The Spatial Life of Trauma: Public Space, Memory and Future-Making
Edited by:
Dimitra Kanellopulou, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, PSL Université, Ambiances Architectures Urbanités Research Laboratory (UMR1563) - CRESSON Team,
Christine Mady, Department of Architecture, School of ARTS, Aalto University,
This volume advances public space scholarship by treating trauma not as a discrete aftermath but as a cumulative, time-space process produced, sensed, negotiated, and potentially transformed in the public realm. It addresses the continuum before, during, and after rupture and traces how intersecting vulnerabilities that appear individual at the time t0 become collective at the time t1. In doing so, it reframes public space from a backdrop for memorials and reconstruction to a medium through which traumatisation and care unfold.
The rationale is twofold. First, existing trauma scholarship - rooted in psychology, memory studies, post-conflict, and catastrophe studies - privileges post-event narratives and monumentalised traces. Second, the “soft,” often invisible registers of harm in everyday urban life remain under-specified: anticipatory stressors, mundane disruptions, and patterned exposures that accrete across bodies, infrastructure, and governance. Repositioning trauma as a public space process matters because it shifts planning and design from reactive response to anticipatory care, clarifies power in naming “what counts” as trauma, and supports equity-centred, early-action policy.
The volume contributes at three levels. Conceptually, it develops temporal-spatial lenses and thresholds for identifying trauma as a public space issue, foregrounding power, justice, and unequal vulnerability in accumulation paths. Methodologically, it advances ways to detect ongoing or obscured traumatising processes - through ethnography, sensory and participatory mapping, spatial and environmental analytics, archival counter-readings, and practice-based protocols for early warning, everyday maintenance, and small-scale repair - alongside ethical frameworks for study and representation. Empirically and for policy, it assembles comparative cases across geographies and trauma types (structural, colonial, environmental/climate, conflict-related), evaluates how design and governance generate or mitigate vulnerability, and assesses interventions that move from memorialisation toward infrastructural care.
Why now?
This edited volume treats trauma as a cumulative, time-space process negotiated in and through public space, rather than a discrete event to be overcome. While trauma scholarship spans multiple disciplines, translation into planning, design, and governance remains limited. We propose public space as a shared framework for recognising how trauma is differentially produced, acknowledged, and lived across identities (age, gender, race), scales (body, street, neighbourhood, city), and temporalities (past, present, and anticipated futures). This framing can guide policy and design and support the development of indicators for the caring, reparative, and regenerative capacities of public spaces.
Against celebratory narratives of resilience, the volume foregrounds ambiguity, accumulation, struggle, power negotiation, and unfinished recovery, and interrogates how dominant discourses sideline justice and unequal vulnerability. We live amid overlapping traumas – pandemics, ecological disasters, large-scale accidents, wars, and displacement – whose effects endure in everyday urban life. Public spaces are often the first settings where such harms become visible and collectively lived.
Despite extensive research on crisis and conflict, the ordinary, recurrent traumatising processes that manifest in public space - deprivation of basic needs and rights, harassment, exclusion, homelessness, discrimination, microaggressions - remain underexamined, as does the capacity of public space to address them. These accumulations often shape mobility, belonging, and participation more than exceptional disasters. We, therefore, centre public space as a site of care, inclusion, repair, and the avoidance of re-traumatisation, and situate this within spatial justice and power dynamics across historical, structural, and more-than-human relations. Emerging climate- and technology-related traumas intensify these dynamics, are spatially embedded and unevenly distributed, and demand attention to embodied, everyday experience.
Our guiding question is: how can public space support living with uncertainty, loss, and ecological transformation? The answers should inform anticipatory, equity-oriented strategies that mitigate traumatising processes and expand entitlement to the city – being part of, moving through, and benefiting from urban life. We call on architecture, urban design, and planning to reorient from growth-led delivery to vocabularies and practices of abatement, care, maintenance, repair, and regeneration, recognising that recovery often proceeds through sustained, small-scale, and accumulative interventions.
Background
Trauma is an intrinsically multidisciplinary field. Emerging from psychoanalysis and psychiatry, it now spans psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, history and memory studies, political science, geography, architecture, and related domains. Positioning itself within trauma studies as a cross-disciplinary formation (Ward and Pilat, 2016), this volume embraces an inter- and transdisciplinary approach.
We approach trauma as a biopsychosocial phenomenon with neurological, physiological, psychological, social, and cultural dimensions. It alters threat detection, memory, executive function, emotion regulation, and stress responses, and it reshapes social relations, cultural narratives, political conflict, urban space, and collective memory. Following psychoanalytic accounts (Caruth, 1995), trauma exceeds narrative integration, resists immediate representation, and returns as fragmentation, repetition, and temporal collapse – an unsettled present rather than a completed past.
