Reimagining Healing Spaces: An Exploration of Therapeutic Architecture for Trauma Recovery in Youth Care

Youth care and protection residences are a significant topic of debate and criticism within today’s social, cultural, and political landscapes. Repeated calls for their closure have been made as their model of care, physical environments, and practices are no longer considered fit for purpose. The intention to replace them with smaller, community-based care homes underpinned by a trauma-informed approach in both their practices and physical environments is part of an ongoing transitional process (Davis & Logie, 2023); however, progress in this direction has been slow. One of the key challenges lies in defining the therapeutic model of care, and how it is translated into the physical environment.

In exploring a trauma-informed approach to design, this thesis re-imagines what these spaces could look like as homes designed to meet the varying and complex needs of youth in care. Applying approaches grounded in sensory, therapeutic, and culturally responsive design methods to drive the research, the thesis aims to contribute towards a framework for future design within these environments that is based on therapeutic rehabilitation, as opposed to containment.

The thesis has been arranged into three phases of research; phase one: a theoretical framework based on literature, phase two: a design framework focused on exploring and extracting architectural principles from case studies to develop a trauma-informed design framework, and phase three: developing an architectural response that explores application of the proposed trauma-informed design framework.