Place-making, settlement and well-being: The therapeutic landscapes of recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds

ARTICLE IN PRESS Health & Place 16 (2010) 116–131

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Place-making, settlement and well-being: The therapeutic landscapes of recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds$ Robyn Sampson, Sandra M. Gifford n La Trobe Refugee Research Centre, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3086, Australia

a r t i c l e in f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 25 March 2009 Received in revised form 8 September 2009 Accepted 8 September 2009

This paper explores the relationship between place-making, well-being and settlement among recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds in Melbourne, Australia. Drawing on qualitative data including photo-novellas and neighborhood drawings, we describe the ways youth negotiate connections to place in early resettlement. Within the context of broader research on health and place, we describe how recently arrived youth actively seek out places with qualities associated with restoration and recovery and through these engagements, work to create therapeutic landscapes on arrival. The findings have implications for understanding the contribution of place-making to well-being in the settlement process. & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Refugees Youth Well-being Settlement Therapeutic Landscapes

1. Introduction Young people who have been forced to flee their country due to persecution embody the depths of the relationship between health and place. Resettled young people with refugee backgrounds have lived much of their lives in places of danger and insecurity, often devoid of opportunities for engaging in the important and normal activities and tasks of childhood and adolescence. Place-making in spaces of persecution, flight and asylum seeking is fraught with social tension and violent conflict. Social, cultural and political connections, as well as connections to place, are intentionally and unintentionally destroyed. Although permanent resettlement is the aspiration of many refugees who cannot return to their country of origin, this is a rare opportunity. Each year, less than one per cent of the world’s Convention refugees1 are offered resettlement in one of 18 $ The materials from this study can be accessed at hwww.latrobe.edu.au/rhrc/ refugee_youth.htmli n Corresponding author. Tel.: +613 9479 5874; fax: + 613 9479 5791. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (R. Sampson), [email protected] (S.M. Gifford). 1 The United National High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) sets out a range of legal definitions for defining categories of persons for which it has a formal mandate – refugees, returnees, stateless and internally displaced – collectively referred to as persons of concern (UNHCR 2008). These definitions are widely contested and statistics on both numbers and categories of forcibly displaced persons are unreliable. In this paper we use the formal UNHCR definition of refugee when we use this term. However, we describe the youth in this study as having refugee backgrounds because although most have been defined as ‘‘convention refugees’’, some have arrived on humanitarian visas or as part of family reunions and once in Australia, few youth identify themselves as refugees.

1353-8292/$ - see front matter & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2009.09.004

countries participating in UNHCR’s resettlement programme (UNHCR, 2002, 2008). Australia offers places to approximately 13,500 people per year, of whom about 26 per cent are between the ages of 10 and 19 (Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2007). For many, the process of resettlement is part of the continuation of their forced displacement, culminating in their forced re-placement in a third country. Resettlement, conceptualized as ‘‘ythe activities and processes of becoming established after arrival in the country of settlement’’ (Valtonen, 2004, p. 70), can be traumatic in part because resettlement is not freely chosen in terms of when or where replacement occurs and often results in a diasporic scattering of families and communities across the globe. Notwithstanding the importance of investigating and understanding the traumas leading to displacement, relatively little attention has been given to the concurrent and ongoing process of forced replacement and the establishment of connections to place among refugees in these contexts. The focus on displacement has left a gap in our understanding of emplacement (Turton, 2004) – about connections to place in settlement contexts. Likewise, little is known about the potential for place-making to promote health and well-being within the context of resettlement. This paper describes the place-making activities in the everyday life of recently arrived young people with refugee backgrounds living in Melbourne, Australia. During the early period of resettlement, these youth seek out and value places that promote healing and recovery. These places, conceptualized together as therapeutic landscapes, are critical for facilitating positive connections to place, promoting well-being and

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contributing to new arrivals’ becoming at home in their country of resettlement.

ships to these places are important for promoting well-being in a resettlement context.

