Architecture for kids podcast with Simeon Shtebunaev Interdisciplinary researcher in the built environment

Children, teens and young people are here, now and have as much right as anyone else to shape the world around us all. I see taking part in this podcast series as a challenge to all built environment professionals to go out and engage with their younger co-citizens today instead of relinquishing them to the future.

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 Cablón. 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. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust, and the Wells School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Simeon Shibania. Simeon is an interdisciplinary researcher in the built environment. His PhD project at Birmingham City University explores how young people engage in the planning of future smart cities. He was the principal investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Are You Game? for Climate Action, developing the board game Climania with young people focusing on the role of the built environment in climate change. Simeon was selected as the RIBA Journal Rising Star 2021 and the Royal Town Planning Institute's Young Planner of the Year 2022. He chairs the Cultural Infrastructure and Investment Working Group, part of the West Midlands Combined Authority Cultural Leadership Board. Simeon, thank you for coming to talk to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Thank you. Antonio. Thank you for having me. What was your favourite subject at school and what were you good at?

SPEAKER_00: 1:48

I was one of those annoying people that was good at everything at school, which was really bad. But I enjoyed mathematics. That was my favourite subject at school. I had further maths. I did mathematics competitions. I did international competitions in mathematics. I loved maths. But I think then led into all the other subjects because I think once you get the logic of how to think in a structured manner, you can crack all the other subjects as well because all the social sciences, everything It has the same structure. I enjoyed pretty much everything, but maths was my favourite.

SPEAKER_01: 2:17

Did it help you in your career and what you're doing today?

SPEAKER_00: 2:20

I've noticed a lot of social scientists come from a very arts-led background or a background which is centred in the humanities. I think with having a maths background, it really, really helps me to look at the bigger picture and think strategically and think about when the equation was actually missing, what are the different bits that are not there, and that's where I'm focusing my research on and hence the work with young people and teenagers.

SPEAKER_01: 2:42

You are doing a lot of work with young people and varied work. Shall we start with the planning work? Because I find that interesting in terms of the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: 2:52

Yeah, for sure. At the moment, apart from working as a researcher at Social Life in London, I'm also a lecturer and PhD researcher at Birmingham City University. My research really focuses on how, when we develop future city visions, and I'm really interested in the smart city visions, how do we involve all of society and in particular young people? I'm really interested in what are the processes in the planning, visioning, when we actually set out what we want the future to be where are the voices of young people integrated but in a structural manner so you know where the policies where the processes where the best practice case studies so when you are a planner or when you really an economic director in a council or when you're a developer you know how to actually integrate that voice and it's already there it's already a practice I think that already is happening a lot more but it's still case by case basis and I think for me that's an interesting challenge to think about how do we do that in a structured in a standardized manner so people actually that becomes just normal part of the world and on the other side in my own PhD I'm really been interested in the views of the young people so actually understanding what it is that you want from a city and what are the priorities and are we actually planning our cities around those priorities of that demographic and maybe I can talk a bit more about that in a bit

SPEAKER_01: 3:59

but it would be interesting to talk about the landscape of planning and the young people what is being done are you involving kids in planning or not and will we be involving if you talk a little bit about that

SPEAKER_00: 4:12

yeah so This is very pertinent because I'm writing a paper on tracking the development of youth inclusion in urban planning. And a lot of the literature comes from America, from the US. If you know the Einstein ladder of participation in the 80s, there was an academic who works in the international development world. And actually, a lot of the literature about youth inclusion comes from social work and from international development. So if you think about the UNICEF, the UNESCO activities. So there was an academic called Roger Hart who adapted that ladder of participation and created a youth ladder of participation when he was talking about the co-production of places in the development world, but then that made its way into the planning world as well. The theory's been there 40 years. In practice, however, the barriers have always been funding, adult centrism, patronisation of young people, and just not being seen as a priority.

SPEAKER_01: 4:56

You mentioned co-production. Do you want to clarify what co-production means in this setting?

SPEAKER_00: 5:01

Yes. The original kind of participation theories always lead to citizen power. At the end, there is a relinquishing of power from the authority to the citizens. In the youth inclusion field, at the moment, the ceiling has been seen as co-production pure, because you're working with people who by default in the way that was structured our societies would never be able to absorb all the power that you give them because they can't they don't have the financial means they don't have the expertise the experience and so on co-production in this sense means that you facilitate a process in which there is an equal power relationship but there is still the acknowledgement that ultimately it is adults that would have to produce the environment but is facilitated the children and the young people are very much on the table in the same level of decision-making powers but i think it's important to think that even if we talk about, you know, hearing young people where they're still in a power relationship with adults purely because they don't have the economic power, they don't have the voting rights. It would be foolish to say that it's an equal relationship. Always they have to recognize that there is a power dynamic in the addresses.

