The Redevelopment of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children: A Case for Trauma-Informed Urban Planning Practices

ABSTRACT The field of urban planning and its scholarship, while acknowledging harmful development practices for marginalized groups, has not directly engaged in alternative, trauma-informed planning processes at the municipal level. Social work and law have a scholarly tradition of acknowledging trauma and providing frameworks for carrying out trauma-informed practice; planning scholars have proposed models like therapeutic planning, but lack an understanding of how to formalize such approaches. We use the case study of the redevelopment of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children to provide lessons and recommendations for how planners might codify trauma-informed practices into formal processes.