Reparative Urban Practices
Exploring reparative justice in cities shaped by colonial violence, focusing on land disputes, spatial imagination and urban healing through creative, collaborative and place-based methods.
City-making is a by-product of racial capitalism and a global colonial history of protracted violence. As a result, the multiple harms, territorial wounds and collective trauma demand new frameworks for conceptualising reparation and territorial healing (Ortiz and Gómez Córdoba, 2023) in cities. This research priority area seeks to frame the political project of reparative justice in urban spaces by tracing the practices to heal wounds from epistemic, racial, slow and colonial violence emerging in cities. It is interested in examining different avenues to redressing past and ongoing harms anchored in specific culturally and politically loaded territories and land disputes (Ortiz, Villamizar-Duarte, et al., 2024).
Key questions
- How do processes and practices of reparative justice activate the spatial imagination of communities affected by violence-related trauma?
- How can territorial healing and reparative planning perspectives transform cross-disciplinary urban research and practice?
- How can we connect place-based memories of violence, healing and reparation with urban policy, planning and design?
- What do creative and collaborative methods offer critical urban and civic pedagogies to foster territorial reparation and healing?
This research priority area engages with urban sensibilities that bridge ecologies of knowledge alongside multiple ways of knowing and feeling in contested territories. In doing so, it honours place-based attachment, affective connections and narratives of place-based identities.
Professor in Critical Urban Pedagogy, Director of UCL Urban Lab
Catalina Ortiz is an urbanist who is passionate about spatial justice. Her research uses decolonial and critical urban theory through knowledge co-production methodologies, mainly in Latin American cities. Catalina's work revolves around urban pedagogies, planning for equality and southern urbanisms.