Pedagogies for Territorial Healing and Reparation: Learning How to Foster in Tandem Spatial, Epistemic and Reparative Justice

Monday, 7 July 2025: 15:00-16:45
Location: ASJE015 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
RC21 Regional and Urban Development (host committee)

Language: English

We are at a historical crossroads characterised by climate catastrophe, colonial violence and socio-political turmoil causing multiple harms and collective trauma. Our cities bear traces of the multiple violences exercised against their territories and their inhabitants. This session proposes to facilitate dialogues focusing on the roles of critical urban pedagogy (Ortiz and Millan, 2022) as a tool for advancing territorial healing (Ortiz and Gomez-Cordoba, 2023) and reparation. That is why, territorial healing and reparation goes beyond the legal mechanisms of transitional justice in institutionalised peacebuilding processes and focuses on different avenues to redressing past and ongoing harms anchored in specific culturally and politically loaded territories (Ortiz, Villamizar-Duarte, et al, 2024). Territorial reparation honours place-based attachment, affective connections, and narratives of place-identity by linking spatial, epistemic, and reparative justice. We believe that critical urban pedagogies are crucial for framing the political project of reparative justice in urban spaces. In this session, we would like to explore in a critical examination of urban pedagogies to reimagine plural urban studies that:

  1. link spatial and reparative justice to recalibrate education and practice to foster joy, empathy, and solidarity
  2. connect community memories of violence, healing and repair with policy, planning and design
  3. explore the use of art-based methods to enable the emergence of diverse ecologies of knowledges and multiple ways of knowing and feeling
  4. experiment with teaching in the classroom and civic pedagogies around territorial reparation
  5. expand the practices of autonomous ‘popular’ education linked to urban struggles and the interdependence of human and non-human agents
Session Organizers:
Catalina ORTIZ, University College London, United Kingdom and Natalia VILLAMIZAR DUARTE, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
Oral Presentations
Healing Borderscapes: Archiving through Networking in Refugee 'hotspot' Islands
Rita LAMBERT, UCL, United Kingdom
Exploring Reparative Methodologies in the U.S. South
Jocelyn POE POE, Cornell University, USA; Noel DIDLA, Center for MS Food Systems, USA
Beyond Refusal: Balancing Colonial Thinking in Planning with Mayan Ixil Knowledges
Joaquin (Am'aj Q'in) LOPEZ HUERTAS, University of Utah, USA
Reparative Urbanism and Spatial Justice: Countering Urbicide in Occupied Palestine
Sahera BLEIBLEH, United Arab Emirates
Decolonizing Planning Studio Pedagogy: Grappling with Tensions and Dissonances
Bi'Anncha ANDREWS, University of Maryland, College Park, USA; Clara IRAZABAL, University of Maryland, College Park, USA; Maxine GROSS, Lakelander and Lakeland Community Heritage Project, USA; Joanne M. BRAXTON, Braxton Institute for Sustainability, Resiliency and Joy, USA
The Associative Tissue, a Reparative Tissue? Rethinking the Role of the Associative World in Brussels Region in a Context of Securitization and Inequality
Lore JANSSENS, Belgium
Mapping Micro-Utopias: Pedagogies for Therapeutic Dialogues across Spatial Imaginaries and Memory Cultures
Isabella POJUNER, University of British Columbia, United Kingdom; Taha VOSTAKOLAEI, University of British Columbia, Canada
The Reparative Ideology: The Limits of Liberal Antiracism
Rashad WILLIAMS, University of Pittsburgh, USA
See more of: RC21 Regional and Urban Development
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