Peace and Urban Spaces

Written by Bethany Bennie

How can peace be expressed an urban context?
Bethanie Bennie

Peace. I struggle when trying to marry peace and urban spaces. I guess I could suggest such things as ‘peaceful’ ways of living – cycling walking busing, creating rain gardens, and not building on top of those precious dunes of ours. Peace could occur as symbolic public art forms, or be expressed in urban design. Peace could be spaces that bring people together, or spaces that seek to dissipate conflict.

Since I haven’t spent a lot of my time exploring the idea of peace in urban space I’ll let others share their thoughts. Here are the views of two colleagues, specialists in their fields; architecture/built heritage and natural heritage. I asked them what they thought of peace and urban spaces.

Carolyn Hill: “heritage and peace are linked by the fact that people’s social, cultural, and spiritual associations can manifest themselves in historic built form. Association can occur in a communal way with community identity attached to these places. In terms of peace; the recognition of these places and a community desire can, I believe, assist in pushing peaceful ways of dealing with things. Working in the retention and preservation of cultural and built heritage can be linked with the same goals and aspirations with peace in a place; the very things that form the fabric of cultural connectivity. It’s an amazing thing, it can be cross-community i.e. the same places can be valued by different community groups. It can be relationally important to many people i.e. it can be a way to get people talking with each other. Christchurch Cathedral is a good example; it’s important to the Anglican Church and is valuable to wider Christchurch community. It is a symbol of their city and contributes to their identity.
The flipside however could be a place like Jerusalem where their cultural heritage is perceived to be divisible – symbol for non-peace/for war. Generally this arises from people in positions of power pushing agendas that aren’t true whereas the reality is that the heritage of Jerusalem is cherished and loved by all disparate groups. In fact it can still be a catalyst for cross-religious/cross cultural dialogue where different groups want the same outcome in terms of preservation of cultural heritage.

Architecture and peace can look more like a social engineering type model. Architecture is usually a vehicle for social betterment. All of the great architecture movements have focussed on the grand themes of peace, happiness and prosperity; aimed at improving the social masses. For example, the Victorian Era had institutional buildings designed to ‘better’ the people who dwelt in them. Take mental asylums; designed with a theme of creating this institution within a landscaped garden, with treatments would better the patients and take them back to a peaceful mindstate. Ideals built into the fabric of a place. Similarly both the modernist movement and the garden city movement were thought to improve the masses. The latter; little lot houses linked with gardens and nature (completely manufactured nature) were designed to make you a better citizen – the world a better place. Conversely architecture can be an instrument for war, take Stalin and Hitler. They designed buildings of a very particular style – grandiose, brutalist, neo-classical style which reflected aggression”.

Mark Seabrooke-Davison: “Walking through a NZ native forest, you feel a sense of peace upon you, a sense of well-being. A favourite thing of mine to do when in a forest is to lie back and look up at the underside of leaves; this gives me a sense of where we are in relation to nature – it’s a feeling of connectedness. In an urban area we need to have close access to open space, even just a simple small space with a swing and a slide. (Such open areas are) important for getting away from workspaces, important for finding some peace”.
Commenting on where he finds his strongest experience with peace; “…Tiritiri Matangi, as soon as you get on that boat, your worries go. The Island is so natural that you feel in a way, like visitors. Visitors to a space occupied by birds and wildlife. And the soul of the place gets into you. Jobs there are never too much trouble – you feel a sense of contributing back to nature. Too often we think we are higher beings but we need to respect life – all species have a right to exist”.

Peace and urban environments seem to be quite contrasting concepts. The development of urban environments involves the destruction of what previously existed, and the up-keep of our cities and the continued use of them, is nothing but peaceful. We battle the ocean for water-front housing developments and the disposal of waste. We battle native habitats for greenfield developments. There are battles between private property owners and local council. And there is the constant drive to be more efficient so we can do more and have more. YET as Carolyn mentioned, urban environments provide context from which we can draw identity – being able to look back to where we have come from in the form of architecture, art, language, culture, technology etc can inform us on where not to go or where to go in the future. We now know how to create more ‘eco-friendly’ cities, and the collision of cultures within cities is teaching us how to live together relatively peacefully. So in that sense while peace and urban environments are contrasting concepts they also work wonderfully together – the urban environment can be seen as a living, dynamic and constantly changing concept that illustrates humanity’s tension between the (unintentional or intentional) destruction of our environment and living at peace with the world.