Architecture for kids podcast with Dr Matluba Khan Lecturer in Urban Design School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University

Engaging children in design thinking about their own environment can help them see their everyday place differently and make them feel listened to and that their opinions matter as citizens. I am impressed to see the line-up of speakers in this podcast series and look forward to listening to it.

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

you

SPEAKER_01: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablão. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. Thank you very much. received multiple international accolades for her co-design projects that include Environment Design Research Association Great Places Award 2016 and American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award 2017. Prior to joining the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, she worked as a research fellow at the University College London and served as an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. But Luba, thank you for coming to talk to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47

Hello, thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:49

What subjects were you good at school and what subjects did you enjoy most?

SPEAKER_00: 1:55

I actually enjoyed everything as kind of the person who loved arts, sciences, literature, mathematics, language. It is in that sense that I found it difficult to choose a subject when I went to university.

SPEAKER_01: 2:09

How did you become an architect?

SPEAKER_00: 2:11

Architecture as a discipline I know in India, some girls, parents

SPEAKER_01: 2:31

advise girls to study architecture because it's a better profession. Does that same thing happen in Bangladesh?

SPEAKER_00: 2:42

There is a perception. that perhaps architecture is better than engineering for girls in the society. But in terms of my family, I think it was more of my choice. So my father always enabled me to take my own decisions. I always exercised certain agency as a child and as a young woman that many young women of my age at the time did not do. For me, architecture was more of that kind of choice that I have made. Perhaps without understanding the implications of it as well, or the future.

SPEAKER_01: 3:15

You studied architecture in Bangladesh and you practiced out there and you came to the UK. Tell us about your trajectory.

SPEAKER_00: 3:22

As an architecture student, I think in third year or fourth year, I had this movement of just trying to understand like what I'm going to do after I graduate. I guess to some extent, I didn't think at that time that I'll go into building industry in the sense of designing individual buildings. And I started becoming concerned about the wider societal implications of architecture, thinking of how architecture can actually help the community, the society, but I didn't know the route to that in many ways, or perhaps I was not shown the way or the path that I need to take to do that. In my fourth year of undergraduate study, there was a workshop on architecture research, which was very interesting to me. And in fifth year, I decided to take thesis. So we have two strands that we can take for fifth year dissertation, either in It's a thesis project or it's a project project. I did take a thesis project where I looked into how to rethink children's learning environments based on the theories of child development. How children develop socially, physically, emotionally, cognitively, and how we can design space that can foster that development. That was the inspiration to take this research path, but then create a design based on that research. That was to a certain extent was an introduction into evidence-based design.

SPEAKER_01: 4:44

I

SPEAKER_00: 4:46

designed actually schools based on a hot learning environment. And following that, I became more interested in the outdoor spaces of schools. I think that was the kind of start of moving from the building toward the outdoor spaces. And I felt like many of the criteria that I have found out from the research are actually embedded in the outdoor space if it is well designed. So in my master's and PhD research project, I actually then looked into how to co-design pool grounds as outdoor learning environments with children and young people. And that was the start with co-design with children and young people. In my PhD research, what I did is I co-designed an outdoor learning environment with children and we co-built and I evaluated the impact of it on children's academic attainment, their motivation to learn. And the interesting finding around that is it is not only important for the children, but also for the teachers to have that resourceful outdoor learning environment that was co-designed designed with children and with teachers. As I said, the journey to us focusing on more outdoor environments and I was introduced to more landscape literature, the relationship between landscape and well-being, but also the power of a design, the co-design. I taught at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, then I did my PhD at the University of Edinburgh. But eventually, interesting that I actually worked at epidemiology and public health at University College London, which really looked into the relationship of these intergenerational Talks

SPEAKER_01: 6:14

about the importance

SPEAKER_00: 6:18

for teachers. Tell us why is it important? teacher-centric without experiment or exploration. But when we co-built that outdoor learning environment together, I started observing the teachers have started using the affordances of the environment. What the physical environment or the school landscape that we co-designed together and co-built together offer for teaching numeracy, for teaching fluency, for teaching different science and maths concepts. And they started to see that and and the learning become more child-centred rather than teacher-centred. And teachers themselves then said that they were in that loop in the classroom, that this is the way of teaching and learning. But as they moved to the outdoor environments, they started to see that the place can be the third teacher, but also teachers need to understand to a certain extent what the place can offer for teaching and learning, utilise that, and that can make learning more fun and enjoying.

