ABSTRACT
Trauma-informed placemaking is a process of compassion and validation, honoring and releasing experiences that have negatively shaped personal identities, sustained harmful institutions, and constructed environments reflective of systems of oppression. Collective trauma in neighborhoods are more than just experiences held in the bodies of individual residents but in permanent scars in the streets, buildings, monuments and beyond. These infrastructural wounds are constant reminders of unprocessed grief that have easily become normalized and almost invisible to the impact on people and quality of life. At its best, trauma-informed placemaking disrupts, repairs, and reimagines public spaces by replacing areas of exploited power and harm into places of ease, connection, and care.
