New Urban Imperatives Symposium: Reparative and Decolonial Praxis

This is a recording of the online session 'Sites of Harm and Territorial Healing'. The session was chaired by Catalina Ortiz (Director, UCL Urban Laboratory) and Natalia Villamizar Duarte (Newcastle University), with presentations from Joaquín Lopez-Huertas, Jocelyn Poe, Ph.D., AICP and Angela Franco.

This session engaged with the enduring harms produced by plantation logics, settler colonial urbanisation, racialised displacement and protracted political conflict. Drawing on research grounded in the United States, Guatemala, Colombia and Palestine, speakers explored how urban space becomes both a site of violence and a terrain of resistance, resurgence and care.

Presentations reflected on how planning, spatial design and community memory respond to histories of anti-Black dispossession, settler encroachment, military occupation and structural neglect. Speakers foregrounded Indigenous planning, reparative urbanism and grassroots organising as transformative practices rooted in lived experience and relational geographies.

Discover more about the symposium: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/events...

Video chapters:
0:00 Introduction from Catalina Ortiz
6:07 Joaquín Lopez-Huertas on Planning in Re-Existence
16:31 Jocelyn Poe, Ph.D., AICP on Reflections: On Trauma & Repair
26:18 Angela Franco on Comprehensive Habitat Upgrading as a Strategy for Building Urban Territorial Peace
36:47 Reflection from Natalia Villamizar Duarte
39:49 Closing from Catalina Ortiz