Practitioners of the emerging architectural movement called trauma-informed design see buildings as “the first line of therapy.”

“Something inside me still lights up when I think about how to use the built environment to love and care for people, not just my family, but for people I might never meet, and the people that care for them.”

"We need to think beyond just the individual," Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University and a leading loneliness researcher, told Insider. "We often neglect the built environment."

On the TEDx stage, Erin shares research at HKS, Inc. on how design of public spaces has the power to combat loneliness is so important to the health of our communities.

To those in the design community, the small strokes you make when designing parks, architecture, or even simple sidewalks can heal us or hurt us.

Our digital and physical workplaces can support or inhibit our brain health.

Our reliance on single office workstations can reduce our effectiveness and render us less active and adaptive.

Creating a range of spaces provides people choice, allowing them to fit their place of work for the type of work they are doing.

"I think a lot of the beautiful traditional forms of architecture over the centuries, really, [have] responded to the natural environment of that area. And they responded to the people and their needs. And I think in so many different areas of life, right now, we're going back to understanding this wisdom that we used to have, that we sort of talked ourselves out of, and I hope that the built environment can be a part of that," said Peavey.

"It doesn't actually have to cost more, it just needs to be designed mindfully."

In a time of hyper connection and communication, many of us report feeling lonely and detached, and there is strong evidence that this has a toxic effect on our health and happiness. Peavey will share an evidence-based framework to design for social connection, examine scalable strategies — some unexpected — that lead to social environments that promote meaningful connections. Huge opportunities await architects who can leverage this knowledge to build a future marked by connections that boost our collective health.

John Oliver discusses environmental racism, how both government and industry are failing people of color, and pandas. Featuring the Floral Farms community, where Shingle Mountain once stood 6 stories high.

Park for Floral Farms won honorable mention in the general excellence category of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards honors the broadest ideas, whether they’re new government policies, new business models, or entirely new consumer categories. Anything that has the potential to effect true systems change or solve wicked problems.

How a shift in attitudes about mental health is changing not only how we design for well-being, but also the inner workings of the architecture field itself.

“What I feel, and what the community feels, is we should have as much justice and freedom, and breathe clean air, like the other areas of Dallas,” Jackson says. “The city isn’t taking lower-income brown and Black families and their health into consideration.”

"Poisoned by Zip Code, Mended by Design" featured (from left) Miguel Perez, KERA arts reporter; Ari Brielle, artist; Marsha Jackson, activist and Floral Farms resident; Erin Peavey, architect, HKS and Evelyn Mayo, chair of Downwinders at Risk. Here on stage at the Dallas Museum of Art

For years, a giant pile of hazardous waste plagued the Dallas neighborhood of Floral Farms. The notorious Shingle Mountain is gone now, but what happens next?

In our latest State of the Arts conversation, join KERA Arts Reporter Miguel Perez in conversation with artist Ari Brielle, community activist Marsha Jackson, Erin Peavey, architect with HKS and Evelyn Mayo of Downwinders at Risk.

State of the Arts: Poisoned by Zip Code, Mended by Design is an in-person event on Saturday, March 5, at the Dallas Museum of Art. Register for the free conversation here. Can't make it in person? The event will be also be live-streamed on the DMA's YouTube channel.

The story of the Floral Farms Park is one of reclamation, connection, and healing. It’s not just about the removing an illegal dumping site, where a mountain of shingles grew to be six-stories tall— it’s about reclaiming the identity of a vibrant neighborhood that came to be known as “where Shingle Mountain is”.

Rest is essential to keeping one's mind and body fertile, creative, and well. Here’s my personal and scientific journey of investing in rest.

Each of our childhoods is buried in our work in different ways. For me, it is my love of problem-solving through storytelling and narratives. For Dr. Mario Luis Small, it's his stories of growing up in Panama in a tight-knit family with an architect father—these aspects shine through in his seminal work on social networks.

I recently had Dr. Small on the Shared Space podcast, where he discussed what social capital is and why it is important to everything from getting a job, to staying healthy, to keeping kids in school; the role of local organizations and institutions—childcare centers, libraries, barbershops—in fostering connection; and research-informed strategies for how the built environment can foster—or harm—our connections…

Park for Floral Farms is the collective vision of the Floral Farms residents to fight against environmental injustice on the former Shingle Mountains site. Through co-planned and co-led community engagement sessions with the neighbors, the design team listened to their vision. It helped them give physical form to their dream of turning this former toxic waste site into a beautiful community park. Soccer fields, walking trails, a community garden, trees, and a splash pad were high on the list for programmatic needs. Flower beds dot the site and mark the entry as a way of reclaiming their Floral Farms’ identity.

How does where we live impact on how we experience loneliness and what can we as policymakers, researchers, and practitioners do about it. This session which includes speakers with experience from around the world, will look at what interventions can really make a difference in reducing the impact of where we live on our levels of loneliness.

The new park would replace the vacant lot of about 4 acres, where the notorious Shingle Mountain once stood. Shingle Mountain was the 100,000-ton pile of hazardous waste that loomed over the community for three years. Residents said it “stood as a vivid reminder of their worth to the city.”