1.1. Forced displacement in a world of movement: refugees and place

1.2. The role of place in processes of healing and recovery

The importance of place in the refugee experience cannot be underestimated. Edward Said (2000) describes exile as the ‘‘yunhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’’ (p. 173). There have been many approaches to understanding the relationship between refugees and place. Recently, there has been a shift away from essentialist or naturalized assumptions about people/place relationships to those that recognize the effects of globalization. Within this context, the naturalized spatial relation between people, identity and community is disrupted or deterritorialized (Malkki, 1992). The diminishing limitations of distance, resulting from modern transportation and communication technologies, have opened up new dialogues regarding people, place and identity (Massey, 1994; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Keith and Pile, 1993; Olwig and Hastrup, 1997). Previously held suppositions of a world divided into static, bounded places – each inhabited by an existing group of people with an inherent bond to their land – have since been challenged (Massey, 1995; McDowell, 1999; Ahmed, 1999). Although this deterritorialization of people and place runs the risk of diminishing the important relationship people have with particular places, the theoretical uprooting of people from place opens up new ways of understanding the importance of place in a fluid, changing and contested globalized world (Gieryn, 2000; Gustafson, 2006). Non-essentialist understandings of identity and connection to place have challenged the commonly held assumption that once a refugee always a refugee. Essentialist people/place frameworks run the risk of stabilizing the identities of the displaced with the land left behind, thus trapping identity in relation to loss and longing for one’s homeland (Malkki, 1992; Warner, 1994; Turton, 2004; Gupta and Ferguson, 1997). Such unifying identities all but erase the creative human capacity for a positive remaking of the present and the future and reinforce the marginalization of refugees as natives outside of their natural place. As Malkki (1992) argues, ‘‘ythe naturalization of the links between people and place lead to a vision of displacement as pathological’’ (p. 34). However, adopting positions that completely denaturalize the people/place/ identity relationship is equally risky in a world that continues to distribute rights and social membership along territorial boundaries. Involuntary displacement marks a very real loss of social, economic and political standing that is not easily re-established (Kibreab, 1999). Important for understanding the relationship of people who become refugees and place is a position somewhere in-between: one that recognizes the strong sense of connection to places left behind and their associated traumas while at the same time recognizing the possibilities of constructive (re)building of connections to place within a context of resettlement. Brun (2001) describes this process as ‘reterritorialization’, or ‘‘ythe way in which displaced people and local people establish new, or rather expand networks and cultural practices that define new spaces for daily life’’ (p. 23). She argues that reterritorialization is a useful way of understanding the complex spatial strategies that refugees develop for negotiating places in which they are physically present, while also negotiating ongoing social, economic and emotional relationships with places from which they are physically absent (Brun, 2001). The concept of reterritorialization thus provides a useful lens though which we might better understand the ways in which the meanings of places and people’s relation-

The importance of the relationship of place to health has been well documented, in relation to geographical inequalities of health (Frumkin, 2003; Macintrye et al., 2002), lay perspectives of health and well-being in places of everyday life (Popay et al., 1998; Bennett et al., 1999) and in the qualities of place that promote healing and restoration (Cooper Marcus and Barnes, 1999). There is now a solid body of evidence within public health (Duncan et al., 1993), social epidemiology (Kaplan, 1996) and medical sociology (Macintyre et al., 1993) that place matters when it comes to health and well-being. Place matters both in relation to empirical, physical attributes as well as lived experiences, emotional ties and meanings and this evidence has been important for informing place-based health promotion interventions (Macintyre et al., 2002). The relationship between place, health and well-being, and refugee resettlement has been explored in several ways. Place-making in the resettlement context has explored place-attachment (Bogac- , 2009); the importance of religion in overcoming feelings of alienation in places of resettlement (McMichael, 2002; Shoeb et al., 2007); the ways in which the gendering of place relates to feeling at home (Moghissi, 1999; Dyck and Dossa, 2007); the impact of concentrations of new arrivals on settlement processes and local neighborhoods (Dunn, 1993; Mazumdar et al., 2000; Wood, 1997); how mobility in places of resettlement impacts on mental health and well-being (Warfa et al., 2006); and the ways in which the challenges of place-making and resettlement become embodied and expressed through illness narratives (Gronseth, 2001; Lawrence, 2008). Especially relevant for resettlement are investigations into the qualities of places considered to be actively health enhancing or beneficial in processes of healing and restoration (Cooper Marcus and Barnes, 1999; Williams, 2002). Such therapeutic landscapes include ancient sites renowned for improving health, including mineral spas and baths (Gesler, 1991, 1998) and sacred sites and pilgrim destinations (Gesler, 1996, 1998). The restorative qualities of these places are of interest both for their curative powers for physical ill health and healing of spiritual unrest. The relationship between the natural environment and human restoration is well documented (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Korpela and Ylen, 2007) and places that provide contact with nature are especially health enhancing (Kearns and Collins, 2000; Palka, 1999; Ulrich, 1999). Finally, the restorative qualities of everyday places such as homes in processes of healing and recovery after illness (English et al., 2008; Martin et al., 2005), as well as the restorative aspects of favourite places in everyday life (Kaplan et al., 1993; Korpela et al., 2008), highlight the power of place in supporting health and wellbeing. What lessons can we learn from this broad overview of research into health and place that can be applied to refugees within resettlement contexts and to young people with refugee backgrounds in particular? It is clear that place matters when it comes to restoring health and promoting well-being and for those who have been forcibly and violently uprooted from place, the restorative powers of place and place-making are not to be underestimated. For refugees, the concept of therapeutic landscapes has particular saliency. Originally defined by Gesler (1996) as places where ‘‘physical and built environments, social conditions and human perceptions combine to produce an atmosphere which is conducive to healing’’ (p. 96), therapeutic landscapes would appear to be particularly important for restoring health and

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well-being among recently settled refugees. Therapeutic landscapes are sought out through the place-making activities and subjective experiences of individuals as they negotiate the physical and social environments of settlement. In this paper, we draw upon this broader body of work on health and place to interpret the ways in which recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds navigate their resettlement landscapes. Notwithstanding the potential to heal, places that make up settlement landscapes can also harm, depending on an individual’s physical and social location and the way in which power is exercised in specific locations (Watkins and Jacoby, 2007). We explore young refugees’ place-making activities on arrival and consider the ways in which they make use of place to create landscapes of restoration and renewal, thereby building a sense of belonging and well-being in their first year in Australia.

