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.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma-informed
• African Nova Scotian
• redevelopment
• therapeutic planning
• restorative justice

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our appreciation for the funding for this work from The Nova Scotia Museum and the Dalhousie University Faculty of Architecture and Planning. We would like to thank Marcia Hale for her influence on this paper through her work on trauma-informed planning, as well as Aaron Murnaghan for sharing his expertise on planning in the Halifax context. Thank you also to the three anonymous reviewers who used their time and expertise to improve this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The term African Nova Scotians refers to African Diaspora communities that have lived in the province of Nova Scotia since its colonial founding, who made their way there by forced migration as slaves and by immigration as settlers. There are several notable waves of Black immigrants to Nova Scotia throughout its history for different geopolitical and economic reasons. These include the Black Loyalists and slaves of White Loyalists after the American Revolution, the exiled Jamaican Maroons in 1796, and Black refugees during and after the war of 1812. Caribbean immigrants, known as the “later arrivals”, came for opportunities in steel mills and coal mines in the early 1900s (Van Dyk, 2020). African Nova Scotian is generally the commonly accepted term to identify Nova Scotians who are Black.

2. Systemic (or institutional) racism is defined in this paper as bias in the formal operations of public institutions (e.g.: laws, regulations, policies and legal processes) that routinely enable discrimination against racial minority communities, and also those formalized practices that contribute to White supremacy by generating advantage for White citizens.

3. Restorative justice in this paper refers to a practice of reconciliation that focuses on repairing the relationships between those who have been harmed or wronged and the perpetrator. This form of justice uses dialogue and collaboration to rebuild trust and promote understanding, with the belief that it will help to promote healing as well as create a strong foundation for future collaboration.

4. In this paper and in the literature, community trauma and collective trauma are used interchangeably to mean trauma that impacts a group of people with a shared identity (as opposed to individual trauma).

5. The NSHCC was created in large part due to the advocacy, organizing and fundraising effort of the African United Baptist Association; they continued to have an informal influence on the Home by fundraising, and advocacy through their established networks. Their role was disconnected from the daily operations of the Home, and therefore none of our data indicates that survivors or other actors felt that they were implicated in the abuses that took place there. In 1978, around the time the original Home building was closed and replaced by two group home buildings (Salloum, 2021), the African United Baptist Association was made the first beneficiary upon the dissolution of the Home (Province of Nova Scotia, 2019).

6. Both poorhouses and working houses functioned as a form of early government support for people living in poverty, however the central idea was that inmates would make their keep through labor, which was often very physically demanding with long hours to which their only payment was sparse accommodations (Fingard, 1975; Tyler, 2009). These were prominent across North America and Europe. They were known for crowded conditions and intense labor requirements which would have been difficult for children.

7. ANSAIO was the result of a lawsuit brought by former residents of Africville, a significant example of displacement of African Nova Scotians during the urban renewal era.

8. Victims of Institutional Child Exploitation Society (VOICES) is an advocacy group consisting of former residents of the Home who prompted the Restorative Inquiry in hopes of reconciling the trauma experienced at the Home.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Nova Scotia Museum; Dalhousie University Faculty of Architecture and Planning.

Notes on contributors

Lisa Berglund

Lisa Berglund, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the School of Planning at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her research focuses on community organizing and social movements in the context of neighborhood change, including instances of redevelopment, gentrification, displacement, and disaster recovery.

Alexandra Kitson

Alexandra Kitson is a research assistant at the Dalhousie University School of Planning and a graduate of their Bachelor of Community Design Honours Program. Her research interests relate to the ways that community planning interacts with sites of contested heritage and sites of trauma.