Trauma Informed Placemaking

Trauma Informed Placemaking offers an introduction to understanding trauma and healing in place. It offers insights that researchers and practitioners can apply to their place-based practice, learning from a global cohort of place leaders and communities.

The book introduces the ethos and application of the trauma-informed approach to working in place, with references to historical and contemporary trauma, including trauma caused by placemakers. It introduces the potential of place and of place practitioners to heal. Offering 20 original frameworks, toolkits and learning exercises across 33 first- and third-person chapters, multi-disciplinary insights are presented throughout. These are organised into four sections that lead the reader to an awareness of how trauma and healing operate in place. The book offers a first gathering of the current praxis in the field – how we can move from trauma in place to healing in place – and concludes with calls to action for the trauma-informed placemaking approach to be adopted.

This book will be essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners interested in people and places, from artists and architects, policy makers and planners, community development workers and organisations, placemakers, to local and national governments. It will appeal to the disciplines of human geography, sociology, politics, cultural studies, psychology and to placemakers, planners and policymakers and those working in community development.

Cara Courage SFIPM, FRSA is a Culture and Place Consultant-Director and scholar, named in the top 10 of place-thinkers globally and a ‘strategy angel’ for the arts sector. She has authored and edited several books on the topic. Cara has a prodigious creative industries, cultural institutions and higher education professional career alongside a renowned academic one. She undertakes her own arts/place research and also for academy and sector-commissioned partners across the globe and UK, including for national arts networks, cultural institutions and local and central government.

Anita McKeown, FRSA, FIPM, is an award-winning artist, curator, educator and researcher working at the intersection of Inclusive Design, Creative Placemaking, Open Source Culture and Technology and STEAM education, across a range of inter- and transdisciplinary projects, processes and partnerships. Anita is the director of SMARTlab Skelligs, SMARTlab Academy and co-founder of Future Focus21c, Anita’s work uses an adaptive change method reverse-engineered for 21st-century challenges and integrates design-thinking, circular economic principles, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) / Earth Charter to encourage a holistic growth mindset and develop strategies and tactics to build social, environmental and economic resilience and encourage systemic behavioural change.