Urban Recovery

Intersecting Displacement with Post War Reconstruction

Howayda Al-Harithy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000362664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

This book calls for re-conceptualising urban recovery by exploring the intersection of reconstruction and displacement in volatile contexts in the Global South. It explores 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. It is hoped that by intersecting or even bridging reconstruction with displacement we can cross-fertilize and exploit both discourses to reach a greater understanding of the notion of urban recovery as a holistic and multi-layered process. This book brings multidisciplinary perspectives into conversation with each other to look beyond the conflict-related displacement and reconstruction and into the greater processes of crises and recovery. It uses empirical research to examine how trauma, crisis, and recovery overlap, coexist, collide and redefine each other. 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.

With local and international insights from scholars across disciplines, this book will appeal to academics and students of urban studies, architecture, and social sciences, as well as those involved in the process of urban recovery.

1Re-conceptualizing urban recovery in the age of protracted displacement

Howayda Al-Harithy

Introduction

In today’s world an unprecedented rate of one person every two seconds is forcibly displaced due to disasters and violent conflicts. Calling the period of 2010–2019 a decade of displacement, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports, ‘At least 100 million people were forced to flee their homes during the last 10 years, seeking refuge either within or outside the borders of their country’.¹ Displacement and reconstruction are more critical than ever with the total number of displaced people worldwide reaching 79.5 million by the end of 2019 due to conflicts, violence, and persecution (UNHCR, 2019). This edited book therefore frames the following question: What does urban recovery look like in the age of mass and protracted displacement? It thus aims to re-conceptualize urban recovery at the intersection of displacement and reconstruction.

Reconstruction and displacement form two independent scholarly trajectories that do not intersect often enough to enrich or challenge one another. While reconstruction is mostly focused on the physical aspects of the built environment, displacement emerges as a human-centred discourse that encompasses the social and temporal dimensions of human migration towards safety and shelter. And, while displacement has occupied a central focus in research across historical, urban, anthropological, geographical, cultural, and refugee studies, emerging threads call for more interdisciplinary and spatial reflections. This book therefore brings together different disciplinary perspectives into conversation with each other and with empirical case studies. These perspectives look beyond conflict-related displacement and reconstruction to explore the greater processes of crises, trauma, and recovery, and examine how they overlap, co-exist and collide and hence, redefine each other. The 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 displaced people rebuilding their lives, environments, and memories in new locations. In the process, displacement is framed as an agency, the displaced as social capital, post-conflict urban environments as archives, and reconstructions as socio-spatial practices.

The idea for this book was initiated in the wake of City Debates 2019, an international conference on contemporary urban issues that I organized in April 2019 at the American University of Beirut, titled Urban Recovery at the Intersection of Displacement and Reconstruction. The conference examined the spatial modalities that inhabit and represent these intersections. It was premised on the following: ‘While reconstruction has long been debated, its intersections with protracted and mass displacement call for more critical conversations’.² The book is designed to bring together the variety of approaches and perspectives that were debated during the conference and share them with the wider academic and professional community throughout the region of the Middle East and beyond.

This book is therefore an invitation to re-conceptualize urban recovery by exploring how reconstruction and displacement intersect across volatile contexts from a Global South perspective. It is hoped that by intersecting and even colliding reconstruction with displacement, we can cross-fertilize and contaminate both discourses positively towards a greater understanding of the notion of urban recovery as a holistic and multi-layered process; one that goes beyond the physical and the humanitarian and proposes a more inclusive and multidisciplinary approach. This approach transcends the formal and the immediate to include informal practices and tune to the complexity of the accumulation and archiving of history. The book is, thus, an in-depth exploration of spatial, social, artistic, virtual, and political modalities that promote the process of urban recovery. It is at the same time an interrogation of the strategies and discourses surrounding recovery, reconstruction, and displacement. These explorations and interrogations are directed towards understanding how violence and protracted displacement impact urban practices; posing urban recovery as a complex process that challenges existing conventions, tackles displacement as urban agency, and engages reconstruction as being equally occupied with the intangible.

The content of this book and its thematic structure explore narratives of displacement and modalities of reconstruction through multiple lenses such as time, space, locality, gender, sectarianism, and memory. The thematic intersections between reconstruction and displacement are organized around understanding systems and scales of governance; housing the displaced; conceiving of cultural heritage in the recovery process; and spaces and imaginaries of post-crisis recovery(s).