SPEAKER_01: 7:37

That sort of bringing a project-based approach to learning and to the curriculum, and what is the implication or the impact on the public health?

SPEAKER_00: 7:44

When I was working at UCL and the Public Health Department, I was working on this project called Inherit, a Horizon 2020, a large-scale project across Europe. But as part of that, I, working with my colleague, I designed an inter-pool-based gardening intervention. And what we looked into, that how pool-based gardening intervention can improve children's physical activity, children's attitudes to eating healthy food, eating more fruits and vegetables, and also the aspect of environmental sustainability and how equal-based gardening interventions can help children think about the environment. That is something that we evaluated across different interventions across Europe, different kind of landscape interventions. There was a project in Norway which was a path built over an abandoned railway. So we evaluated how that path impacted people's active travel behaviour, people's health behaviour in terms of physical activity. What I perhaps want to say in terms of public health, how this built environment interventions can actually help people adopt this health behaviour, can improve people's health at population level.

SPEAKER_01: 8:51

This was your initial project, Maldives to Evolve.

SPEAKER_00: 8:54

When I accepted the position at Cardiff University and moved here, and right after that pandemic happened, and as we all know, how pandemic has affected children significantly, particularly from disadvantaged communities and deprived neighbourhoods. At the time, I wanted to investigate how pandemic has affected children's everyday lived experiences, their experiences of play in the neighborhood, and what can be done to recover. And as I always work, I have adopted child-centric approach. So I wanted to adopt a child-centric approach to create a recovery plan for neighborhoods. That's when we applied for a small funding to work on this project, which we now name as A Grange Town to Grow Up In. So in this project, myself, with my colleague We worked with more than 150 children in Grangetown, children and young people. So they were from 8 to 17 years old. We worked with them and we co-assessed the neighborhood. Children and young people shared with us what they value in the neighborhood, how pandemic has affected their everyday experiences, their play, their recreation, and what can be done actually to come out of it. So not only come out of it, but what can be done to to make Greenstown a better place to grow up in. That project used various creative methods to enable children and young people to share their voices, to share their opinions about the place they lived in. So many of the young people actually mentioned that nobody has asked them before about the places, and they themselves also mentioned that they have taken their everyday places for granted, but this project has enabled them to look into their everyday places with a different eye while appreciate what they have in their community at the same time understand what can be done to improve it to make it better.

SPEAKER_01: 10:52

How do you work with the children and young people to get their opinion?

SPEAKER_00: 10:55

What we say is there are four steps to creating a child-friendly neighbourhood in the sense that co-creating a child-friendly neighbourhood meaning like to capture children's voices is the first step to explore what is there in my neighbourhood now. So what we do is We do drawings, mapping, walking in the neighborhood. We ask children to lead us to the places they value in the neighborhood, to the places that they think they're important, both in both ways, positively or negatively, so the places they like, but also the places where they may not feel safe. Walk and talk was very appreciated by children and young people that helped them look into their usual places in a different way. And then we experienced explored children's feelings in the neighborhood, so how pandemic has affected them. If you say the second step is actually designing future neighborhood based on what we have learned in the first and second workshop, like walk and talk and mapping. Then we start doing overview planning. So we use map and then tracing paper to trace over things and to lay over it and drawing and using post-it notes. And then also based on the overview planning, children decide which part they want to make detail design on, then they make model of certain elements of it. What we do next is we do prioritization. It's not only getting children's ideas and capturing their voices, but also what they value most. Because we cannot implement all the ideas at the same time, and generally adults make the decision in terms of what they want to implement. What we wanted to explore is ask children what they value most, what they think that should be done now, what can be done in medium term like one to three years and what can be done in three plus years we discuss this concept of short medium and long term or we ask them you do not think about the budget but you think what is most important for you to implement now and interestingly they don't actually take into consideration various practical factors when they make their decisions they do not have access to knowledge about everything about the practicalities of how this can happen but they have a very good knowledge of about many things how they happen prioritization is a very And then bringing this all together in a plan that can be shared with everyone, something that children and young people can read, not an adult plan that adults read, but a plan that is co-created with children and young people using very visual language, but also visual child-friendly language that can be read by anyone from any discipline. So it's not geared to only designers or planners who can read plans, but it is for everyone will be able to read what children and young people share. Those were the steps that we have taken in that project.