SPEAKER_01: 5:56

They also don't have the expertise nor the experience. We need to make that very clear that although it is important to have their voices heard, there's an element of expertise and experience that they don't have that needs to be factored in.

SPEAKER_00: 6:09

You mentioned one of the projects, Claymania, that we worked on. In that project, The way we design our co-production process was we would take all the leads from the young people that we work with. We worked with 12 young people who are our co-leads, co-researchers. We trained them, but we were very aware that at any point when they have to start looking at knowledge base, then they have to start looking at design skills that they don't have, we as experts could come in and provide those skills. But when we talked about strategy and direction of the project and how do we actually develop the final product, this was very much down to the young people who were leading the project. I think it's important sometimes as an adult in the room or somebody who was an expert to realize when you have to be a facilitator when you have to actually be a producer and when you actually have to just step back and just not be in the room for the decision making with that it mainly has to happen because you're producing something that is for that demographic so you should be decided by that demographic by the same time if you just let them things that they don't have experience and not they're not supported then you're setting them up to fail so you really need to provide a support network as well and i think it's same in planning it's easy to just say what do you want in the city without actually giving that background i mean quite often i find the issue is people are actually don't know about town planning. We don't know how the city is structured and how decisions are taken. When you give them a choice, it's a false choice because they're not informed. So you have to provide that structure around them first. And they'll surprise you because you're even better than you imagined.

SPEAKER_01: 7:25

In terms of what's being done in planning to incorporate the voice of young people, you mentioned a lot of our references and our study comes from the US, but what is actually being done in the UK and what is it that you are doing as well?

SPEAKER_00: 7:38

The first point of reference would be the RTPI's document that was published about child-friendly planning recently by Jenny Wood and RTPR researchers. They published policy guides for planners and one was on child-friendly planning and that mapped what are the different interplays between the system in the UK, each planning system in England, Wales and so on is different. That was interesting and the answer is not that much is being done. In Scotland with a new planning system there is actually some reference to youth inclusion and there are some tools which have been developed and being integrated. Scotland and Wales are generally further ahead. In Wales you have the Future Generations Act which requires all public sector to consider future generations in every decision so that by extension means that youth inclusion is making its way on a legal basis being integrated but in terms of actually practice wise I'm going to be interviewing a lot of people who are doing the things that on the ground I can see a lot of developers at the moment especially with the ESG and social value becoming very much a requirement in every procurement process youth inclusion is high on the agenda at the moment the question is are you doing youth inclusion to tick off points and get all the briefing 20% of social value on that you get the commission are you supporting those young people after that. And then actually, if you're really doing it well, is that learning being captured? And I think this is the bit where we're missing something in the moment to coordinate all of these good initiatives and get all those lessons together.

SPEAKER_01: 8:53

Why is it so important to involve kids and young people in the planning process?

SPEAKER_00: 8:58

I will give you my journey to this and other people might agree or disagree. For me, it's a great test. It's a stress test. Are you producing spaces and places that cater for everybody? And when you think about everybody here, we could equally pick another disadvantaged group and stress tester for me youths and children are such a major part of society or 25% of the UK is under 18 or something like that we just completely ignore them and I think quite often people would say oh because they're the future is there a future and I think that's a bit of a bogus argument sometimes because they're not our future they're here they exist actually are you catering for people at that point in life and are you actually trying to understand what their needs are right now not just what their needs might be in the future and I think in my research specifically a lot of the time so I evaluated a of smart city strategies across Europe. A lot of times, young people are seen as a future economic resource, not as future users or future decision makers, or even as current users and current decision makers. And I think that's a big, big issue. So I think it's really important to involve them in the production space because they are using space at the moment. So actually understanding what their needs right now are is really, really important. And I think also, I mean, young people do shape the built environment right now. So there is a fantastic book called States of Childhood, which focuses on these kind of youth-led cities in the US in the 1800s, which were completely led by youth. The police, the court system, everything was young people. And it worked. They were like a weird experiment, you know, when America's the land of the free and everybody could do whatever they wanted. But equally, when I was a teenager, when I was a kid in my neighborhood in Bulgaria, we would just go and build random bits around the neighborhood, you know, so we would actually be actively shaping the built environment, if you count sheds as a built environment. And I think that freedom of taking ownership of where you live is not just lost, but it's actively being eroded, especially when it comes to young people. You're actually prohibiting them from shaping the built environment. And I think all young people, you know, have that drive. to do so? You know, they want to create their own dance, they want to create their own spaces, and why wouldn't they be able to do so if you actually create those opportunities?

