Viewpoint: Young people and the built environment: can they shape our cities?

Abstract

It is widely recognised that child-friendly and youth-friendly urban design is central to building sustainable communities. Yet, no matter how strong this argument is, current advice on how to achieve this objective is articulated from adult perspectives, taking the approach that 'the professionals know best'. This Viewpoint argues that children and young people have the right and the ability to contribute to planning and urban design processes and that they can engage creatively in delivering sustainable communities. Young people: their built environment and advances in understanding learning and teaching Today there is widespread concern about the content and methods of teaching of young people. The seminal work developed by UNICEF, for example, since the early 1990s, puts forward recommendations about the need to recognise the developmental needs and strengthen the rights of children and teenagers living in cities. The recent UNICEF report (2006) on the status of children has clearly established that issues such as poverty and inequalities which children experience within their neighbourhoods and cities lead to the significant exclusion of these groups from participation in the decision-making processes to help shape the world we inhabit. All too often we see young people as a threat because they do not always conform to our ideas of what they should or should not be doing in public spaces. On the other hand, young students claim that the professionals have failed them because they do not take into consideration their needs and desires. A number of pedagogic and academic experts and built environment professionals argue that children and young adults have the ability to understand complex relationships, including complex relationships across different subject areas such as biology, geography, history and art (Bransford et al., 1999; Spencer et al., 1989). They argue that people's views and experiences, normally studied in relation to particular places, are fundamental to the development of 'self ' and one's own identity. Spencer and colleagues (1989 and 2006) and Dudek (2005), for instance, consider that education plays an important role in determining how children and teenagers can, or cannot, face the social, political, cultural and urban problems which they experience in their lives. This view suggests that through a basic understanding of the principles of learning, children and teenagers can be helped to become self-sustaining life-long learners, able to make important decisions which will enrich their lives and the lives of other social groups. Hart (1997) studied children's experiences of places in terms of their place knowledge, place values and feelings and place use. Further research on learning and transfer of knowledge (Lewis et al., 2004) indicates that 'situational' and place-based learning encourages a reflective process of learning, whereby students can synthesise knowledge and skills acquired in both classroom and situational learning. This observation is particularly useful when it comes to using IT-based technology and skills, a medium that young people also use for their personal or peer group entertainment. It is argued here that through virtual visualisations and other methods young people and students can put into practice complex urban design principles and ideas. To demonstrate how this could be achieved an example of working with young people in the field of the built environment is explained below. The Rootscape project The Joint Centre for Urban Design (JCUD) at Oxford Brookes University, together with Oxford Youthworks and Mayim, ran an UrbanBuzz project called Rootscape, funded by HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England). The Rootscape project was designed to enable children and young people (aged 12-16) to experience and understand urban design, to work with built environment professionals in creating visions of how to improve rundown areas of Oxford and to empower them to make decisions about the neighbourhoods in which they live. …