URBANISM: POST TRAUMA

Urbanism is the study of how population of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment. It is a main component, for example, urban planning, is the practice focusing on the physical design and management of urban structures and sociology, which is the academic field of study.
Many architects, planners and sociologists explore how people live in densely populated urban areas. There is a wide range of theories and different approaches to the study of urbanization. However, in some international contexts, urban areas are synonymous with urban planning, and “urban” refers to urban planning.
The urbanization of the early 20th century was associated with a rise in central industrialization, mixed-use neighborhoods, social organizations and networks, and what was described as the “convergence of political, social and economic citizenship.

Urban trauma describes a condition where conflict or catastrophe has disrupted and damaged not only the physical environment and infrastructure of a city, but also the social and cultural networks. Cities experiencing trauma dominate the daily news. Images of blasted buildings, or events such as Cyclone Katrina exemplify the sense of ‘immediate impact’. But how is this trauma to be understood in its aftermath, and in urban terms? What is the response of the discipline to the post-traumatic condition?
On the one hand, one can try to restore and recover everything that has passed, or otherwise see the
post-traumatic city as a resilient space poised on the cusp of new potentialities. While repair and
reconstruction are automatic reflexes, the knowledge and practices of the disciplines need to be imbued with a deeper understanding of the effect of trauma on cities and their contingent realities. This issue will pursue this latter approach, using examples of post-traumatic urban conditions to rethink the agency of architecture and urbanism in the contemporary world. Post-traumatic urbanism demands of architects the mobilisation of skills, criticality and creativity in contexts with which they are not familiar. The posttraumatic is no longer the exception; it is the global condition.

Trauma is defined as a wound or an injury caused by an act of violence on one’s body, or as a severe anxiety caused by an unpleasant experience. The symptoms of this trauma are still visible today in various Israeli cities. As a result of the war, Israeli cities had annexed formerly owned Palestinian villages and neighborhoods. Along the years, these vacated Palestinian houses were settled by Jewish immigrants, turned to slums and became the target of several urban renewal projects. These renewal projects mainly asked to erase all traces of the neighborhood’s Arab past, and to introduce a new urban order.
Cities are plagued with traumatic events, natural catastrophes, wars, economic conflicts and infrastructural breakdowns. Cities become traumatized by these disasters and malfunction moments within the urban fabric as the remnants of disaster will emerge. These moments are considered as volatile conditions within the city; unpredictable, out of control and fluctuating over time. Here the goal is to manage these unstable moments through multiple local and infrastructural strategies and reorganize the damaged neighborhood. The challenge is how these neighborhoods affect the organization of the undamaged part of the city. We need to re-stitch back together the torn apart city through urban design & architecture.