Table 1 Participants’ country of birth by gender (n= 120). Country of birth

Females

Males

Total N

%

Sudan Iraq Ethiopia Afghanistan Liberia Burma Croatia Iran Uganda Bosnia Burundi Kuwait

28 9 6 3 3 1 0 1 2 0 1 1

34 9 9 5 3 1 2 1 0 1 0 0

62 18 15 8 6 2 2 2 2 1 1 1

51.7 15.0 12.5 6.6 6.0 1.7 1.7 1.7 1.7 0.8 0.8 0.8

Total

55

65

120

100.0

2. Methods The data presented in this paper is drawn from the Good Starts for Refugee Youth Study, a 4-year investigation designed to describe the social determinants and contexts that promote psychosocial well-being among recently arrived refugee youth in the early settlement period (Gifford et al., 2009). The research methodology was informed by social epidemiology and anthropology and used a mix of qualitative and quantitative instruments and strategies to gather in-depth information across a range of domains (Gifford et al., 2007). This paper presents the qualitative data relating to connections to place in the first year in Australia. One hundred and twenty youth aged 11–19 years who arrived in Australia on humanitarian visas between 2003 and 2006 were recruited into the study in their first year of arrival into Australia (see Table 1). Participants came from a range of refugee-source countries reflecting Australia’s humanitarian intake2 at the time of recruitment (Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, 2004). Refugee youth are eligible to attend English Language Schools (ELSs) for up to 1 year upon arrival in Australia and the participants in this study were recruited through three ELSs in Melbourne, Australia with high numbers of students with refugee backgrounds. These ELSs are located in the outer suburbs of Melbourne often referred to as Melbourne’s ‘‘growth corridors’’. These suburbs are characterized by relatively cheap housing, middle to lower income households, new housing developments, and poor infrastructure including transport and recreation facilities. It has been especially difficult for large families, including extended families from Africa, to find houses large enough to accommodate them. In setting the scene for this paper, it is important to recognize that newly arrived families are not settling in the inner urban areas of Melbourne, which have been the first places of resettlement for newcomers in the past. These neighborhoods have become gentrified introducing higher rents and, except for high rise public housing for which there are long wait lists, it is near impossible for families to acquire housing in more established and better serviced neighborhoods. The data reported in this paper were collected within the first year of settlement. Data collection was integrated into the school curriculum, allowing researchers to work with participants in the established safe-space of their classroom over 10 weeks. Participants and their parent/guardian provided written consent on translated consent forms after first having several opportunities to 2 Australian humanitarian intake is set at approximately 13,500 permanent visas each year for on-shore and off-shore applicants. The countries from which refugees are selected for migration under this scheme changes each year depending on the priorities set by UNHCR and by the Australian government.

discuss the project and to learn about consent, voluntary participation and confidentiality of personal information. The study was approved by three ethics committees (La Trobe University, Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture and the Victorian Department of Education). Two key visual methods were used to elicit qualitative data on connections to place: neighborhood maps (Morrow, 2001b) and photo-novellas (Berman et al., 2001; Clark, 1999; Gold, 2004). Visual sources were supplemented with narrative and ethnographic data from informal conversations with participants about their drawings and photo-novellas, and field notes recorded throughout the study. Visual methods of data collection are commonly used in research with children and youth as they provide a means of facilitating discussion and exploring ‘ways of seeing’ while engaging participants in an enjoyable activity (Matthews in Backett-Milburn and McKie, 1999, p. 390). They are particularly useful in surmounting the linguistic and conceptual barriers faced when working with newly arrived young people (Boyden and Ennew, 1997). Although drawings are a powerful form of representation, they are not necessarily a direct expression of experience or feelings but are instead mediated by social and contextual factors (Backett-Milburn and McKie, 1999). Multiple methods were thus required to adequately address the dilemmas of visual data and enable an in-depth interpretation of experiences of place. Like drawings, photography has long been used as a research tool (Hurworth, 2003; Stanczak, 2004) especially in ethnographic studies (Gold, 2004) and increasingly in participatory research (Wang et al., 1996) and for investigations of children’s experiences of place (Morrow, 2001b). Photo-novellas are particularly suited to research with refugee children and youth as demonstrated by Berman et al. (2001), who used this method to investigate experiences of Bosnian youth living in Canada: ‘‘y[The] photo novella is a creative and innovative means for understanding and describing human health experiences, and for examining these experiences in new ways’’ (p. 39). Through self-directed photography, participants are able to capture important aspects of their worlds without the inhibiting presence of a researcher. These photographs provide a visual resource that researchers can use to prompt for narratives of more complex and emotional reflections by participants (Clark-Ibanez, 2004; Morrow, 2001b; Clark, 1999; Faulstich Orellana, 1999; Buss, 1995). We made use of participatory photography for its utility as an effective strategy for investigating adolescents’ experiences of place (Dodman, 2003), as an ethnographic tool in cross-cultural settings (Samuels, 2004) and as a useful research method in a resettlement context (Kissoon, 2003; Berman et al., 2001; Koltyk, 1993; Blair, 1997).

