Buildings can deepen trauma — or help heal it — according to the Cornell Chronicle. In a new book, Cornell architecture professor Esra Akcan argues that architecture must confront its role in displacement, state violence and climate disaster to help societies recover after crisis.
Her book, Architecture and the Right to Heal, looks beyond postwar reconstruction to what she calls internal violence, including enforced disappearances, partition and extinction. Akcan shows how design and planning have often enabled harm, but could instead support justice, accountability and repair.
She urges architects to face erased histories, address climate reparations and design spaces that connect rather than divide. The goal isn’t quick fixes, she says, but imagining fairer futures after catastrophe.
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