Conceptualizing recovery

Existing literature presents wide-ranging differences in the definitions and conceptualizations of recovery that have provoked the entry point of this book. While diverse definitions co-exist, recovery as a construct evolved over the past three decades from a term that is synonymous with reconstruction to an iterative process that is intertwined with development, reconstruction, or resilience, to then emerge as an open-ended participatory process that is locally informed and socially anchored. When used in relation to post-conflict or post-disaster, some scholars reduce recovery to the physical aspects of the built and natural environments, often equating it with reconstruction while calling for the implementation of comprehensive urban planning schemes. Other scholars think of recovery as an ongoing act of resilience that starts before a crisis ends, while others link it to bottom-up strategies that involve contextual and participatory approaches. These differences in conceptualizations lie largely in the disciplinary or sub-disciplinary framing; of particular interest here are the differences that emerge in the conception of recovery among the three strands of post-disaster recovery, post-war reconstruction, and humanitarian aid and relief.

This section of the chapter offers an overview of the different definitions and conceptualizations of recovery and identifies the main theoretical shifts that have taken place in the literature. It then positions the book and its thematic tracks in relation to such trajectories. It is important, however, to note that the different definitions of recovery have developed and continue to co-exist in parallel. Recovery remains open to further conceptualizations upon which the invitation of this book is extended.

Early research equated recovery with reconstruction of the physical environment but paved the way for more critical conceptions of recovery in relation to reconstruction (Haas, Kates, and Bowden, 1977; Bolin, 1976, 1982; Bolin and Trainer, 1978; Drabek and Key, 1984; Oliver-Smith, 1986; Bates and Peacock, 1993). The distinction between recovery and reconstruction was sharpened when the literature shifted from a focus on pure tangible reconstruction schemes to the recovery of intangible dynamics and networks. This significant shift became apparent after the end of the post-Yugoslav collapse and the siege of Sarajevo in 1996. The sole focus was no longer on the reconstruction of the built environment as was the case following the World War II. Recovering memories, practices, and a sense of place became crucial in the aftermath of violent conflict, as well as state rebuilding and community reintegration. For example, when the physical impact of urban trauma is considered, authors such as Shaw (1996) and Zetter (2005) focus on the need to tie recovery to reconstruction, and hence development. They suggest a push for more sustainable economic structures as part of the reconstruction agenda. Stanley-Price (2007) ties reconstruction to the recovery of cultural heritage. He views it as a priority, along with the provision of shelter, basic needs, and services for people. It encompasses elements of both tangible and intangible heritage, including the restoration of symbolic monuments, cultural practices, and markers of national identity by looking at the significance of home and land in the minds of people. In addition to material losses, he further argues that cultural heritage is grounded in people’s personal and collective histories and their visions for their neighbourhoods. He, thus, focuses on reviving the cultural fabric of a place, including the identities of individuals, their communities, and sense of belonging. Similarly, Gotham and Greenberg (2008) consider the activation of cultural institutions as paramount to recovery, alongside the provision of humanitarian aid and immediate housing.

Addison (2003a, 2003b) ties reconstruction to recovery through his conception of ‘broad-based recovery’. To Addison, achieving recovery in Africa from an empirical point of view requires a set of parallel actions that go beyond the act of rebuilding damaged physical infrastructure. These actions include peace building, securing political stability, strengthening the functions of the state, resettling refugees, and rebuilding the social and economic sectors. Addison (2003b) argues that moving from conflict to recovery in Africa can only be secured when peace is sought and broad-based recovery is designed to improve the livelihood of all social groups, especially the disadvantaged. In this case, achieving recovery includes two requirements. The first requirement is the balanced and active role of all the stakeholders involved in the recovery process. Involvement in recovery is illustrated by a ‘reconstruction and growth’ pyramid where national and international actors are key players. At the base of this pyramid are local communities. To Addison (2003b), success lies in the ability of communities to rebuild and strengthen their livelihoods. The second requirement proposes legislative and political reform to accompany the reconstruction of physical, natural, and human capital. Here, Addison (2003b) draws a parallel between reconstruction initiatives and the legislative and political reform. While both are imperative to achieving recovery, they need to be addressed in tandem: prioritizing one over the other can lead to a narrow rather than broad-based recovery. Recovery for Addison (2003a, 2003b) is therefore a two-fold condition that is reached through reconstruction and reform.

