INTRODUCTION
It is a common assumption that teenagers are disobedient, reckless, and dangerous. This perception of youth as detrimental to the people and spaces around them has led to their constant monitoring. As a result, young people have few (if any) spaces in a city where they feel welcomed and autonomous. If they congregate in public and semi-public spaces like parks, fast food restaurants, streets, train stations, shopping malls, school grounds, or parking lots, they regularly run into conflict with police, security, business owners, school administrators, and other authority figures. Whether they are viewed as criminal threats or a nuisance, young people are often the victims of legal, spatial, and social restriction through such means as anti-loitering laws, noise regulations, curfews, park closing times, skate deterrents, restaurant time limits, and cost.
This is felt especially hard by Black and Brown youth, who are frequently harassed by law enforcement and other adults for their mere presence in public space. Aggressive forms of zero-tolerance policing on top of the school to prison pipeline can have detrimental consequences for youth—they can cause emotional distress, result in physical conflicts, or potentially initiate a cycle of incarceration. Added to this, hostile architecture such as spikes on ledges and lack of seating, sends a clear message to teens: “you are not welcomed here.” It does not help that the prioritization of vehicular traffic in American cities has created unsafe streets, further compounding the challenges faced by young people.
The COVID-19 pandemic also brought into sharp relief the mental health crisis overtaking teens today. While this issue predates the pandemic, the isolation and instability experienced during that time exacerbated the problem. As the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association state in their “Declaration of a National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health” from 2021, rates of “depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality” are soaring among young people. Data shows that this is particularly high for LGBTQIA+ youth who are struggling with an increasingly hostile political climate.
This studio asks how we might envision the environment and conditions for young people to thrive and feel free, comfortable, and safe in the city. It aims to assert young people’s right to the city and challenge the unjust and counterproductive rejection of teenagers in the built environment. It asks students to imagine ways the city can be more open and inclusive towards youth, offering alternatives to adults’ spatial hegemony.
SITE & PROGRAM
This studio will focus its efforts on the Bronx, the borough with the highest percentage of people under the age of 18. In particular, students will consider the neighborhoods of Concourse and Morrisania, homes to the studio’s community partners, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco) and DreamYard. These neighborhoods have a rich history. They are places that nurtured the rise of hip-hop, beginning fifty years ago, as well as other musical styles. They are also areas that have experienced cycles of systematic neglect and disinvestment, as well as recent surges of gentrification.
Building off the work of the community partners, as well as key findings drawn from direct observations of the site and recurring engagements with community youth, students will be tasked with developing a comprehensive set of city-wide policy ideas, as well as site-specific urban design proposals to make this area youth-affirming. Student projects would not simply scatter more youth-centric amenities throughout the area, they would radically reconsider spatial-social relations and how spaces are designed, managed, policed, and operated. The program and exact site for students’ projects would be constructed through research and analysis, and can tackle a wide range of youth-related topics, such as the arts, mental health, policing, education, commerce, civic engagement, etc.
METHODOLOGY
Through this studio, students will be introduced to the theories and methods of community-centered design. Over a sequence of exercises, students will gain experience connecting with, learning from, and collaborating with stakeholders. Students will combine participatory research and design approaches to understand user needs grounded in real-world insights and formulate impactful and visionary design responses through an iterative process that is guided by active listening.
Students will work closely with community partners WHEDco and DreamYard. WHEDco is a community development organization that serves over 1,000 young people in the Bronx through its youth development programs. DreamYard is an arts organization that fosters equity and social justice among Bronx youth through its visual and performing arts programming.
In addition to working with these organizations, students will also be collaborating with a group of youth advisors, a dedicated group of teens from WHEDco and DreamYard, who will consult with students throughout the semester and also participate in the midterm and final reviews. As young people’s necessities are often ignored and their views are not taken seriously, this studio stresses the importance of including young people, especially Black and Latinx youth, in the decision-making process, uplifting the voices of a demographic often overlooked and rejected by architecture and urban design.
Students will begin by interrogating their own memories of being a teenager wherever they grew up, and analyzing ways they carved out spaces of autonomy as well as ways they were made to feel unwelcomed. This exercise is intended to ground students’ work in their own lived experience.
Students will also create community engagement tools that they will deploy during the studio trip. For the studio trip, students will be fully immersed in the Bronx. They will familiarize themselves with the project site and current youth-related issues through community walking tours, interactions with the community partners, meetings with city agencies, policymakers, and other youth-oriented organizations, and (most importantly) active engagement with local youth (in addition to the youth advisors) through a community-engagement workshop.
The studio is focused on building long-term relationships and maintaining multiple touch points throughout the semester with the community partners and youth advisors. Work from the studio will be compiled into a report after the semester is complete that can be utilized by the community partners and others to advocate for policy changes and inspire future projects. All work (except for the first exercise) will be done in groups. The studio will encourage experimental techniques for image-making and representation.