Doctoral Dissertation Research: Evaluating the Role of Landscape and Urban Planning in Prevention and Mitigation of Domestic Violence

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates the role of landscape and planning in creating long-term solutions for the prevention and mitigation of domestic violence and violence against women. Domestic violence is a significant barrier to the economic and social development of women, families and communities across the globe and is a key area of concern for US policy makers. The project focuses on an urban community in Costa Rica that was planned and designed 20 years ago as an innovative solution to the problem of domestic violence. The planning process at its core was informed by anti-violence organizing. As such it offers an opportunity to look at the relationship between the built environment and the social milieu surrounding violence across generations. This project is thus a reflective study on how successful a design approach is for addressing domestic violence. By studying the effects of design on the behaviors and attitudes of a residential community this project will connect community, home and interpersonal practices to regional and national policies. A key output of this project will be a set of resources for creating community level responses to domestic violence that can be taken up and employed by both policy makers and local organizations within the US and other countries. These resources, in addition to the oral histories and case study data, will be made available to the public in both English and Spanish through an online portal. This portal will also be valuable for engaging undergraduate students in courses on urban planning, politics and gender. This project will contribute to scholarship on the relationship between urban planning, vernacular landscapes, and everyday practices. The study brings together literatures on geopolitics, social movement organizing, feminist planning, landscape analysis and memory studies in a conceptual framework that enables the exploration of how anti-violence organizing can be sustained across generations. The central goals of this project are to (1) trace the ways the ideologies of anti-violence organizing might be embedded in the built environment through intentional urban planning; (2) how those ideologies are then experienced and internalized by inhabitants of those places; and (3) if this process works inter-generationally. Ultimately this project seeks to understand to what extent a particular built environment informs the decision making and perceptions of individuals. These goals will be accomplished by evaluating a urban community in Costa Rica, where domestic violence was a driving factor in the original design process, using a short term cohort study with the "builders" (people who participated in the design and construction of the community 20 years ago) and the "second generation" (people who grew up there). The empirical data will consist of (1) life history interviewing; (2) participant photo documentation; and (3) semi-structured follow up interviews. This innovative combination of visual and textual methods speaks to the study's conceptual landscape analysis component as well as enabling the investigators to analyze participants' understanding of domestic violence and the sustainability of anti-violence organizing across generations in relation to the built environment.