The literature identifies individual, collective, intergenerational, structural, environmental and climate-related forms, showing trauma as embedded in social, political, cultural, and physical structures. Its dimensions are psychological (dread, intrusive memories, disordered identity), social (erosion and reconfiguration of trust and ties, alongside resilience), spatial (inscribed in landscapes, ruins, memorials; cities as mnemonic terrains that preserve and erase traces: Gilloch and Kilby, 2005; Boyer, 1996; Hebbert, 2005), political (terrorism, state violence, security, reconstruction; reverberations in policy and governance: Ward and Pilat, 2016), and cultural (film, literature, monuments, ritual; e.g., Palestinian cinema reconstructing fractured memory while acknowledging irreparable loss: Gertz and Khleifi, 2008), as well as corporeal and temporal (neurophysiological effects; compression of past and present through delay and recurrence). In public space these dimensions are co-present and mutually shaping.
Although trauma follows no single trajectory, it is often characterised by recurring processes - including the accumulation of triggers, moments of rupture - which overwhelm cognitive and social frames, periods of latency, the return of trauma through symptoms and cultural forms, and social practices - like grieving, memorialisation, storytelling, post-memory, and reconstruction that seek to incorporate traumatic experience. Closure is rare; trauma remains open-ended, renegotiated through politics, art, ritual, and alterations to public space. Accordingly, this volume examines how public spaces shape and are reshaped by collective trauma (war, colonial violence, terrorism, ecological disaster, systemic injustice), or seemingly individual trauma, and argues for public space as active infrastructure of care, maintenance, and repair responsive to trauma’s cumulative and staged condition.
The volume and its parts
The volume asks:
- Who decides how, by whom and for how long, trauma is remembered or forgotten through lived and shared experiences in public space?
- How do public spaces absorb/ hide, represent, reflect, resist, or reveal traumatic experiences and processes? What are the risks of normalising or anaesthetising traumatic experiences?
- How can everyday public space practices contribute to negotiating trauma and creating conditions of care and transformation?
- How can public spaces anticipate future ruptures and address their root causes and
These questions are addressed through the volume’s four interconnected parts.
Part 1. Recognising and naming trauma in public space
Part 1 focuses on how trauma becomes spatially legible and asks when, how, and by whom a site is recognised as a traumatised or traumatising space. Rather than considering trauma as a self-evident condition, this part addresses the politics of recognition, who labels an event, experience or condition as traumatic who is entitled to do so and who has the power to deny, erase, hide, or normalise it? Recognition can be understood as a process; trauma is first identified, then its existence knowledge, and only then potentially addressed. Yet, who initiates this process of searching, identifying, and naming? Communities, individuals, public institutions, experts, activists and other actors may play different and sometimes conflicting roles. Contributions to this part are therefore invited to examine the actor’s network to make traumatic experiences publicly perceptible. The part considers recognition and acknowledgement as possible starting points for individual and collective continuations and for the construction of possible future trajectories. It asks how public space participates in making trauma visible, and when the recognition of a traumatised, or actively traumatising space creates the possibility for it to be addressed.
Part 2. Remembering trauma: transmission, commemoration, and ethics of visibility
Part 2 examines how public space transmit, perform, materialise or erase traumatic memory. It questions the presence of the past in the present and examines the role of public space in keeping trauma active, discontinuing traumatic processed, or transforming the way in which traumatic experiences are transmitted. Societies have long used public space to materialise memory through monuments, memorials and commemorative landscapes. This part extends these established debates towards new arenas in which new concepts of memory and commemoration emerge and operate differently: counter monuments, temporary and performative memorial practices, digital extensions of memorial space, everyday rituals, artistic practices and events. Rather than understand memory as something fixed in material form, the section approaches memory as something people do. Memories shift, overlap and change overtime and public spaces provide fertile grounds through which they are continually performed and transmitted. Contributions may address practices developed in specific public spaces to recall or commemorate trauma and to prevent its repetition, as well as the pedagogical role of public space; can public space teach? How is traumatic memory transmitted between individuals, communities and generations? Simultaneously, the part critically examines the dynamics, of commodification and the transformation of particular places into landmarks of trauma. It asks how commemoration, consumption, tourism, and public visibility intersect and potentially alter the meaning of traumatic experience.
Part 3. Negotiating trauma: everyday practices of care and transformation
Part 3 shifts attention from trauma as a discrete event towards trauma as a lived and ongoing condition. It explores how trauma is experienced and constantly re-negotiated through everyday life, privileging the mundane public places and subtle experiences beyond the material traces of tragic occurrences. This part focuses on the difference between trauma as event and trauma as condition, for example, environmental, technological and infrastructural conditions. Public spaces are locations where trauma is always being renegotiated. Contestation, protest and occupation are key expressions of this negotiation, where conflicting actors strive to impose alternative notions of significance, meaning or public recognition of painful experience. Post-trauma policing, control and securitisation illustrate how responses to trauma reshape everyday public life, while contestation is only one mode of negotiation. Equally important are spatial practices like avoidance, appropriation, adaptability, perseverance, informal gathering and mutual care. Part 3 looks at how everyday activities can both express trauma and generate circumstances for identification, care and transformation. Contributions to this part examine the scales of traumatic experience (geographical, chronological, physiological and experiential), the significance of the everyday compared to exceptional events, and explore trauma-informed planning, design and architecture, grassroots rebuilding projects, artistic performances, community participation and everyday practices of care. These could be explored using cases on emerging practices, actors initiating them, resulting transformations or sticking points to question how public spaces contribute to processes of care, acknowledgement, justice, adaptability and collective transformation. Public space may not 'heal' trauma itself, but it can help to modify the geographical, social and political conditions that sustain traumatising experiences.
