Post Traumatic Urbanism - Term Paper Example

Post Traumatic Urbanism Name Institution Date Post Traumatic Urbanism Introduction Post Traumatic urbanism has been stated to be more about a notion of trauma that has not just been developed through psychology but one that has turned out to be known as the new. As stated by Lahoud (2010), post urban traumatism has created something new to the people and to the environment. Lahoud further stated that this subject does not handle and neither does it uncover archaeological history of events that shape and organize the present ways of living; rather, the subject creates something new, creating a new way of handling events as they occur. The notion of trauma in this case refers to the state where individuals are left in a situation where they do not belong to a familiar side; having been taken from their own psychic land. It is such an unfamiliar territory that brings the concept of new when referring to the post traumatic urbanism. Based on Colquhoun’s idea on displacement of concepts, it should be noted that post traumatic urbanism can be taken to be a reinterpretation process and not one to be created in a social void. This argument adds to the fact that post traumatic urbanism should be considered as a new. Therefore, this paper shall investigate the idea of post traumatic urbanism as a new; basing this reference to what Lahoud (2010) stated about the concept. The notion of post traumatic urbanism revolves around what is done to the urban environment after the occurrence of calamitous events. These events involve construction and reconstruction of the environment after the event occurs. The events that occur in the urban environment could be ecological or political. These events could be a result of wars, terror attacks, floods and landslides. Occurrence of such events in most urban areas has been frequent, compressed temporarily and profound. When these calamitous events occur, they cause “urban trauma.” This can be overwhelming to the people and to the environment. It could bring changes that in most cases are not recoverable. Such changes affect the networks, infrastructure and fabric. In most cases, the effect disrupts the existing as well as the imagined city landscape forever. When this happens, it implants blind spots in the urban environment and this not only stimulates but also informs opportunities and directions for renewal of the urban architecture. In an urban setting, there are several activities that define the environment. These activities include social upheaval, human hubris, war and ecological disaster. These activities impact on the daily lives of several people in the urban area and in the nation. In addition, the activities serve millions of people across the globe. This implies that the urban setting is a critical part of the global world. Even for individuals who are far from the post traumatic, the images displayed to them through the media presents them with a periodic window of the tragedies. More than the representations shown or displayed through the media, there are various other ways in which the post traumatic urbanism exists around people. These range from the demolition of historic structures, displacement of poor people, instability and transience of the homeless and the sleek and new infrastructure that is seen after the calamity. A post traumatic urban center is totally different from the known city. One aspect that adds to the already existent trauma is the fact that city or the urban setting still remains the city to be used by the people. They will have to make do with the new set up and all they have is the memory of their old city. Such are the factors that contribute to the trauma faced by people. The new set up will be filled by numerous Do’s and Don’ts of hazardous boundaries and zones. Such places are bound by a lot of imagination from the people together with awareness hence post traumatic urbanism can provoke the imagination of the public, influence their culture, activate their policies and bring in a lot of innovation. When such factors are combined, the post traumatic city becomes in entirely new place. According to Lahoud (2010), trauma is an exception space that is said to “exceed expectation and where the object gets unprecedented.” When in such a context, the residents, the practitioners and even the readers are challenged to make contributions to the urban center in new ways that were not thought of before. Architects of urban centers do not heal the trauma that is caused by the urban environment. However, they are complicit with the production of this trauma. The architects rely on market forces and this implies that post traumatic urbanism will redirect the reality of market force reliance towards optimizing ideas that will be calibrated to the crisis. Such ideas include adaptation and resilience. This implies that by finding out new ideas calibrated towards curbing the crisis, the end result is the creation of a new city and a new people. Among some of the ideas that the architects have in mind is the decision to reconstruct what has been lost through the calamity or to contemplate new possibilities of the urban setting. Chatterjee (2011) stated that in Post Traumatic Urbanism, trauma is advanced. This changes the focus from the how the event occurred to how the experience of the event was felt and what the effects and the impact of the events were. This shift creates a move from the known appearance of the urban setting to the new one or to one that had not been known before. It has to be noted that recovering the urban setting back to what it was prior to the occurrence of the calamity is not possible. It is for this reason that the resilience and adaptation of the urban setting and the urban architects have to be used in ensuring that the efforts towards renewal are successful. Even with such efforts, the imaginations left on the public’s mind cannot be erased. The image of the events will