URBAN RECOVERY

@ THE INTERSECTION OF DISPLACEMENT AND RECOVERY

APRIL 1-3

In today’s world, an unprecedented rate of one person every two seconds is forcibly displaced due to disasters and violent conflicts. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a record number of 3 million people were uprooted in 2017 making it the biggest increase ever reported in a single year. Displacement and reconstruction are more critical than ever with the total number of displaced worldwide reaching 68.5 million by the end of 2017.

City Debates 2019 will focus on the intersections between displacement and reconstruction and will examine the spatial modalities that inhabit and represent these intersections. While reconstruction has long been debated, its intersections with protracted and mass displacement call for more critical conversations. And while displacement has occupied a central focus in research across historical, urban, anthropological, geographical, and cultural studies, emerging threads call for more interdisciplinary reflections.

The conference will therefore bring together different disciplinary perspectives into conversation with each other and with empirical case studies. We are keen to look beyond conflict related displacement and reconstruction into the greater processes of crises and recovery, to examine how trauma/crisis and recovery overlap, coexist, collide and hence redefine each other. Our goal 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.

City Debates 2019 will frame displacement as agency, the displaced as social capital, post-conflict urban environments as archives, and reconstructions as socio-spatial practices.

The conference will explore narratives of displacement, modalities of reconstruction, and will focus on the thematic intersections and overlaps between them. Respective panels will be organized to facilitate for critical reflections and interdisciplinary conversations on the different and overlapping narratives and modalities. The thematic intersections will include: – Housing the displaced – Reconstructed memories and spaces – Art as recovery – Recovering cultural heritage – Modalities of local governance – Rethinking the “camp” * Special session on Syria