Cara Courage
Dr. Cara Courage is a placemaking practitioner, researcher, writer, and cultural strategist whose work explores the relationships between culture, community, and place. Across more than three decades, she has worked from grassroots arts and community practice to senior leadership at Tate, alongside advising cultural institutions, governments, universities, funders, and communities internationally. Cara is the editor of the influential Routledge Handbook of Placemaking and co-author, with Dr. Anita McKeown, of Trauma-Informed Placemaking, which asks how the shaping of place can center care, lived experience, healing, and community expertise rather than reproduce harm. Across her writing and practice, she treats placemaking not simply as a toolkit for improving spaces, but as a deeply relational civic practice—one concerned with culture, power, participation, belonging, and who gets to shape the places we share.