Trauma and place: Avoiding triggers in design and engagement

Hello, and welcome to the developer podcast where we talk about how to make cities worth living in, which often has to do with the spaces between the buildings as much as the buildings themselves. Trauma Informed Practice is a new way of working that considers the impact of trauma on individuals and aims to have conversations and create physical environments that promote healing and well-being and don't trigger feelings of fight or flight. The UK government agreed on a definition of trauma informed practice in 2022 with a view to adopting trauma led processes in future, especially in the health and social care sector. But until recently, trauma informed practice has not been used in community engagement or design in architecture. There is only one trauma informed building in The UK, Hope Street Housing, commissioned by charity One Small Thing. Today, I'm speaking to Alide Oboe, managing director of Populate and board member at Socius, who undertook training with One Small Thing on trauma informed design and is applying that knowledge on a whole new scale to the design and the development of the London Cancer Hub, which will be the largest research and treatment center in Europe. Let's listen in. So hi, Olade. Welcome to the developer podcast. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Thanks, Christine. Really excited to be on the podcast, and I am Elide Abbo, as you've rightly said. I am a director of Socius. Socius is a mixed use developer working across fast growth cities in The UK. I am also very recently, started to head up a new company, associates company called Populate, and our job is to get involved in locations really early to help to develop the ecosystem and to bring communities together, and also think about how do we enliven places in advance of construction because we know construction takes a while. So our job is to really get involved early and activate those places for long term kind of benefits for everybody. So one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on the show today was to talk about trauma informed practice. So tell me a little bit about how you came across, working in a trauma informed way. So I'm a huge fan of the festival of, Festival Place, and I came along. I've been along to every event so far, actually. It's always, in my diary. I block it out my diary because I find, content really refreshing, and it's very different to my day to day world, which is very, very real estate and property focused. But, actually, I came along to, festival and, I met a charity called one small thing. And their role, they had they had partnered up with a company to design a residential community called Hope Street. And it was all about responding to women who had been affected by domestic violence and trying to help to create a a place that was …