We’re taught that peace is what happens when the fighting stops. But survivors will tell you that peace is more than an end to violence. They’ll tell you that without justice, without dignity, without repair—there can be no peace. That type of peace demands a different kind of reckoning, a different kind of rebuilding.

Host and MIT professor Delia Wendel and her guests discuss the messy work of building peace, in place and over time. Listeners will hear how peacebuilding strategies connect ideas about peace to actions—seeking justice through remembrance, dignity through job training, or repair in the rebuilding of homes, heritage, and cities. Peace is not just the stuff of international brokers and national plans; it is also community informed. It cannot be durable if conceived as a frictionless future; peace is a future imagined with the past. Planners, architects, and development experts are implicated in this work—not least because of the violent history of our practices and the promises of equality, health, and justice embedded therein. Planning for Peace brings together practitioners and scholars working in peace and conflict studies, architecture, and urban planning to discuss how peace is built; to learn just how hard—and possible—it is.