Spy with My Eyes! Re-figuration of Youth’s Participation in Urban Planning

Young people are increasingly getting more involved in both urban planning and urban design. In line with Hart’s proclaimed Ladder of Participation, children and adolescents are progressively seen pushing toward more sustainable development. At the same time we can reconstruct changes in the appropriation of spaces by children and adolescence – today’s digital natives – , and their understanding of space trough mediatisation of communicative actions and polycontexturality of spatial constitutions. Evidence stemming from an ongoing research project, suggests that young people modify according to their intuitive needs and preferences to specific aspects of the intended plan and design, if they have the space and time to do so. Overall, it is believed that inherent conflictual character of planning participatory processes becomes exponentially puzzling by youth and children’s capacity to “spy with their little eye” as well as performatively and subversively contradict “professional decisions” and their adult knowledge of space.

Professor Angela Million is an urban designer and planner. She is Professor of Urban Design and Director of the Institute of City and Regional Planning at TU Berlin. Her research focuses on participatory urban design, social infrastructure and Baukultur, with a special interest in cities as educational settings, children and youth. Her most recent research explores educational landscapes, multifunctional infrastructure design and the relevance of spatial knowledge in planning processes, latter within the SFB 1265 “Re-Figuration of Space”. Building on her work in the classroom, Professor Million’s scholarship includes studies on teaching urban design and visual communication in planning. She is Director of the new DAAD-funded Global Center on Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability.