Wanna dance? Using creative placemaking value indicators to identify COVID-lockdown-related solastalgia in Sydney, Australia

This chapter explores creative placemaking and its valuation as one way to address place-related trauma. It proposes that some urban public domain within COVID-19 lockdowns became sites of place-trauma (Donovan, 2013), or ‘traumascapes’ (Tumarkin, 2019, p. 5), resulting in feelings of ‘solastalgia’ by local communities (Albrecht, 2006). Understanding and evaluating the promise and potential of trauma-informed creative placemaking through the lens of solastalgia requires thinking beyond place as specific site. To address this, the chapter recognises place as people’s layered experience of time and space that includes events, memory, affect, social ties and representations. It is organised around a case study of the 2021 temporary art installation and dance performance series, Wanna Dance (Figure 21.1). Using the value indicators contained in our Valuing Creative Placemaking (VCPM) Toolkit (Cohen et al., 2023), we use this case study to foreground the less tangible aspects of creative placemaking as they relate to forms of trauma - in this case the experiences of loss and isolation resulting from COVID-19 restrictions, especially the loss of access to public space.