Associate Professor of Urban Studies and International Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Delia Duong Ba Wendel is a critical peace scholar and architectural historian who explores cities in conflict and forms of repair after violence. That research proceeds from spatial and trauma-informed perspectives.
New book, Nov 2025:
In Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a newly available visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims’ remains for public display. Rwanda’s genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms “trauma heritage,” wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized—made visible in public space—to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda’s genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control. LEARN MORE
“Trauma heritage—wherein hidden and unrecognized violence is made visible in public space—innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South.”
— Delia Duong Ba Wendel, Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage (2025)
Chronological Atlas of Trauma Heritage, 1875-2020 (Art by Yabework Abebe Kifetew for Delia Wendel, 2024)
The above chronological atlas represents an era of trauma heritage: a contemporary geography of spatialized memory justice activism, particularly salient from the 1970s to the present, in which efforts to make crimes against humanity visible in public spaces proliferated. The struggles for recognition by advocates of Black communities killed and oppressed under apartheid in South Africa, Mayan communities murdered and persecuted in Guatemala, Bengalis violently suppressed in the movement for Bangladesh’s self-determination, and the scores of Argentinian dissidents forcibly disappeared by the military junta exemplify what is at stake in claiming public spaces for absenced histories. Significant precedents, including those related to racialized violence in the United States and the Holocaust in Europe, had substantial influence in shaping both the human rights principles and the representational forms on which this approach to atrocity remembrance relies. Rwanda’s genocide heritage exemplifies, in extreme ways, the core aspects of trauma heritage and the related shift to spatialized memory justice.
Planning for Peace Research Collective, MIT
Planning for Peace is a research group directed by Delia Duong Ba Wendel at M.I.T. We advance research on urban futures shaped by conflict and the forms of restitution required therein. Peace comprises emancipatory processes that advance rights and dignity, seek justice for harms done, educate societies, repair group relations, improve quality of life, and strengthen the economic and political self-determination of marginalized communities. Peacebuilding is, by extension, non-universal and place-specific, enacted in living communities accountable to the dead and harmed, and contingent on (not a break from) conflicts both past and present. The Collective attends to the affective dimensions of conflict and peace, including how lived experiences and histories of violence shape vulnerability and social relations. It also contributes to the “spatial turn” within Peace Studies to explore how the idea of peace is made material, along with its local processes and spatial impacts.
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With ten gardens and counting, Project Sprout has seen a significant improvement in mental and physical health for all participating community members. Other than lowering obesity, blood pressure, and depression rates, the crime rate has also fallen. Our children are doing better in school, reporting higher grades and aspirations, and better job prospects.
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If you live near one of our gardens, get involved to receive portions of each harvest. We accept volunteers regardless of skill level. There is a rotation in roles, but we’ll teach you all the skills you need to know. Teenagers 14 years and older can earn community service credits for school in addition to getting produce for their families. Donations are also vital to our growth, as we use them for seed, fertilizer, tools, and outreach.