still linger in their mind. Individuals will never get over what they went through completely since they had been used to their old system. Based on what Benjamin (2010) stated, trauma is an interiorized condition of the imaginaries of the humans and cultures. This imagination reserves the threat of a return occurrence. When a traumatic event such as war occurs in a city, there could be very devastating and inconsistent impacts on the language that is spoken in the region. This means that there will be new changes in the setup of the urban center in the aftermath of the calamity. When such calamitous events occur, individuals could suffer from conditions such as getting exiled from their own self. They could also lose their identity due to movements across borders while seeking refuge. Such loses as faced by people leads to new individuals in the same old people. The individuals may be the same but the persons in them are different; they are new. When individuals face such traumatizing moments, it is highly recommended that the conditions be harnessed and treated as opportunities to develop and to enrich the existing urban systems. Through this architects can develop new structures that will help in adaptation of the people to their new setup. Based on the experience that is faced by individuals, post traumatic urbanism presents various stances on the management, experience and mitigation of the trauma faced. Therefore, this points to upcoming epistemological outlines that can be used in augmenting post traumatic urbanism as a practice. Trauma is gradual and sudden. It could also be collective or it could be individual based on the effects that the people feel at the collective level and at the individual level. Through the trauma faced, it is possible to highlight both the recognizable and the unrecognizable shifts that could occur in the urban center. This can be done by monitoring the effects and impacts felt by the urban center and by the people living in the region. In some cases, individuals are forced to move away from the city to new cities. This could be a result of seeking asylum or due to the desire to be in new places; away from the traumatizing effects they underwent. When an urban place experiences great migration or great immigration, the city will be different from what it was. This is because the city may have to make do with the loss of certain groups of people or to do with the inflow of new people with new cultures. It means that to some extent, there will be a loss of diversity in the city. It also means that for the city that will face immigration, there will be increased diversity. This is an indication of the changes that can be faced by a city in Post Traumatic Urbanism. The condition of urban trauma can be described as the state where the catastrophe disrupts or damages the physical environment as well as the infrastructure in a city. In addition to that, the catastrophe disrupts the cultural and social networks of the city. In the current world setting, there are reports of cities that experience trauma on daily news. These are characterized by images of blasted buildings or images of catastrophic events such as the Hurricane Katrina. Such events exemplify the immediate impact sense. In most cases, there is the tendency to try and restore the city back to where it was. In other cases, the city is seen as a robust space that is placed on the nib of new potentialities. Such potentialities are the reason as to why the post traumatic urbanism is referred to as the new. It is because the city is seen to be about to experience something it had not yet seen before. In addition, there is the general tendency by the people in the city to have a fear of the unknown. The unknown in this case is the likely occurrence of another catastrophe. This implies that the people living in the city will dwell in the area without the security that they had enjoyed previously. Security in this case is the sense of safety in the city that they once believed was their safest place to be. After the occurrence of the event, they are not sure of when the event may occur again. It is for this reason that most people move out of their old cities as a consequence of the post traumatic urbanism. The response shown by the discipline of architecture to the post traumatic urbanism is an automatic reflex that involves repair and construction of the city. This involves analysis of the current state of the city and what they plan to make out of the new state of the city (Oxman, 2010). In most cases, the new construction is made so as to come up with new and stronger buildings. For cases of hurricane attacks, the new buildings are constructed so as to be to stand any future occurrences. This implies that the new building is constructed so as to have it stable enough for any vibrations and tremors of the earth. For instance, the second city of Chile, Constitucion, was hit by a huge earthquake of the magnitude of 8.8. This was subsequently followed by a tsunami that had waves of up to 12 meters in height. The number of people that were killed in this event was 550. This led to the displacement of more than 2 million people; which is about 80 % of the population of the country. This city has been faced by a number of earthquakes and it has the history of being faced by earthquakes. This is attributed to its location in a high seismic area. While most buildings that collapsed under this catastrophe were not new, they had been made out of adobe. For the city to be fully reconstructed, it would take the country about three or four years. This would also be costly since the country would use about $30 billion. Reconstruction of the city would also involve constructing of housing facilities that would be used to resettle the families that had been displaced. The most disturbing reality is that even after the reconstruction and resettling of people, the effects that they face would not be erased from their memories. This