SPEAKER_01: 10:49

And why are we prohibiting them to do so?

SPEAKER_00: 10:52

For me, the simple answer is they don't generate economic value in the current system in the way that we're actually thinking about economic value at the moment. I work with teenagers a lot. At that age, you could argue they actually work, they actually do use a lot of services, they do actually spend a lot of money, given, you know, their parents' money, but maybe they lend their own money as well. But in In the systems that we kind of have at the moment, children and young people are just that intermediate state before they become generators of economic value. Therefore, they're not seen as users. They're not seen as people who should be satisfied. They're seen as people who should be trained and who should be socialized, then become the productive part of society. And I think until we shift that perception and understand that, no, social and cultural production is also equally valuable production of value, then we can actually start valuing what young people are doing. Because a lot of culture, actually, that we have comes from youth culture a lot of ways of how people decide where to live is because of their children and the needs of their children but we don't really conceptualize that think about the economic side that's one thing the other thing is also in the current structure that we have they don't have a voting power they don't have opportunity to express those views they're not being given the sort of the structures in which they can actually feed into that so then obviously if you're not hearing what the needs are then you're not going to address those needs but you just don't know or you minimize them because everybody have interaction with a child or a teenager in their life at some point but it's an individual case it's not a collective you're don't take

SPEAKER_01: 12:13

it as serious. As you were talking about voting, can you specify the age group? I think that'll be really important.

SPEAKER_00: 12:18

For the podcast listeners, I do work with 15 to 19-year-olds a lot. I work with a bit older teenagers. The summer school I run in Bulgaria is between 10 to 18. I tend to work with the 10-plus, and really with 13-plus. So this is when I talk about voting. I'm talking about people who, in the GILIC test, are competent, who can make decisions by themselves, and really do not require, in most cases, parental permission to make a decision, because they're a fully-formed person. When we talk about younger kids, we can then talk about manipulation and that if you talk about voting, there will be differences there. But I'm not necessarily talking about going to the urn and actually casting a vote for a political party. I'm more talking about having a system where what the needs are are being captured, apart from just regression analysis through large datasets from GCSEs or whatever, but more about proactive consideration of how we're creating our cities in the way that this generation at the moment is using. My PhD research is in Spain, Bulgaria, and England, and actually, all the priorities of the young people that I've interviewed, again, 15, 19-year-olds, are pretty similar. It's always about safe city. It's always about green city. It's always about good education. It's always about quality of life at that point in life, whether they hang out, what opportunities to go and earn some money, what opportunities to socialize with their friends, easy transport, making sure that everything's environmentally sustainable. And if you actually compare the data, there's some real clear trends, given it's the European context, obviously there would be, but there's still three very different contexts. For me, it's interesting that at that age, people do tend to coalesce around similar values. I don't think that's necessarily the values that we can represent. I mean, a lot of people that I've interviewed kept on saying, well, we're not doing anything about the homeless people in our cities. Both in Sofia and in Valencia and in Birmingham and in Manchester, empathy came up a lot. And then when you think about the way that we plant cities, we actually don't think about that because that seems to be a value that we suppress as we grow older. And actually having that alternative voice is pretty important because those are the teenagers going to school, encountering all these homeless people every day. So, you know, it's just for them, that's a very large issue because they keep seeing What

SPEAKER_01: 14:12

needs to change and how do you think it's going

SPEAKER_00: 14:14

to change? underneath the decision-making process that we make. I think a lot of the times at the moment, especially how policy is being made, the evidence base at some point starts skewing the underlying values because you can't collect evidence on something that you haven't actually considered or something that might be actually quite intangible or something which should be just a pure moral value, which is we should value everybody in society, not just all the people that earn money. We should value very old people that don't earn any more money, very young people that can't do that. But I think our value system is skewed. The bigger bit is often that short term is you need to start giving good examples and what I was saying when capturing all these different expertise of different people and systemizing them in a way that you can demonstrate them to policymakers you can demonstrate to developers you can demonstrate to people I used to take investors and so on that this is feasible that this is actually workable that this actually creates better communities because you involve everybody in the community because she generates value for you because you have happy young people on the streets and you know you don't have to kind of hide them away into bad gardens and so on I think the short term is actually demonstrating in a very easy way of a way that this works and ways to integrate that into the work that decision makers do.