Part 4. Futures after Ruptures
Part 4 looks forward rather than backward, asking what possibilities become feasible through the planning and design of public spaces that identify and address trauma. This part explores prevention, anticipation, imagination and the identification through public space of the core reasons and situations that give rise to the will to understand, accept, or deal with a traumatic experience. Ruptures, break downs, ruins are not understood just in their literal, material forms in buildings and physical landscapes. They may also be disrupted or ruined memories, childhoods, emotions, social relations and collective imaginaries. This part, therefore, considers post-traumatic scenarios not necessarily as transient states on the road to recovery, but as states that might define permanent or long-term futures. We encourage contributions that examine anticipatory design, regenerative public spaces, preventive measures, and future imaginaries emerging through art, culture, play and social experimentation. How might planning and design anticipate traumatic events or conditions, instead than simply reacting after rupture? How can public spaces respond to structural vulnerabilities and how can they assist to the prevention of the repetition of traumatising conditions? How might these processes be enhanced with empathy, communal imagination and a counter-identification of root causes? This part ends with the ethical and policy difficulties inherent in planning public places in trauma-marked situations. What should stay, what should go, what should be changed, what should be left to grow? How can public space recognise unresolved suffering without permanently anchoring populations into traumatised identities? How might design and policy respond to uncertainty and allow for alternative collective futures to be imagined?
References
Boyer, M. C. (1996). The city of collective memory: Its historical imagery and architectural entertainments. MIT Press.
Caruth, C. (Ed.). (1995). Trauma: Explorations in memory. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Gertz, N., & Khleifi, G. (2008). Palestinian cinema: Landscape, trauma and memory. Edinburgh University Press.
Gilloch, G., & Kilby, J. (2005). Trauma and memory in the city: From Auster to Austerlitz. In M. Crinson (Ed.), Urban memory: History and amnesia in the modern city (pp. 1–22). Routledge.
Hebbert, M. (2005). The street as locus of collective memory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23(4), 581–596. https://doi.org/10.1068/d55j
Ward, J., & Pilat, S. (2016). Terror, trauma, memory: Reflections on the Oklahoma City bombing—An introduction. Social Science Quarterly, 97(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12247
INFORMATION ON CONTRIBUTIONS
We welcome contributions that address any of the four parts and suggest how this could reflect on planning, design or governance of public space. Submissions are invited from scholars – established academics to early career researchers – and practitioners in diverse disciplines (urban studies, planning, architecture, landscape architecture, geography, sociology, anthropology, political science, history and memory studies, disaster and climate studies, public health, media and film studies, and environmental humanities). Co-authored work with community organizations, NGOs, public agencies, or design practices is encouraged, including methodological contributions, case-based analyses, and practice-led studies that demonstrate actionable models of care, maintenance, and repair. By integrating conceptual, methodological, and empirical work, the volume bridges scholarship and policy to reorient public-space practice from post-event response to anticipatory, justice-oriented care across the trauma continuum.
When submitting your proposal, please consider the following:
- Indicate which part it is intended for
- 1000 words abstract excluding references (theoretical or conceptual framework, methodology, and anticipated outcome, clear alignment with the book’s theme) in English
- 5-10 references (APA style)
- Maximum three co-authors
- Short bio of 100 words per author (including name, email, affiliation)
- Submit the abstract as a Word Document attached to your email with a clear subject line (example, Abstract – title and author surname) to both addresses
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. andThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
IMPORTANT DATES AND TENTATIVE TIMELINE
- Call for abstracts – 16 July 2026
- Abstract submission – 1 October 2026
- Decision on abstracts – 22 October 2026
- Submitting book proposal to the publisher – 29 October 2026
- Expected book proposal review and receipt of contract with the publisher – January/ February 2027
- Notification to chapter authors about the submission requirements (author guidelines) – January/ February 2027
- Submission of final draft – April 2027
- Review of chapters and comments to authors – May 2027
- Submission of final chapter – June 2027
- Submission to publisher – July 2027
- Expected publication – December 2027/ January 2028
Assessment criteria
- The work has not been submitted for publication before
- Originality, novelty, and clear alignment with the book’s approach and themes
- Methodological strength
- Interdisciplinary and global perspectives
- Contribution to broader academic research on public space