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In this study, participants were asked to draw a picture of their neighborhood and to include their house, the places around their house, the places they go to and to name each place (see Plates 1 and 2). Participants then circled places they like best in yellow and places they did not like in blue. They were also given disposable cameras and instructed to take photographs of their street; the outside of their house; a favourite place at their house; the place they like most at school; a place they do not like at school; a place they feel they belong; a place they feel they do not belong; the place they spend most of their time when out of school and something unusual or strange in Australia. Participants pasted their photographs into settlement journals designed by the researchers for the study (Gifford et al., 2007) and labeled each with the name of the place, a short description and their reasons

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for choosing to photograph that particular place. Participants wrote comments about their drawings and photographs in English with the assistance of interpreters, bi-lingual teacher aids and research assistants. After recording data, original journals were returned to participants. Of the 120 youth, 115 completed drawings of their neighborhoods and 111 returned their cameras with photographs. Thematic analysis was used to guide the interpretation of the data and NVivo (QSR International, 2006) was used for data management. In particular, the analysis sought to identify those aspects of place valued by the youth. Firstly, a list was compiled of the places that appeared in the neighborhood drawings including a separate listing of places that participants circled as those they ‘‘liked’’ or ‘‘disliked’’. A similar process was undertaken with the

Plate 1. I like my room. I don’t like the house down the street. (12-year-old Afghani male).

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Plate 2. I like my house and the park with the swings. I don’t like the road. (13-year-old Sudanese male).

photo-novellas. These lists were then compared to identify both the types of places that appeared in drawings and photo-novellas and the qualities of these places as noted in the written descriptions by youth. Finally, thematic analysis was undertaken of the written material recorded in journals and supplemented by data recorded in field notes.

3. Results On arrival in Australia, youth with refugee backgrounds are faced with new and unfamiliar social, cultural, economic, political and spatial landscapes. Not only have they spent most of their lives in places of violence, poverty and insecurity, but many have

grown up in developing countries with little infrastructure in the form of schools, roads, electricity, water and sanitation. The relative wealth and social stability of places of resettlement have the potential to support recovery from past traumas and to improve the future lives of resettled youth. What places, then, are especially important to youth with refugee backgrounds in the initial stages of resettlement and why? A key challenge for the young people in this study was to negotiate their transition into the unfamiliar physical and social terrains they encountered on arrival. A major task for young people more generally revolves around their struggle to carve out a place for themselves as teenagers in an adult world (Roberts, 2000). The appropriation of space by young people–their active place-making–can also be understood as part of their movement

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Plate 3. Where I learn. Where I find my friends. Quiet, comfortable. (17-year-old Iraqi female).

into the broader social and physical world and these geographies of youth play an important role in negotiating transitions into adulthood (Katz, 1993; Langevang, 2008; Punch, 2002; Skelton and Valentine, 1998; Valentine, 2003). An array of places, both public and private, were identified by youth in this study as important to them in their settlement landscapes including shops, public transport, other people’s homes and places of worship. However, the most significant of these were their own home, their school, local parks and libraries (see Plates 1 and 2). Places of importance for the young people in this study are those relatively close to where they live and go to school. These are the places where recently arrived youth feel most at home and can be understood as ‘‘safe’’ places from which they venture forth to explore the geographies of their new social and physical environment. As such, schools, parks and libraries become places that provide a sense of welcome in the initial

period of resettlement. Such places are especially important in the very early settlement period as they offer young people their first opportunities to develop a sense of belonging and to inhabit and appropriate public places into their everyday life. The words and concepts most commonly used by participants when writing about places that were important to them included: learning, studying and reading (n = 70)3; playing games and sports (n = 41); beauty (n =34); watching television, playing computer games and browsing the internet (n =32); quiet (n =27); gardens, trees, flowers and other greenery (n= 25); friends and classmates (n = 23); family (n= 20); relaxing, resting and sleeping (n= 19) and absence of trouble or conflict (n = 18). Thus, the places that make

3 This is the number of participants who referred to this concept, not the number of times this concept appeared overall.

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Plate 4. This is the basketball court. I am playing with my friends here. (19-year-old Sudanese male).

up their settlement landscapes are associated with being able to pursue a range of potentials largely absent in the places of their past: learning and playing; beautiful and green places; quiet, relaxing and comfortable places; places for building relationships with friends and family; and avoidance of places associated with conflict or danger. In the following sections we build on these themes to describe four types of places valued by these youth– places of opportunity, beautiful and comfortable places, places of sociality and safe places. We discuss the qualities of these places and how these types of places can be understood together to create therapeutic landscapes before considering the implications for well-being during settlement.

