress post-conflict, social, economic and spatial divisions. I argue that by re-focusing the design profession upon ethical rather than purely aesthetic concerns, we can establish an effective platform from which architectural and planning professionals can contribute to the reconstruction of the increasing number of cities polarised by ethnic and economic conflict. Dedicated to a great reconstructionist, Rafiq Hariri, ex-Prime Minister of Lebanon, killed

14.02.05

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Projections 4: Responding to Disaster: Trauma, Recovery, and Remembrance

Published on Dec 8, 2022

MIT DUSP

In a world of real and imagined danger in which we find ourselves, the process of trauma, recovery and remembrance has taken on new significance. While we do not address the events of September 11th 2001 directly, this volume of Projections certainly has its genesis in the struggle we have faced to rebuild, personally and professionally, in the months and years following that tragic morning. For me, the struggle to cope with disaster recovery began earlier, following my visit to Sarajevo in 2000 where I was part of a group re-designing the government center after its 1992-95 siege. Five years after the war ended, the scars of conflict were immediately present: buildings toppled, areas land mined, growing squatter settlements and thousands of simple white sticks dotting the landscape, marking the resting place of the city's defenders.