Spaces of safety and more-than-safety in women’s refuges in England

an article by Janet C. Bowstead (Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, UK) published in Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography Volume 26 Issue 1 (January 2019)

Abstract

Many women escaping domestic violence spend time in women’s refuges (shelters) whilst they deal with practical and emotional issues in a safe space. Such spaces are therefore an important place for women’s recovery and empowerment after abuse, but are also complex spaces of displacement.

In the UK, there is a wide range of refuge providers, and different models of accommodation and support provision in refuges. Differences, such as those between refuges providing self-contained flats and those with communal facilities and communal activities, can provide very different experiences for the women and their children who live there.

In addition, there have been shifts in the policy context of refuges, and increasingly individualistic models of service provision.

This article explores women’s refuges as spaces of safety, and of more-than-safety, drawing on interviews with women in the Midlands, South Coast and London, and on participatory creative groupwork with women in the Midlands and South Coast. Refuge spaces require, but also enable, contact and encounter between women; and communal living and group processes can enable interaction and collaboration between women.

The article draws on women’s words and images to exemplify these experiences, concluding that the safe spaces of women’s refuges can enable processes of more-than-safety. These collective processes begin to counteract the isolation of abuse and to help prepare women for their lives after the refuge.

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Land in urban debates: Unpacking the grab–development dichotomy

Femke van Noorloos and Griet Steel (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) and Christien Klaufus (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) published in Urban Studies Volume 56 Issue 5 (April 2019)

Abstract

On the heels of the rural ‘land grab’ debate, the ongoing urban transition combined with large-scale urban infrastructure investments and land scarcity forces us to also pay more attention to issues of land in urban discussions.

Yet how can we conceptualise land-related problems in order to connect and integrate rural and urban debates in overarching discussions of development? In this commentary, we argue for moving beyond the directly visible outcomes and presumed ‘culprits’ of land investments by critically analysing indirect and long-term effects of land acquisitions on people’s livelihoods as well as the differentiation of these effects for different actors.

We propose three specific arguments to disentangle the grab–development dichotomy:

1. placing a focus on the sequential chain of effects of displacement;
2. paying more attention to the ambivalent roles and contradictory interests of different actors; and
3. taking the three-dimensional aspects of land development into account.

Full text (PDF 13pp)

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From 1969 to 2018: Relocating historical narratives of displacement during ‘the Troubles’ through the European migrant crisis

an article by Brendan Ciarán Browne (Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, Ireland) and Casey Asprooth-Jackson (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway) published in Capital & Class Volume 43 Issue 1 (March 2019)

Abstract

From the outset of the Northern Ireland conflict, the internal displacement of civilians from across the sectarian divide became a familiar phenomenon for those seeking to escape inter-communal conflict.

In 2018, the legacy of this displacement remains pronounced, with segregation and division a feature of the ‘post-conflict’ landscape. Despite the far-reaching consequence of displacement during the Troubles, there has been little or no consideration of the long-term impact of displacement, with the need for restitution for those who were forced to leave their homes absent from the literature on dealing with the past.

It can be argued that as a result, those who were displaced will remain hidden or forgotten victims.

In 2016, in response to the growing migration crisis emanating from the Syrian conflict, European countries, including Ireland north and south, were asked to open up borders and provide sanctuary for civilians who had been displaced as a result of violence. The crisis has, in turn, sharpened the potential for those interested in legacy issues surrounding ‘the Troubles’ to begin to reflect more critically on the issue of historical displacement during the Northern Irish conflict.

This article will, through reference to the response to the Syrian refugee crisis, critique why the issue of restitution for displaced people during ‘the Troubles’ has not found prominence in the voluminous literature on dealing with the past.

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Chronic urban trauma: The slow violence of housing dispossession

an article by Rachel Pain (Newcastle University, UK) published Urban Studies Volume 56 Issue 2 (February 2019)

Abstract

This paper sets the idea of slow violence into dialogue with trauma, to understand the practice and legitimisation of the repeated damage done to certain places through state violence.

Slow violence (Nixon R (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) describes the ‘attritional lethality’ of many contemporary effects of globalisation. While originating in environmental humanities, it has clear relevance for urban studies.

After assessing accounts of the post-traumatic city, the paper draws insights from feminist psychiatry and postcolonial analysis to develop the concept of chronic urban trauma, as a psychological effect of violence involving an ongoing relational dynamic. Reporting from a three-year participatory action research project on the managed decline and disposal of social housing in a former coalmining village in north-east England, the paper discusses the temporal and place-based effects of slow violence.

It argues that chronic urban trauma becomes hard-wired in place, enabling retraumatisation while also remaining open to efforts to heal and rebuild.

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