SPEAKER_01: 15:47

Where are you in terms of your PhD research?

SPEAKER_00: 15:50

I picked the topic of smart cities because the type of policy that would be was becoming so influential with the built environment but it wasn't actually sitting in planning departments in a lot of places if you actually look at the sort of smart city vision or the vision for the city that's not necessarily a planning vision that's it or built environment vision it's a vision in the economic directorate it's a vision in the political leadership that owns it a lot of council committees will have a kind of collective vision Birmingham just published one which is 2040 vision for Birmingham that's kind of a economic vision but then it's obviously feeding very much into place and I think this is where my PhD comes into is saying okay right first of all we're doing those visions are we connected them to the planning world and to the built environment world if we are are we listening to those who might not have any input in that vision and are we adjusting then planning for me could be that filter which takes all these political visions we want the future to look like this and then actually really humanizes them in the local environment Because ultimately, that's the bit that we have to deliver. We have to actually build those visions or readjust the built environment to accommodate those visions, whether it's a smart city or an eco city or whatever. But in that process, that's where planners and architects and built environment professionals could really come in because they can be that connection with the community, with the young people to really understand what the priorities are and adapt that vision, which has been top down led. I think that's when come to the question of how. And I think a lot of the times planners I speak to are quite reluctant to engage with young people. people not because they don't see the value but because they don't know how and also they don't really think about it they don't even consider it i worked on one project with a community in birmingham where the planners they just said oh it's really hard to involve young people and we went on the site stood for two hours in the rain and i spoke to 15 people but we actually went and talked to the people and i think it's something which all the financing issues that the system is experiencing at the moment is really cutting that ambition down and we need to bring back and we really need to say no it's not that difficult you just go and talk to young people and not aliens they're just there under a four-year capable of conversation. I had a conversation with a four-year-old on the plane and it was a very informed conversation for a four-year-old. But, you know, I learned something about the way they were living and I was thinking, okay, now I understand your perspective a little better. It was a full conversation. Do

SPEAKER_01: 17:55

you think that we need better systems?

SPEAKER_00: 17:56

I think you're right. And I think also, I would just point out that young people do require more upstart costs, I would say. You have to put a bit more support in the beginning because of that lack of expertise. And, you know, maybe if you go and speak with, you know, pensioners or you go and speak with adults from my or maybe disability or whatever, you're still talking to adults who have experience of some of the structures of how maybe society works or how maybe business interactions work and so on. With young people, you wouldn't have that. So I think sometimes there is a bit of a learning process that needs to be embedded within that interaction. I think this is a prohibitive cost quite often because on any project I've worked with and in the summer schools I run, I always have to chase young people because they haven't developed that responsibility yet about the work they're doing, but that's normal. That's why they're doing this at the moment. But you do have to put a bit of extra support there. And I think quite often that puts people off. When you talk about infrastructures, there is a project which is really interesting in the moment in Finsbury Park in London called My Place. That is youth-led planning, investigation world where young people are being trained to research and to understand what's going on in the community and come back and report to developers. And similarly, that's what I've been thinking a lot in my work. How do you create a process where in the process of consultation with all the communities, young people can play a key role? And I think that's really, really important because they are at the point of their life where they're really non-threatening they're really that people do talk to young people quite easy so they can become that social glue very easily in a community and they can get access to a lot of bits of the community that somebody coming from the outside or somebody who might have an agenda would struggle to and would struggle to even have the conversations like the first conversation I mean if you go as a developer in an existing community in a state project there is already a dynamic there which you can break even if you have the best intentions in the world same with councils sometimes people have such solidified opinions about their local council that it's really hard to break those doubts whereas with young people that is not there so you could really have an honest and frank conversation they will smell out the bullshit as well what I've noticed in some areas is this kind of drive to youth inclusion has started to mimic some of the early consultation debates where you know it's not just box ticking but also even it's manipulation because they're being used just because they're young and they don't know will convince them that everything is great my experience is that they quite quickly smell out bullshit and they have access to a lot of information that maybe 10 20 30 years ago people wouldn't have if you you're going to be doing something controversial, they will research you and they will know what you're doing. And I get called out sometimes as well, which is fantastic. And they're like, oh, Simon, we saw you publish this thing three years ago. Do you still agree with it? It's a good check. It's an easy way into a community, but it's not an easy way into communities when you prepare

SPEAKER_01: 20:27

the community. In my experience working with young people, it's very easy if I go through a school, but it's very difficult to work separate from a school for many reasons. What is your experience?