3.1. Places of meaningful activity: restoring opportunity Crisis defined the lives of the youth in this study prior to their arrival in Australia. As such, much of their childhood and early adolescence revolved around obtaining basic necessities such as food, water, fuel and shelter, locating lost family members and friends, and pursuing options for permanent safety and security. The destruction of their social and physical environments meant education and stimulating play activities were severely disrupted. The participants’ educational history reflected this experience, with a mean of 5.7 years of schooling prior to arrival in Australia (Gifford et al., 2009). In comparison, Australian youth aged 15–16

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years are usually in their 11th year of education (Australian Council for Educational Research, 2008). Photo-novellas revealed that youth were eager for opportunities to pursue an education and learn English, were enthusiastic about active games and sports and excited about watching television shows and movies, playing computer games and surfing the internet. A range of places were identified as important for supporting these activities, affirming their significance in their daily lives. Everyday places that provided an opportunity for education featured far more frequently in participants’ settlement landscapes than any other type of place (see Plates 3 and 4). Youth consistently made positive references to places that supported learning, studying, reading and writing, which in turn were seen as key for achieving positive and successful futures. All participants were attending English language schools and these were identified as the key place for learning activities (including classrooms and libraries). Other qualities of these places that facilitated learning included positive relationships with teachers and peers and quiet spaces for respite and concentration. [I like] my class room because we learn English.4 (18-year-old Sudanese male) [I feel I belong] at school because I come to learn. (16-year-old Liberian female) This is my classroom. I like my classroom because I learn English and I am with my friends. Also, this is a new classroom. Everything is new. (15-year-old Iraqi male) [At English language school there are] a lot of good friends, and it’s very easy to learn because nobody actually makes fun of youyif you say something wrong they correct you. (15-year-old Sudanese male) The value given to learning and education is also reflected in an appreciation of a range of places outside of school that allowed participants to study, read and write. Bedrooms and quiet spaces at home, local libraries and homework clubs were all identified as positive places because of the association with reading and doing homework. [I like the] library. I want to read the story, learn more about the world. (16-year-old Burmese female) [I like the] libraryybecause in the library it’s quiet and I feel comfortable and I can read books. (16-year-old Afghani female) [I like my] bedroomyI want sleep there. I like my room because it is quiet and I like [to] study there. (15-year-old Iraqi male) Despite the focus on education, participants were not all work and no play! Reflections on place were also filled with stories of doing things that were fun. Youth took great pleasure in leisure activities and this was evidenced in their sense of connection with open spaces and sports grounds that allowed them to play active games and sports such as basketball and soccer; places where they could use computers, watch television and play video games; and comfortable spaces where they could relax and rest (see Plate 4): [I like the] park because I do play after school. (17-year-old Sudanese female) [I like] the place [where I watch] television. I see a television with my free time and I saw a movie with my free time. I like to see Simpsons. (14-year-old Afghan male) [I like my] bedroomyPlaying games and using internet. (18-yearold Sudanese female) 4 Spelling mistakes have been corrected in these written statements from participants’ photo-novellas or interview transcripts.

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[I like] our garden where we can play. And our neighbor who lives next to usy when we play and our ball go [over the fence] y they said ‘Yeah, you can go and take your ball.’ They are very nice. (13-year-old Afghani female) In pursuing a balance between study and play youth made use of a range of places to facilitate these different activities. In this sense, they sought out and engaged with places compatible with their own needs and desires and through these interactions, began to appropriate these places as their own. However, the range of places available to these youth is limited by a range of factors including lack of access to transportation, few public recreational facilities and lack of financial resources required for hanging out in commercial shopping centers or malls. Indeed, there was a marked absence of these places of consumption in the young people’s settlement landscapes (cf. Kato, 2009). Notwithstanding this limitation, young peoples’ principal interests in learning and playing was largely supported by the (limited) places available to them. This compatibility between people and place is described as ‘‘ythe match between personal inclinations and purposes, environmental supports for intended activities, and environmental constraints on action’’ (Korpela and Hartig, 1996) and is a key characteristic of favourite places and for supporting restorative experiences (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Twigger-Ross and Uzzell, 1996). The perceived supportiveness of the environment in relation to personal projects is also a predictor of levels of life satisfaction (Wallenius, 1999) and thus places of opportunity which support learning and play are highly valued and sought out by recently settled youth with refugee backgrounds. 3.2. Places of relaxation: restoring self Places that promoted experiences of relaxation and restoration were highly valued aspects of young people’s connections to place on resettlement. Recently settled youth commonly described their connections to place in relation to the aesthetic qualities of beauty, including greenness and cleanliness, comfort and tranquility (see Plates 5 and 6). Restorative experiences are important in dealing with trauma and distress (Newell, 1997; Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Korpela and Hartig, 1996) and yet most contexts of displacement contain few places that might prove a source of solace and relaxation. Korpela et al. (2008) have found places can facilitate experiences of restoration and renewal by supporting a sense of calmness; increasing energy; improving alertness and concentration; clearing the mind of worrying thoughts; and clarifying worries and concerns. Importantly, youth identified places where they could retreat to, rest and relax, and be themselves as highly important and this is consistent with other studies of youth and place (Clark and Uzzell, 2002). The youth in this study identified the aesthetics of ‘beauty’ as a quality they valued. Many of these young people had previously lived in places that struggled to meet the needs of their populations and these barren environments would have been marked by the scars of destruction and deprivation. In contrast, environments with opportunities for connecting with nature and those of beauty and cleanliness signify a healthy, supportive environment. Other research has also found beauty to be a key characteristic of places most valued by adolescents (Owens, 1988), and there is evidence that the importance of aesthetic concerns increases through the latter years of adolescence (Tuan, 1995; Malinowski and Thurber, 1996). For refugees, recovering the ability to notice beauty is an important marker in the restoration of mental health (Keyes and Kane, 2004). Descriptions of beauty by the youth in this study emerged as a key quality of place to which they felt a sense of connection and belonging, especially in their home and street:

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Plate 5. I like my bedroom, is very beautiful because there are lots of toys, etc. My bedroom is clean. (13-year-old Afghani female).

