A Trauma-Informed Planning Framework (TIPF) for Immigrant Belonging

Source abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings Forced migration exposes individuals to a range of traumatic experiences before, during, and after migration, with lasting effects on them, their families, institutions, and their sense of belonging in the receiving communities. We reviewed scholarship across public health, social work, psychology, and the planning/design fields to identify how urban planning can respond. Although trauma-informed approaches are well developed in health disciplines, planning scholarship remains nascent and rarely centers on immigrant populations. We propose the trauma-informed planning framework (TIPF), which integrates the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s six principles with a socioecological model (encompassing individual, interpersonal, community, and institutional/systemic levels) and three planning dimensions—place, emotion, and cognition—to organize planning exploration, analysis, design, and community engagement. In this Review Essay we suggest TIPF can guide planning for Latine immigrants and—given shared structural determinants of trauma—for other marginalized communities through local adaptation. We also provide adaptable prompt banks to operationalize TIPF across different planning subfields with scoping, co-design, action, monitoring, and evaluation phases.Takeaway for practice Practitioners can use TIPF to map who acts at which level, with which trauma-informed principles, and through which spatial and psychosocial pathways. This would enable them to align investments (e.g., housing, public space, mobility) with healing-centered engagement and institutional learning, as well as develop context-specific indicators for tracking progress.