Locating Young Women in Public Space

Abstract

Young women have largely been left out of public space design and planning processes. There is a need for meaningful knowledge production to be centred on, and grounded within, this group. In this viewpoint, we propose and evaluate our feminist spatial researcher-in-residence methodology for engaging young women in design and planning processes. We developed this model for a series of peer research projects on gender and perceptions of public space, with individuals who identify as girls and young women in the UK from April 2022 to October 2023. We first give an overview of our method which focuses on peer research – notably the researcher-in-residence model – and subsequently go on to discuss two central aspects: (un)learning and visual methods. We argue that such approaches contrast traditional methods of doing research with young people (e.g. surveying), by giving us ways of exploring the banality (eg. benches) and complexity (feelings of safety) of young women’s experiences of the public realm; and by allowing research participants to have greater agency in representing their own lifeworlds. It is our view that this methodology makes the case for why it is essential to value the tacit knowledge that young women and girls have in meaningful and attentive ways if we are to create an inclusive public realm.