ABSTRACT
Children and youth have the inalienable right to both occupy and be involved in the planning of public spaces in their communities. However, often citing lack of time, knowledge, and resources, professional planners, designers, and municipal organizations struggle to operationalize participatory processes that acknowledge youth as capable and legitimate contributors to community design. This chapter outlines a flexible, participatory, rights-based framework, along with recommended tools, which can be utilized to genuinely engage children and youth in processes to collectively design and build more youth-inclusive public spaces. The process and its efficacy will be illustrated via a sample project from London, Canada where public elementary school children were integrated into the assessment and re-design of an unused, tarmacked portion of their schoolyard into a public play and learning garden. Children were positioned as co-researchers and co-designers of the space, responsible for all components of site research and design development including site assessment and measurement, behavioral observation, and user needs identification. Design solutions and priorities identified by the youth informed a consensus-building process which produced a final design for the naturalized learning and play garden. The youth participatory design framework and tools outlined here, grounded in the rights of children and principles of meaningful participation, can serve as a guide to engaging in effective, collaborative co-design and planning with youth, helping to remove some of the key barriers to the development of youth-inclusive public spaces.
