Trauma-Informed Placemaking: a research-as-publication project to understand the role of trauma and healing in place-based practice, research and theory.
Place has been seen as ranging from being contested, where people and politics clash, or as convivial, as sites of serendipitous meeting and celebration for example; but wherever placed on that spectrum, the potential of place to have been of a traumatic experience is not widely acknowledged.
This project brings together place academics, practitioners and thought-leaders, with those from psychology, the arts, behavioural and social sciences in a transdisciplinary investigation of ‘trauma-informed placemaking,’ and calls for this approach as foundational for any understanding of, or working in, place.
Where we are now.
The Trauma Informed Placemaking textbook has been published by Routledge and is available here in hardback, paperback and ebook formats.
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.
The editors and contributor cohort have been engaged in cooperative and co-creative work around the development of the project, and its theoretical underpinnings, terminology, values and practices- including through a World Cafe, kindly hosted with Leo Vasquez of Creative Placemaking Communities.
Community of Praxis.
Through the making of a global network of place-based practitioners, researchers and thought-leaders that share the belief in the need for placemaking to address trauma as prerequisite in our approach to working in place, a Community of Praxis is forming as an outcome of the trauma informed placemaking project.
The project is working to nurture this Community of Praxis through our continued cohort exchanges, our divergent˃convergent˃lateral explorations, our aimed for outputs and outcomes, and in the application of our learning into action to change sector practices.
Taking a lead from Community of Practice theory, approaching the project as a Community of Praxis, not only engenders the forming of a knowledge exchange community around the notion of trauma informed placemaking, but also a step-change in the practice of placemaking through the practical application of theory and learning from experience.