Changing places: geographies of post-disaster landscapes

This article introduces some of the ways geographers have attempted to make sense of disaster recovery landscapes. Acknowledging that geographers frame ‘place’ as layered with meaning, the article seeks to open out discussion about how disasters (and recovery from them) might change the ways in which people understand and connect with specific places. Importantly, disasters are not just characterised by material or infrastructural damage, but also by ‘ruptures’ to the ways in which people make sense of place - ruptures that can enable new cultural, political and ethical practices to emerge. The article draws specifically on examples from the Christchurch post-earthquake landscape - a city on the South Island of New Zealand that, in late 2010 and early 2011, experienced a series of earthquakes that resulted in significant loss of life and material devastation. The presented examples offer evidence for an interpretation of recovery in Christchurch as something other than a return to ‘normality’. Instead, we might think about the city as a ‘ruptured place’ through which pre-existing inequalities and senses of belonging are being contested in the construction of a ‘new normal’.