SPEAKER_01: 13:42

What I'd like to ask you is, you know, in terms of the kids react when you start these conversations and this workshop, as well as the community, their parents, their guardians or their grandparents.

SPEAKER_00: 13:52

What we did when we were working in Grangetown, we have done several drop-in sessions in Grange Pavilion as part of different events. That was the time when we were able to interact with the parents. We haven't done any systematic process of asking parents or grandparents or the community, but we made sure that we are present in the community events and we're doing those community events, we talk to the parents, we talk to the other but more kind of older children or young people above the age of 18 and very enthusiastically they took part and they took it very positively that children are being asked, that they're being valued as citizens and we used also different kind of creative methods, stickers and drawings to generate those discussions.

SPEAKER_01: 14:37

What do you think is the impact of bringing children and young people into to a standalone discussion about the built environment. What's the impact on their lives and on the community where they live?

SPEAKER_00: 14:48

In terms of impact on children, I think they felt valued, empowered, that they could share their opinions. They had a platform to share their opinions about the places they're living in. But also, we have worked closely with the local authority and local councillors. When we launched the plan, the local authority and the local councillors were invited. This local councillor was born and raised in that area I think the impact that was the local councillor, he has been very enthusiastic about it. And he said, I want to do more to listen to the voices of children and young people in my area. And that was really strong in terms of, it's not always that we will be going to go to do workshops, but what can be done so that sharing their opinions is a continuous process. I remember to be, we came in a British Town Schools advisory panel and he discussed with the teachers how he can listen to kind of children's voices. that expressed his ideas to listen to children's voices through various mediums, which I consider as impactful. So we have produced a toolkit for the planners, designers and teachers and we have shared it with the local authority, the Child Friendly Cardiff team and planners. They can use now those tools to actually work with children from different communities to listen to their voice.

SPEAKER_01: 16:06

How can we make these initiatives and broaden them and widen them to other communities So one

SPEAKER_00: 16:13

thing that you have asked me earlier about the summer school program. One thing that we have piloted this time, the summer school program called Cities and Children, where I, along with my colleagues, we designed the summer school program to equip our students with the skills and knowledge and tools that will enable them to co-design with children and people to listen to their voices. And once they graduate, they can take it to their workplace when they work. Or if they research, they can take it to their school. research and implement it in that sense that they now do have the knowledge and confidence actually to work with children and young people. I think that one way of creating impact that we're equipping our students with the skill that can take to the employment because they will work in local authorities, they will work with private organizations, consultancy firms, they have the practical experience of working with children and if we can continue such programs, if we can embed this in our mainstream modules, our students will be equipped with more skills. One student really mentioned that I have learned more about research in the last four days than I have learned in my entire program, which was quite powerful in that sense. I think that's one way that we are approaching it, that we're also talking with local authorities about creating training programs for planners and designers. They are equipped with that, that they can implement and they can apply in these tools.

SPEAKER_01: 17:33

There's a lot of professionals out there that know understanding how to work with children and people, so that's a strategy to deal with it.

SPEAKER_00: 17:40

We'll have the toolkit available that the professionals can use, but also if we can make this training program, it will be available to professionals. So not only within the local authorities, we need to find a way of making it that the professionals can access too. We will adopt strategy around that. But also, I work not only in CODIS, I'm involved in co-design projects in Bangladesh and in Brazil. As I said, I started my career in Bangladesh and I'm working on developing a toolkit with Bangladeshi teachers. We develop a learning environment toolkit with Bangladesh primary school and secondary school teachers, which includes a range of activities that can help teachers to engage children in assessing their own learning environment. By learning environment, we didn't limit it to the school itself. It is a school environment, so indoor environment is also outdoor environment. It is the community learning environment. It is the home learning environment and the digital learning environment. I've used developing an encompassing toolkit, which will enable teachers actually to work with children to assess their own environment. But also we wanted to work with professionals in Bangladesh as well, that architects and landscape architects can work with these toolkits as they approach designing learning environments. It is a long battle, I think, a long journey, but we're taking several different strategies to make it more feasible for people at different places.

SPEAKER_01: 19:04

As you create these toolkits that you're going to implement in Bangladesh or in Brazil, here in Wales, UK. There are similarities and there are differences. I mean, this has to be site-specific or culturally-specific. How does that work?

