Urban Recovery: Intersecting Displacement with Post War Reconstruction

Howayda Al-Harithy - 2021
Urban Recovery: Intersecting Displacement with Post War Reconstruction calls for re-conceptualizing urban recovery by exploring the intersection of reconstruction and displacement in volatile contexts in the Global South. It is an in-depth exploration of the spatial, social, artistic, and political conditions that promote urban recovery.
Reconstruction and displacement have often been studied independently as two different processes of physical recovery and human migration towards safety and shelter. This edited book brings multidisciplinary perspectives to look beyond the conflict of reconstruction and displacement and into the greater processes of crises and recovery. It aims at cross-fertilizing discourses to reach a greater understanding of the notion of urban recovery as a holistic and multi-layered process. It uses empirical research to examine how trauma, crisis, and recovery overlap, coexist, collide and redefine one another. The core exploration of this edited collection is to understand how the oppositional framing of destruction versus reconstruction and place-making versus displacement can be disrupted; how displacement is spatialized; and how reconstruction is extended to the displaced people rebuilding their lives, environments, and memories in new locations. In the process, displacement is framed as agency, the displaced as social capital, post-conflict urban environments as archives, and reconstructions as socio-spatial practices.

This book recognizes the multi-dimensional facets of recovery in the literature, including the physical, economic, social, political, and cultural. It’s structured around four thematic intersections that facilitate for critical and cross-dimensional conversations on overlapping narratives of displacement and spatial modalities of reconstruction: understanding systems and scales of governance, housing the displaced, conceiving of cultural heritage in the recovery process, as well as space and imaginaries in framing post-crisis recovery. The thematic intersections incorporate the work of local and international scholars and experts on displacement and reconstruction, as well as those who can locate these themes in a longer historical trajectory. The authors in the book offer new interpretations of urban recovery in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, and Georgia.
This new book, edited by Howayda Al-Harithy, was published in July 2021 by Routledge in the Critical Studies in Urbanism and the City Series.

Chapters in the book were authored by Howayda Al-Harithy, Jennifer Hyndman, Diane E. Davis, Mona Harb, Mona Fawaz, Carla Al-Hage, Loren Landau, Ghiath Al Jebawi, Cathrine Brun, Joana Dabaj, Camillo Boano, Namariq Al-Rawi, Rohit Jigyasu, Dina Mneimneh, Suzanne Harris-Brandts, David Sichinava, Chiara de Cesari, Eva Ziedan, Elena Isayev, Judith Naeff, and Omar Mismar.