I like my unit because it is beautiful. This is my building. (15-yearold Sudanese male) I feel very happy. It’s nice. Outside of my house is very beautiful. There are lots of flowers. (13-year-old Afghan female) [My street] is beautiful and I like it. Quiet and nice place. (14-yearold Iraqi male) Vegetation–trees, flowers, grass–was identified as another characteristic of place valued by newly arrived youth (see Plate 6). As discussed in the first part of this paper, connections with the natural environment are restorative (Maas et al., 2006; Maller

et al., 2005) and are particularly important during periods of ill health and stress (Conradson, 2005; Cooper Marcus and Barnes, 1999; English et al., 2008; Korpela and Ylen, 2007). Green spaces have also been found to contribute to the health and well-being of youth more generally, through promoting restorative experiences and increasing physical activity (Cohen et al., 2007; Maas et al., 2006; Veith et al., 2006; Thurber and Malinowski, 1999). Participants in this study expressed strong positive associations with gardens at home or school, outdoor public green spaces, and with individual trees or flowers, highlighting the importance of nature as part of their positive connections to place:

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Plate 6. My house. I feel safe and happy. It looks nice, is comfortable is my house. It has nice trees and I like it house. (14-year-old Sudanese female).

I like my place because we have park and trees. (16-year-old Ethiopian female) This is the outside of my house. I like the flowers and the compound. I love my house because it is beautiful. (13-year-old Sudanese male) I feel happy. It’s green. (17-year-old Sudanese female) This is my garden. I play soccer in my garden. I like the green grass and all the plants. (15-year-old Iraqi male) Cleanliness was another aesthetic quality of place valued by participants. This was more often referred to in the negative, through the rejection of places that were dirty, threatening and to which they felt they did not belong. The symbolic relationships

between dirt, pollution and risk–both social and physical–are well established (Douglas, 1984) and these concerns are particularly salient for youth who have lived in perilous places such as adolescents living in squatter camps in South Africa (Swart-Kruger and Chawla, 2002; Chawla, 2000) as well as for youth in urban settings in the UK (Morrow, 2001a) and the USA. (Dura n-Narucki, 2008). Young people in this study voiced positive connections to places that were clean, tidy and orderly and distanced themselves from places that were dirty or unclean. Indeed, youth viewed these places as potentially risky, places they did not belong and places that were unwelcoming. This is the street to our house. I like it because it is clean. (13-yearold Sudanese male)

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[My street is] safe, trees, clean. (15-year-old Sudanese female) Behind school. This place I don’t like because it is dirty. (17-yearold Ethiopian male) [Outdoor steps at school] I don’t like it because dirty and messy. (14-year-old Iraqi female) [At school I do not like] the steps near the toilets. Lots of boys block the way. Noisy, dirty. (17-year-old Iraqi female) Another quality of their aesthetic appreciation of place was a sense of calmness and peace. For these youth who have lived much of their lives in places of conflict, soothing places are a source of solace, relaxation and reassurance and were actively sought for their calming and relaxing qualities. Through their photographs and drawings they tell stories of places relished for being quiet, comfortable and relaxing where they could retreat for resting, sleeping, and for being at peace in their everyday lives (see Plates 3 and 6). Although these qualities were associated most often with their own bedrooms, their homes and street, other places were also valued as being calming and comfortable including libraries, parks, some classrooms and churches. My home is quiet I can rest and read. (16-year-old Liberian female) I like this street a lot because it is very quiet. Quiet, clean, wide. (17-year-old Iraqi female) [My favourite place at home] is sitting room. Comfortable, good for rest. (15-year-old Serbian male) [I like] my Bedroom. Because it is a place where I relax and do my study. (16-year-old Ethiopian male) This is my bedroom. I like sleeping a lot. It’s a comfortable place. (17-year-old Sudanese male) The aesthetics of place–as being beautiful, clean and calm–are important for their restorative powers and cannot be underestimated for youth (Abbot-Chapman and Robertson, 2001) and especially for youth with refugee backgrounds. These places of calm offer a safe retreat for youth, a place of one’s own protected from the chaos of their past and uncertainty of their present and future, where they can be at ease. 3.3. Places of sociality: restoring relationships One of the key tasks of recovery in the early resettlement period is restoring social relationships and places of sociality figure highly in young people’s resettlement landscapes. Youth portrayed siblings, cousins and friends in many photographs of important places, highlighting the ways in which place-making is bound up with the relationships developed and sustained within these physical locations. Friends and classmates were the most commonly identified people in the youth’s representations of place (see Plates 3 and 4) and highlight the importance of making new friends, engaging with new communities and developing new social relationships that are fun, supportive and contribute to a sense of belonging. Friendships and fellow classmates were identified by participants as particularly important within a school environment entirely populated by students who had recently arrived in Australia and were learning English. The social inclusion of the classroom was a particularly favoured place for supporting feelings of belonging with friends and teachers: This is my classroom. I like my classroom because all my friends are learning English just like me. We are all the same. (15-yearold Iraqi male) This is my class room. I feel I have people here who help me friends and teachers. (17-year-old Sudanese male) I like this school because I have a lots friends and teachers. And then my teacher like me so much. (16-year-old Burmese female)

