Contested places: A typology for responding to place-based harms

In response to historic and ongoing devaluation of certain people, and concurrently, the places they live, many communities are grappling with how to respond to place-based harms. This has produced a wide range of responses, such as calls for “Land Back,” reparations programs, arts-based neighborhood regeneration, and local history initiatives. This paper explores the potential roles community practitioners can play in these contested places. Drawing on a review of the literature, this paper offers an emerging typology for responding to place-based harms. The proposed typology includes six place-based approaches: Reparation, Remembrance, Regeneration, Resistance, Harm-Reduction, and Repatriation/Rematriation. The authors distinguish each approach by its target and temporal focus, common strategies, primary change agents, and vulnerabilities. While drawing on transdisciplinary scholarship, authors also describe social work's engagement with each approach. This emerging typology may assist social work practitioners, scholars, and students as they study and employ strategies for intervening in contested spaces. It also suggests areas for future research in conjunction with responses to place-based harms.