Wednesday 17 May, 5pm – 6.30pm

ZOOM EVENT – You can watch the video here

The Irish Architecture Foundation invites you to join a discussion on Trauma Informed Placemaking as part of our Reimagine Sessions programme. 

Trauma Informed Placemaking calls for a place-based awareness of trauma and its impact on the individual, the community and ‘sense of place’ and then on place healing, though place-based community responses and interventions. 

As people who work with people in place, it is up to us all to set up the conditions for, maintain, and enjoy interpersonal and place-orientated relations.

This online panel has been guest curated by the Trauma Informed Placemaking project founders, Dr Anita Mckeown and Dr Cara Courage, and will feature five of its global cohort of creative and research practitioners – Aisling Rusk, Karen Till with Michal Huss, Brian Jay De Lima Ambulo, and Jeff Poulin – covering projects from Ireland to the Philippines and topics from working in post-disaster places and with young people. 

This event is a rare opportunity to hear from several of the projects represented in the Trauma Informed Placemaking textbook forthcoming from Routledge, to continue to build on the community of praxis that Cara and Anita have convened, and to provide space for deeper discussion into the role and responsibilities of placemaking as a practice which can heal as well as amplify trauma.

Dr Cara Courage

Dr Cara Courage, SFIPM, FRSA, is a culture and place consultant and scholar, named in the top 10 of place-thinkers globally and a ‘strategy angel’ for the arts sector. Cara has worked in the cultural and place sectors for over 25 years and in that time, there isn’t an artform that she hasn’t worked with. She has developed expertise in practices that are socially engaged, community-led, and embedded in place, whether that place be a team, a city park, a national museum or a rural town high street. Cara is convenor-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking (2021); co-editor of Creative Placemaking and Beyond (Routledge, 2018); and author of Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice (Routledge, 2017). 

Dr Anita McKeown

Dr Anita McKeown, FRSA, FIPM, is an award-winning artist, curator, educator, and researcher working at the intersection of inclusive design, creative placemaking, technology, and STEAM education. She is the director of SMARTlab Skelligs, a satellite of the global research network SMARTlab Research Institute, and UCD SMARTlab Academy. Anita’s work uses an adaptive change methodology, reverse engineered for 21st-century challenges, incorporating design thinking, circular economic principles, and the SDGs/Earth Charter to build social, environmental, and economic resilience and encourage systemic behavioural change. In addition to a distinguished career in academia and the arts, she is recognised as an author and editor, having co-edited the book Creative Placemaking and Beyond (Routledge, 2018) and as a sub-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking (2021). Her work has earned her numerous accolades and awards, and her extensive expertise and experience has contributed to her recognition as a thought leader in her field.

Image courtesy of Cara Courage.