Over the last three decades, the term recovery further evolved as an alternative to reconstruction that does not assume a return to the previous state that was linked to the roots of conflict. To Barakat and Zyck (2009, p.1072):

Although the term ‘reconstruction’ has gained considerable momentum, it has also been criticised for suggesting a return to the status quo ante which had been implicated in the cause of the conflict. The constructive urge, it was implied, had failed to adequately deconstruct the weaknesses and vulnerability factors evident in the pre-conflict environment. In the light of such debates, ‘recovery’ gained favour for its pre-existing use in economic, social, medical and psychological realms and because of its apparent distance from the infrastructure-oriented connotations and origins of reconstruction.

As such, the conceptualization of recovery shifted from framing it as a return to the status quo ante to a ‘new normal’. According to Chang (2010), recovery produces an environment that becomes the ‘new normal’. In this case, building back as before either becomes impossible due to irreversible social, political, and economic changes or reproduces the conditions that created the disaster. It is, however, important to note that adapting to the ‘new normal’ might not always lead to a ‘new better’. Chang (2010) therefore conceptualizes recovery as an adaptive process that negotiates the reconstruction of pre-disaster systems with major alterations of those systems.

In parallel, scholars also challenge the conception of recovery as linear. They advance a more critical take that acknowledges recovery as iterative with overlapping phases at multiple scales from local, regional, to national (Berke, Kartez, and Wenger, 1993; Neal, 1996; Chang, 2009). Post-disaster scholars begin to conceptualize recovery as a process that is versatile, complex, and without an endpoint. They no longer conceive of disaster as an interruption in development and recovery as a reversal process seeking to restore the pre-disaster normality. Rather, recovery begins to be conceived as complex and nonlinear and results in a ‘new normality’; an environment that was altered and reconfigured by the disaster. In the process, recovery prioritizes re-establishing people’s lives over physical rebuilding (Olshansky, 2005). Scholars even add that a successful recovery improves a community’s disaster resilience rather than re-establish their vulnerabilities (Mileti, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004). As a result, recovery emerges as a process of rebuilding both the physical and the social. It involves more than the reconstruction of the built environment and is more appropriately conceptualized as a social process that is shaped by both pre- and post-disaster conditions. It acknowledges the challenges faced by people as well as the recovery of the built and natural systems. As such, recovery in post-disaster literature is defined as the process of restoring, rebuilding, and reshaping the spatial, socio-cultural, economic, and natural environments through pre-event planning and post-event actions (Smith and Wenger, 2007).

This invited the conceptualization of recovery in relation to the urban and to resilience. Davis (2005) focuses on resilience while examining the impacts of Mexico City’s disastrous earthquake on the spatial, physical, social, and political character of the capital city. She questions how a city can recover from a disaster of this magnitude by being more resilient. Davis (2005) defines recovery through resilience as more than mere physical rebuilding. It is understood in terms of the enduring qualities of places, people, and their social practices and values. It allows cities to respond to the stresses of disaster by transforming and adapting to a new state. Furthermore, Davis’s (2005) work proposes a link between recovery as a process and the practice of urban citizenship. The earthquake in Mexico City exposed the hidden corruption embedded in the city and acted as a catalyst that mobilized citizens to search for social justice. It expanded the understanding of recovery to become an opportunity for people to seek answers to what they need for a better future, with lessons learned from the past. Davis (2005, p. 260) makes the following propositions while distinguishing between the resilience of the people and the resilience of corrupt systems that produce a recovery shaped by the ‘logic of money and power’: ‘a city is more than its buildings and, thus, resilience must be understood as more than physical reconstruction’. As such, ‘reconstruction is not necessarily recovery (or vice versa), and resilience is not always a good thing’. Similarly, Vale and Campanella (2005) define resilience as the capacity of a city and its people to rebound from a disaster. Campanella (2006) explores recovery in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina and its ability to rebound from a disaster. As Davis (2005), Campanella (2006) links resilience to recovery, not only through the physical recovery of the city itself, but also to the recovery of the social fabric. For Campanella (2006), recovery is defined in terms of the resilience of the residents to reclaim their neighbourhoods after a disaster. Cities, to Campanella, are not just build...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Re-conceptualizing urban recovery in the age of protracted displacement
• PART I Understanding systems and scales of governance
• PART II Housing the displaced
• PART III Conceiving of cultural heritage in the recovery process
• PART IV Space and imaginaries in framing post-crisis recovery(s)
• Index