[At school I have] five friendsyone from Sudan, one from Serbia, and Iran, Afghanistan and the other guy from LebanonyYeah we be together at lunchtime, play basketball or soccer ball. (17-yearold Sudanese male) Also important were places outside of school where young people could interact with friends out of the gaze of adults: [My favourite place at home is the] garage. Because I can meet my friends and we talk and laugh and no one disturbs us in there. (18-year-old Afghani male) Places for being with family were significant for youth in this study (see Plates 1 and 2). Most of the young people had experienced the loss of family members and 24 arrived in Australia without either of their parents, living instead with older siblings or with members of their extended family. Places of family togetherness featured highly in settlement landscapes and photo-novellas reveal these as important sites for reaffirming relationships and for displaying cultural artefacts, family photographs and other objects of cultural familiarity that together create a sense of belonging and being at home: [I spend my spare time at] home. Because my family is in there and I know that I belong to them. (16-year-old Afghani female) I like to stay at home because I stay with my family. (13-year-old Sudanese female) This is our living room. I love it, I feel safe. We all get together in the living room. (13-year-old Ethiopian female) [I like my] bedroom. I like it because all of my family sit down here. It’s comfortable and good and I have fun there with my sisters and brothers. (17-year-old Iraqi male) [A place I feel I belong is] my aunty’s house because I live with my aunty a long, long time. (17-year-old Sudanese female) Although resettled youth have left behind the physicality of past places, they have not left behind connections to the social worlds of those places. Important to their sense of identity and well-being is being able to transcend the locality of place to connect with friends and relatives who are scattered across the globe. Libraries in particular are places favoured by youth to connect with friends and family living elsewhere by providing access to the internet, as well as supporting connections with peers in their local community as a public space to meet and hang out. Local places that support youth in maintaining their social networks across time and space are important for their well-being and identity and may also play an important role in feelings of social inclusion, particularly in the early years when they are strangers in a new country (Castells, 2001; Wilding et al. (2009)). For example, youth in this study used their mobile phones and email accounts not only to communicate with friends and family in Australia but also to stay in touch with those overseas. Indeed, the appropriation of transnational spaces emerges as an important part of becoming at home in the locality of place in Australia. 3.4. Places of safety: restoring security Safety and a sense of security are essential aspects of healthy places and restorative experiences (Macintrye et al., 2002; Milligan and Bingley, 2007). As for youth more generally, the tensions between safety and danger were part of the placemaking experiences of the young people in this study (Katz, 1993; Manzo, 2005). All the youth arrived in Australia having personally experienced violent conflict, danger and untrustworthy authorities. As a result, concerns about their personal safety and of those around them were amplified by the past reality of violence and insecurity and sites associated with such threats were actively

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Plate 7. People fight here. (15-year-old Sudanese male).

circumvented. Places of authority such as the office of school principals and police stations were especially avoided. Not only did these places represent getting in to trouble but for some youth they were places where they felt unsafe and uncared for: [I do not like the principal’s] office. Because every time I see the office means troubles. (14-year-old Iraqi female) [I do not like the] teachers’ office because that is where you go when you are in trouble. (14-year-old Sudanese female) I don’t like office because I getting trouble. (15-year-old Sudanese male) [A place I feel I do not belong is the] police office. Place for problems. (15-year-old Sudanese female)

Busy roads and car parks were also a significant safety concern for these youth, impacting on their sense of security and pleasure and limiting their ability to travel to favourite places safely and independently. Although similar concerns about traffic and place have been identified for youth generally (Swart-Kruger and Chawla, 2002; Mullen, 2003; Morrow, 2001a), these issues are particularly relevant for those youth who are not confident negotiating traffic and busy roads, having spent many years in rural areas or refugee camps (Refugee Health Research Centre, 2007). Places with heavy traffic were identified as being unsafe, with several participants naming cars as a dangerous and threatening element of place in their photo-novellas. Many youth marked the roads drawn in their maps as parts of their neighborhood they did not like (see Plate 2):

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[My street is] good – but if the baby walk out they will get hit by a car. It is a very busy street. (14-year-old Sudanese female)

4. Discussion

I don’t like being in the street, is too busy. (15-year-old Ethiopian female)