would go on to haunt and to torment them from many more years. For the example of the Chilean city, it would traumatize them more since the city has a history of being hit by earthquakes. Even after the reconstruction, the city would not be the same as it was before. This is because of the experience that the city dwellers underwent. Such a state presents the dwellers in state where they are not in a familiar land and neither are they in a land where they feel at home. In a way, they are in a confused state of the mind since they still have the effects of the catastrophe (Bullivant, 2012). The catastrophic earthquake that hit Venezuela in Caracas, 2005, showed how the informal urban fabric’s logic was severed by infrastructure and this was severed from the city grid’s rationality that had been planned centrally. The interruption that was caused intensified the differentiation that occurred between them. Instead of them being taken s wounds that had to be healed, they were taken as difference productive so that they could be used in re-examining the reconnection of the reflective impulse. This implies that the occurrence was taken as an opportunity for the city to be redeveloped and to be made into a better city. Therefore, this implies that post traumatic urbanism not only has negative effects on the city but also has a lot of positive consequences. These are seen from the new designs that are made for the reconstruction plan. Taking the occurrence of a catastrophe as an opportunity to improve the city makes the city look better than it looked like before. Even so, it makes the city new; looking attractive. While this might be so appealing to some of the dwellers who were faced by the catastrophe, it would still bring some positive change in the appearance of the city. Ii would make the city look better than it did and would make it more appealing to new entrants to the city. In some cases, destruction through wars is done in pursuit of some agendas. These could be political. For instance, the Israeli invasion to the southern suburbs of Beirut was meant to destabilize Lebanon’s internal balance in politics. This would be achieved using a design urban strategy that was targeted towards clearing the neighborhood. The political climate got charged after bombing because various groups were not in agreement over the design of the reconstruction that had been proposed. This is because the design was more of a repeat of the neighborhood that had been destroyed. The options for design were considered to be means that would be used in establishing historical continuity as well as embodying various sorts of potential tactically. This indicates that in some cases, the old design of the city after occurrence of a catastrophe is not desired by the people. It is for this reason that there were conflicts in the case of Lebanon. Changes to a new design are in most cases the most preferred move since they bring in a new look to the urban setting and help in taking away the trauma that had been experienced by the people; albeit partially. Such a move is what brings about adaptation of the city to the new city. Further, it is what makes the city termed as resilient. This resilience comes after the city has been able to recover from what it underwent. This recovery has to be coupled with reconstruction of the city. It is after the city has been reconstructed and all the buildings that had been affected restored or new ones constructed that the city can be considered to have recovered fully. In such a case, the city will acquire a new look. However, this new look is characterized by some uncertainty in the people. This comes from the imagination of what they would like to see in the future of the city and what they actually face. The vision of the affected and restored city gives them some pleasant surprise. This is what causes trauma in the city and it is what brings in the concept of the new. For example, Zizek (2002) stated that in months that follow any attack, the feeling is that they live in a new and unique time. This is a time between an event that was traumatic and the impact of the event. This can be analogous to the time when one has a deep cut and the pain fully strikes them after sometime. It is the time before this pain strikes that can be compared to the post traumatic urbanism. In fact, post traumatic has been referred to as the evidence of an aftermath. These are the remnants from a missing event. Spaces seen around the blind spot created after the catastrophe make a recording of the event as if it were a scar. This enhances the trauma that individuals undergo and makes them appear to be in a whole new world. Conclusion Post traumatic urbanism occurs in cities as n aftermath of a catastrophic event. To the people, they could be in a state of confusion for some time, not knowing what they would do next. To the architectural discipline, it would be an opportunity to come up with a new design for the city. In other cases, the architects have the options of either reconstructing the whole city and its infrastructure or to repair the affected building. In other cases, preference is made on design of new buildings and new constructions. Either way, the city is seen to be in a new state and it is for such a reason that the post traumatic urbanism is considered to be the new. Bibliography Benjamin, A. 2010, Trauma within the Walls: Notes towards a Philosophy of the City, Architectural Design, 80: 24–31. Bullivant, L. 2012, Master planning Futures, New York, Routlege. Chatterjee, A. 2011, Review of Post Traumatic Urbanism, retrieved on May 21, 2013 from: http://www.academia.edu/781926/Review_of_Post_Traumatic_Urbanism. Lahoud, A. 2010, Post traumatic urbanism, USA, Wiley Publishers. Oxman, R. 2010, The New Structuralism: Design, Engineering and Architectural Technologies, UK, John Wiley and Sons. Zizek, S. 2002, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’, The Symptom, Iss. 2, pp. 44. Read More