SPEAKER_00: 19:18

I think one approach that we take, particularly the method, how it's designed in the method. Because the toolkit that I just mentioned is specifically now in Bangladesh. It is tapped to Bangladeshi curriculum. When we do it in a Welsh context, we'll tap it to Welsh curriculum. But at the same time, the activities, they are to generate the discussion, they are to bring out the ideas, and the ideas will always be context specific so it is never prescriptive in the sense it is not prescriptive it is designed in a way that enables bringing out contextual factors because when children share their ideas in a Bangladeshi context they will look into their own neighborhood it's a very place-based approach they're looking into their own neighborhood they're assessing the place they are living in and they are deriving ideas for the place they live in from day one we took that place-based neighborhood based approach because children are the experts of of their own neighbourhood, of the place they are living in. They are then generating ideas for that place. They're experts.

SPEAKER_01: 20:17

The basis that could be used almost in any country, as well as some of the tools. But the content, how you explore that framework into an activity or a workshop, then is site-specific. Not just culturally specific, but site-specific as well.

SPEAKER_00: 20:32

Yes, exactly. How you can run it would be the same, like you'll ask children to draw where is your home and which places you want to go. And we'll be engaging children in mapping. will be using the map of their local area. The instructions will be more or less similar, but you are using the things that are specific, not only context, that specific neighbor.

SPEAKER_01: 20:52

In the big scheme of things, where are we with the landscape of children and youth engagement in Chandler?

SPEAKER_00: 20:59

This is not new, right? This is something that has been happening. Even some of the methods like traffic light mapping or towing, these are not new methods. These methods are been used. It was used in 1970s. Very interesting examples from Italy around it. When I started working here, I was quite surprised that this is not new, but this has not happened to the extent that you would expect. Although, particularly if you think of Wales, Wales has a really progressive policy framework. No other country has the Wellbeing of the Future Generation Act or the place efficiency assessment that Welsh local authorities are bound to do to create more play opportunities for children. These are really progressive ideas and a policy framework that enables doing things like that. But still, not a lot are happening. I think planners are not much comfortable about going out there and talking to children. But what I would say that there is more appetite for it within the local authority, amongst adults as well, I would say amongst the community. I think more and more we see that people, I think perhaps appetite appreciate the idea of listening to the young people and bringing them into the kind of conversation more. We just need to be cautious about that it doesn't become tokenistic. I think that that was one challenge in many cases. Sometimes these just become quite tokenistic and not necessarily this informed decision making in that sense or there is perhaps not a clear-cut pathway in terms of how it can inform the decision.

SPEAKER_01: 22:36

What is in your view that needs to start this movement and I think

SPEAKER_00: 22:43

definitely like for other countries, they can think about learning from the policy framework, particularly well-being of future generation and place efficiency. That's the kind of wider policy framework that can enable the kind of local authorities to work under or different organizations to work under. But in terms of implementation, how the voices can go towards, I think we need more work there and more research on how to unstuck this and how the ideas can into actually the actions. I know that many times we do it on a very individual level, but at collective capacity, this doesn't happen much. For example, the school braille that I mentioned, it has been done on a very much individual level, sponsored by an individual, anonymous individual. But when I try kind of unstuck, bang the doors of the people with power who can fund certain things, I got stuck there. I got stuck in the implementation of it. And to a certain extent, I think the other issue is the silos that at different professionals working. It's also outside, well, like outside the local authority, in the outside world, different professionals, they work in silos. Within the local authority, I think that not all departments actually talk to each other, but then perhaps different departments go on different participatory work. But sometimes it's also limited to the people who work with children and youth, rather than, for example, the planners or landscape architect or architect. What we need, there is a people from all of this place to work together, breaking the silos and and thinking together how all these ideas that come here that are not specific to certain departments. And because we are always directed to certain other departments, people need to think about, okay, if it falls under my department, I'll work on it. But they need to work together to find a way of how to work with them. Intersectoral.

SPEAKER_01: 24:28

One last question. Was there a question I should have asked you that I haven't asked you? And what is that question?

SPEAKER_00: 24:34

I think we need to talk more about, one thing is decolonizing higher education, but humanizing higher education. We talk a lot about curriculum changes because children are intervention at early stages are really helpful in the sense that developing that agency, the children can grow up as citizens. But also, I think higher education has a greater role to play. To such an extent, perhaps we do not really maybe to that extent cater for the community we are based in. And we need to really have more practice-oriented and community-based works embedded Thank you

SPEAKER_01: 25:31

very much to my guests today, to all the listeners, and please subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and the Thank you very much. And please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast, brought to you in collaboration with the Build Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.