The place-making endeavors of recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds, as described in this paper, are an important part of the settlement process and play a key role in helping young people to become at home in a new country through a process of reterritorialization. The potential role of place in supporting the health and well-being of these youth during settlement has not previously been explored. We have identified four kinds of places that are particularly important to young people on arrival and which together can be understood to constitute therapeutic landscapes through their contribution to experiences of restoration and renewal. These therapeutic landscapes are made up of places of opportunity, places of restoration, places of sociability and places of safety and young people orient their place-making activities around these types of places in their tasks of becoming settled and building new futures. The restorative characteristics of place and place-making have the capacity to contribute to recovery and well-being of resettled youth in the process of ‘becoming at home’ in their new host country. There are a range of frameworks for recovery of refugees who have suffered from the traumas of violence and displacement that are applied in resettlement settings and which inform policies and services of UNHCR resettlement countries (UNHCR, 2002; Kaplan, 1998; Mitchell et al., 2007; Silove, 1999) and we argue that the kinds of places that make up the landscape of settlement for youth in this study resonate with the recovery goals set out in these models. For example, the framework for recovery developed by the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture (Kaplan, 1998) and

My street is good because there are not many cars. (16-year-old Sudanese female) Finally, conflict and violence are issues that youth continue to face in their resettlement context and places where violence happens were prominent in their photo-novellas. Many of these places can be described as liminal spaces: spaces of transition, not appropriated or owned by anyone in particular and away from the public gaze. Places behind buildings on the boundaries of school grounds were experienced as dangerous and where fighting took place (see Plate 7). Public places such as train stations were experienced as potentially dangerous both because of the racism experienced by some youth and also because of the potential for conflict between teenagers. Likewise public parks were sometimes seen as threatening places because of the lack of control over the dangerous behaviors of others. [I do not like] the back corner [at school] because it is dirty and students fight there. (14-year-old Sudanese male) I don’t like the place because is behind the fence students fight here. (16-year-old Liberian female) [A place I don’t belong is the] park because people fight. (18-yearold Sudanese male) I do not like [the train] station because of the fighting everyday. (15-year-old Sudanese female)

Fig. 1. Place-making and its contribution to well-being during settlement (Adapted from Kaplan, 1998).

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adopted by the UNHCR (2002), sets out four key recovery goals: restoring safety, restoring attachments and social connections to others, restoring meaning in life and restoring dignity. This framework identifies emotional and social restoration as integral to successful settlement and provides a lens through which we can understand the importance of place-making as an avenue for experiencing restoration and renewal. The qualities of four types of places that make up the therapeutic landscapes of settlement for the youth as described in this study can make powerful contributions to these recovery goals (see Fig. 1). It is both the physicality of place and the sociality of place that are important for promoting recovery and settlement. While we have focused this paper on the health-enhancing qualities of place, it is equally important to note the potential negative impact of places of resettlement on well-being. For example, young people identified many places where they felt unsafe, unwanted and where they felt they did not belong. Many of these places can be characterized as liminal, belonging to no one in particular (e.g. school toilets), places of social exclusion (e.g. where there is racist graffiti) or places of perceived danger (e.g. roads with heavy traffic). Far too little attention has been given to the importance of place in experiences of exclusion and belonging in the early resettlement context. One important strategy for facilitating connections to place for newly arrived young people involves the active involvement of authority figures–especially teachers, police and community leaders. The young people in this study value these key individuals as being important social bridges into their new community (Gifford et al., 2009) and this is critical for positive place-making. As refugees who have often had negative experiences of authority figures, it is important to be able to experience places where they are welcomed by such individuals. And while connections to place in their first year in Australia are largely contained to places that have been already designated specifically for youth (school, parks and libraries), their placemaking activities will become more contested over time. As they expand their social world so will they expand their appropriation of place to sites inhabited by a greater diversity of individuals, including at mainstream schools and places of consumption. The success with which they create and experience therapeutic landscapes on arrival will inform the ways in which they navigate the landscapes of their future. This research has taken an inductive approach to learn from recently arrived youth about the meaning and importance of place and place-making during their initial period of settlement. This approach highlights the agency of recent arrivals in seeking out and fostering connections with the kinds of places that support their well-being in their first years in Australia. Given the traumatic nature of forced migration generally and the refugee experience in particular, it is perhaps not surprising that youth have identified places of restoration and recovery as important resources when coping with these difficult circumstances. This study has highlighted the comfort and solace that many of these young people experience in their everyday places of settlement. The apparently mundane places of homes, schools, public parks and libraries are highly valued sites for promoting healing and renewal. The research findings show that recently arrived youth make use of the context of resettlement to create therapeutic landscapes to help them become at home. By pursuing connections with places of opportunity, places of restoration, places of sociality and places of safety, these young people are able to experience restorative aspects of place. These findings demonstrate the potential healing properties of place identified by youth in a country of permanent protection, suggesting the important place of place in restoring well-being and promoting becoming at home amongst resettled youth with refugee backgrounds.

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Acknowledgements We would like to thank the young people in the study for sharing so much of their lives with the Good Starts project. We would also like to acknowledge the work of all the Good Starts research team, especially Christine Bakopanos and Belinda Devine; the other investigators on the study, Dr. Ignacio CorreaVelez and Dr. Ida Kaplan; and the particular input of La Trobe University students Luella Monson and Verity Nicholson to this paper. This research was funded by the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), The Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture and La Trobe University. We appreciate the insightful comments and suggestions offered by two anonymous reviewers.

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