Territorial healing: A spatial spiral weaving transformative reparation

Abstract

This article introduces the concept of territorial healing as a strategy for holistic intervention with communities affected by violence-related trauma. Violence exerted in places generates affective and territorial ruptures contained in socio-emotional wounds and disruptions in the social and institutional fabric that weakens collective life. Building on post/in-conflict cities studies, peacebuilding studies, and a decolonial approach, we argue that territorial healing agglutinates myriad interventions aimed at a collective restorative reparation of geo-traumas (Pain, 2021) and promotes the construction of collective subjects for decision-making in territorial processes. The article highlights the need to go beyond the local/spatial turn of peacebuilding and reparative planning by providing a more robust understanding of how to frame the political project of reparative justice in urban spaces and across different scales. Territorial healing processes go beyond institutionalized frameworks to involve decentralized and autonomous processes that expand the spatiality of the symbolic, corporeal and emotions of collective urban life. This article suggests that a territorial healing trajectory requires weaving the mapping of body-territory-earth (Cabnal, 2019), collective memory, and spatial imagination as a strategy to manage existing conflicts through therapeutic dialogue and the shaping of reparative infrastructures.