Kids, joy, and flipping the table on who gets to influence the future
It turns out the next generation has a clear idea of what they want for society and the planet. As planners and urban designers, it’s up to us to create new avenues for youth engagement and to advocate for kids’ influence on decision-making. At Framework, we’re proud of our approach to youth engagement in a variety of projects and look forward to giving kids more of a role in the future.
Traditional engagement efforts in community planning play to the strengths of people with an abundance of time and access to information. Night meetings at city hall, public hearings, and prototypical focus groups revolve around the nine-to-five work schedule and assume people can break away from their life obligations around dinner time. A check-the-box mindset on public engagement too often defaults to these perfunctory outlets and the result amplifies the voices of older and wealthier residents. This is frustrating, because it ensures that the narrow interests held by this subset of the population become the basis for decisions affecting entire communities. Consequently, the ideas and aspirations of people of color, low-income residents, renters, and kids are lost, or, at best, underrepresented and underappreciated.
This doesn’t have to be the endgame of public discourse in urban design and planning. Luckily, many cities are increasingly aware of the existing engagement deficits and are looking to connect with a wider range of people that more accurately represent the community at large.
As a firm that puts people at the heart of planning and design, Framework has maximized inclusive engagement since our earliest projects. And over the past year, we’ve turned it up a notch when finding creative ways to emphasize the voices and ideas of one of our most overlooked groups in society: kids.
First, our honest appreciation for kids
Children, teenagers, and young adults inherently see and experience our communities differently. Not only are they incredibly insightful about the issues that adults have been trying to solve for decades, but they bring a perspective of joyfulness and scale that’s often challenging for jaded, full-grown adults to fathom. Unleashing their ideas, however, requires much more thought than asking them to speak up during a city council meeting.
Here are a few examples of how we’re putting kids’ perspectives at center stage in our projects.
Seattle Design Festival – Design Your Own Neighborhood
Last summer, Framework developed a fun kid-friendly activity for the Seattle Design Festival called “Design Your Own Neighborhood.” Our installation invited festival-goers to create an inclusive neighborhood that supports community gathering, maximizes green/open space, and accommodates a variety of homes, retail/service offerings, and public amenities.
Anticipating the masses of families that would descend upon Lake Union Park in mid-summer, we intentionally designed the activity with kids in mind. Our components—a gridded ground cloth and colored boxes indicating homes, retail, and amenities—were simple and small so children could easily maneuver and place their buildings. Plus, the flexible, yet gamified rules spurred creativity and even instilled some competition among these young designers. Our favorite outcomes, however, were kids’ narratives of their creations.
Comprehensive Planning in Milton and Sultan – From Crayons and LEGOs to Visual Preference Boards
Youth engagement is essential in our comprehensive planning projects. As we envision the next 20-years in cities across the state, we’re especially diligent about kids’ involvement as demand for more kid-focused activities and destinations intensifies in many communities. It’s also clear that kids are keenly aware of the community needs for 30-to-40 year-olds—their age by the end of the planning period.
In Sultan, we rolled out a huge vinyl basemap and invited kids (and their parents) to scribble notes and place LEGOs to indicate where they want to see new homes, schools, shops, restaurants, parks, trails, and safe streets. The activity—inspired by James Rojas’ Placeit concept—is approachable for many ages and abilities, place-based and aspirational, and interactive at many levels: someone can place a single LEGO or have a detailed discussion with us about their ideas.
We’re also visiting schools and tying into other events that teenagers are already attending. In Milton, we asked middle schoolers to map their favorite places and dream about new destinations. We also had the opportunity to gather specific design ideas for Hill Tower Park, which gave us invaluable information about kids’ desired programming like a climbing structure and splash pad.
Arts and Culture in Renton – Wishing Wells and High School Surveys
Framework is also involving youth in our arts and culture plans. In Renton, we asked kids to toss their wishes for new public art projects, cultural spaces, and more into a makeshift wishing well—in exchange for a piece of candy, of course! We also had the opportunity to join an art teacher’s event where high school students felt comfortable filling out a survey about new creative classes, performance spaces, and art installations in the city.
Let’s Face it: Planning for kids is planning for the future
If we really want safer streets, equitable development, diverse housing options, and vibrant public spaces in our communities, then we ought to elevate the perspectives of children. Kids approach the built, social, and natural world with a balance of curiosity, imagination, and vulnerability that can be equally practical and inspiring. They’re regularly looking for adventure and play, and, at the same time, undeniably vulnerable to the harms of a warming climate and an unsafe, inaccessible public realm—not to mention entirely disadvantaged in a culture that revolves around cars. Our youth are also keenly aware of our societal struggles for social justice and climate action. So, taken seriously, the realities of kids’ lived experience can inform design interventions and policy moves that produce a more comfortable, joyful, and socially just world for everyone.
As our work progresses, we’ll be constantly looking for more opportunities to engage with these thoughtful and imaginative members of our society.
Written by Tyler Quinn-Smith @Framework
