The joy of…co-design

There’s been an explosion in the desire to evoke ‘joy’ in our public spaces over the last few years. I’m not sure where it’s come from but it’s certainly needed.

The drab, grey spaces most of us live in and move through as part of our day to day routines are often overlooked and unappreciated spaces that instead of platforming creativity, joy, possibility and connectedness are rooted in necessity, survival, the bare minimum.

Through all our work at Street Space we see our neighbourhood infrastructure: streets, parks, pavements, corners as a canvas that is there to be shaped, played with and experimented on.

But why, you may ask? We share Fred Kent’s view that: “the street is the stage where public life takes place”.

If we want people to live out happy, healthy, thriving lives in public we need to set the stage for them to do this. If we want people to choose to walk, wheel or cycle instead of driving we need to make the pedestrian experience the easiest, more accessible, safe and fun way of getting around. If we want people from all backgrounds to feel it’s possible to walk, wheel or cycle to get around we need to make it the most radically inclusive thing to choose. If we want people to be able to walk freely and easily whilst using a pushchair we need to prioritise walking and cycling over parking and driving. If we want anyone, other than a cis white male, to feel like the city is designed for them… we need to embrace radical change and shifts in our built environment.

We don’t know all the answers, but we know that to do this we need to work with people in a meaningful and collaborative way — shifting power as we do it. Radically re-occupying and reclaiming these unloved spaces as acts of community or neighbourhood power. If we want to champion places and fill them with engaging ideas and activities that will bring people together and connect them we need to invest and experiment in activating our shared spaces with local people, making space for new ideas, for feedback loops and mistakes in a bid to create the best possible chance of designing neighbourhoods, towns and cities that work for everyone.

Since January we’ve been working with teenage girls to reimagine a well used, but unloved snicket between homes and school, mosque and the park in Manningham, Bradford. Through a series of collaborative design workshops we listened to the girls to identify, dream and then bring to life the girls’ ideas in the snicket over a period of months. Listen to the joy in the girls’ reactions seeing their ideas come to life in the real world.

Kids enjoying the hop scotch. Photo credit: Alex Fisher

This is the power of collaborative design, of collaborative working and hopefully demonstrating that it is possible for the fabric of the places around us to be re-shaped and renewed with new ideas, colour and imagery. For different people to be in the driving seat of that change showing us all environments can change, and so can we.