Liberal modernist normative understandings of urban space, place, scale and environment assume the city to be a stage of action or a networked system advancing capital accumulation. However, most urban inhabitants and activists understand the city as lived; the many distinctive places that constitute the city are central to their sense of self, belonging, well-being and dignity. Rather than begin from an arrogant position that assumes the earth is a blank spatio-temporal grid that can be (re)designed with each new crisis, I stand in solidarity with those community activists, leaders and artists who call for spatial justice by ‘staying with the trouble’, to borrow from Donna Haraway. Activists who have inherited the legacies of colonial and state-perpetrated violence call for decolonising the city, place and our earth. Theirs is a call to enact alternative ways of living, place making and world making rather than ‘fix’ or ‘fill’ places with desired activities. This paper extends upon my research about a place-based ethics of care in the wounded cities of Dublin, Berlin, Cape Town, M'nsota, and Horowhenua-Kapiti, and draws upon Rachel Pain's discussion of chronic urban trauma and geotrauma. I consider how local to local forms of knowledge exchange might empower us to (re)make our worlds and in the process better ways of living and dying together.
Mots clés : wounded cities|place|care|decolonisation|local knowledges
A103642KT