An entry from Deborah Fitchett's blog for 22 February 2012, posted to Livejournal. The entry is titled, "In which we remember a year".The entry was downloaded on 13 April 2015.
An entry from Deborah Fitchett's blog for 22 February 2012, posted to Dreamwidth. The entry is titled, "In which we remember a year".The entry was downloaded on 16 April 2015.
Disasters are a critical topic for practitioners of landscape architecture. A fundamental role of the profession is disaster prevention or mitigation through practitioners having a thorough understanding of known threats. Once we reach the ‘other side’ of a disaster – the aftermath – landscape architecture plays a central response in dealing with its consequences, rebuilding of settlements and infrastructure and gaining an enhanced understanding of the causes of any failures. Landscape architecture must respond not only to the physical dimensions of disaster landscapes but also to the social, psychological and spiritual aspects. Landscape’s experiential potency is heightened in disasters in ways that may challenge and extend the spectrum of emotions. Identity is rooted in landscape, and massive transformation through the impact of a disaster can lead to ongoing psychological devastation. Memory and landscape are tightly intertwined as part of individual and collective identities, as connections to place and time. The ruptures caused by disasters present a challenge to remembering the lives lost and the prior condition of the landscape, the intimate attachments to places now gone and even the event itself.