Cara Courage

Anita McKeown

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.

Trauma Informed Placemaking

This book makes a significant contribution to the history of placemaking, presenting grassroots to top-down practices and socially engaged, situated artistic practices and artsled spatial inquiry that go beyond instrumentalising the arts for development. The book brings together a range of scholars to critique and deconstruct the notion of creative placemaking, presenting diverse case studies from researcher, practitioner, funder and policymaker perspectives from across the globe. It opens with the creators of the 2010 White Paper that named and defined creative placemaking, Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus, who offer a cortically reflexive narrative on the founding of the sector and its development. This book looks at vernacular creativity in place, a topic continued through the book with its focus on the practitioner and community-placed projects. It closes with a consideration of aesthetics, metrics and, from the editors, a consideration of the next ten years for the sector. If creative placemaking is to contribute to places-in-the-making and encourage citizenled agency, new conceptual frameworks and practical methodologies are required. This book joins theorists and practitioners in dialogue, advocating for transdisciplinary, resilient processes.

Anita McKeown

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