SPEAKER_00: 20:38

I think you're very right. You have to have an incentive If you go to a gatekeeper, like a school or an organisation, so the same school I run is with a foundation, so they have connections in schools and that's how we recruit people. If I've worked in research projects where I've had to recruit my own collective of young people, you have to have an incentive. Money helps. If you pay young people to do some work for you, people would be interested. And I think that's all training or some kind of incentive works. I find that schools, especially in the UK and especially around the pandemic, are an incredibly hard environment to even get anything in. I thought, you quite a lot of schools through a program called the brilliant club in the west midlands where i've been teaching about my phd so it's been a bit of an inception and it's something which is organized by an external organization and the school actually pays to that organization to come and help and deliver some of it has been hard to get in with the school because it just overworks a lot it's there's been a lot of behavior issues around the pandemic i would say out of all these extracurricular clubs actually going on the street and setting a stall and going to the skate park going to the park going to after hours club or whatever you know actually going to the places where the young people are having a chat with a few of them and saying what would you like to do and I'm here again talking about teenagers because that's what you know I do with younger people the system that we've set up it just so that you kind of have to go through gatekeeper however in the pandemic a lot of my research happened on Instagram and actually on Instagram is really really easy and ethically problematic I would say but you can just get access to young people very easily because you can just DM them and say we're doing this research project would you like to take part that creates some other ethical issues and actually creates ethical issues the other way around because I have a separate Instagram account for my PhD project to which I've been doing recruitment and I've had some young people message me some like quite rude things so then you know you kind of have to that breaks a lot of barriers and that gatekeeping process that you're saying is not there and actually you know 13 plus and even young on there which is really ethically challenging I think yeah you just have to structure in a way where you put all these ethical barriers and policies and then really think why are you actually contacting young people I think if they're going to have some benefit for their own area or whatever then yes if there is something at the end of it but if you're just going it blank Also

SPEAKER_01: 22:42

because there's all these protection or safety issues and as adults we feel real uncomfortable being around kids. You can't go to a park, playgrounds, let's say, and be around young people because parents or adults will think

SPEAKER_00: 22:56

that... problematic to the point where it's a bit paranoid and actually the release has a really nice paper from 20 years ago which talks exactly about this about how that paranoia is actually really challenging for young people to being integrated in development processes because it just creates this us and others so it's almost like you don't talk to them because somebody would think that you're there I think this goes up to your own moral values as well isn't it and how well actually you are maintaining those boundaries the easiest thing is to do with someone else to actually have proper oversight to actually proper protocols yes you have to everything with ethics if you're part of an institution. If you're a council, for example, you would do that with another officer or whatever when you follow a protocol. But I personally don't think there is anything wrong with going to a place where people are hanging out and actually talking to them on the street in a public environment and just saying, what do you think about this area? Would you like to take part in this project? And so on. As long as, obviously, you've followed everything ethically. I think that's a perception that is very damaging because then the young people are just there. They're just in the corner of the city and nobody talks to them and they just suddenly talk to themselves And same, you know, when I see people, I said I had a four-year-old conversation on the thing. His mother was there. You can always just straight away check in, especially the younger children. The parent will be there or there will be some authority figure there. So you would straight away go to them and say, can I have a conversation because we're doing this and so on. Obviously, you have to clear everything up, but I don't think that should be a barrier for doing it. But it is a barrier when higher-ups, especially universities, institutions are considered to give the ethical. So you have to be very clear on the beginning. And this is another thing. You have to put a lot of work in the beginning. You actually have to create those support systems. You have to create that form. number that people can call you you have to know every time I work with young people I always set up some money aside for like a mental health counsellor because you never know what might come up if it's a private project or you know have an understanding what are the support systems that if a young person suddenly starts reporting something to me I can actually go and direct them in the correct area so you have to put all of this effort in the beginning and I think actually in that sense it is prohibitive for a lot of people but the structures are there if you go to your social or youth work department in your council or in your area they already have that they have all the safeguarding policies You don't have to reinvent anything. You can just actually ask them for help. The policies are there. You just have to follow them. Is

SPEAKER_01: 25:16

there a question I should have asked you that I didn't ask you? And if so, what was that question?

SPEAKER_00: 25:21

The question I have on my mind at the moment is where is the money coming from? Where is the money coming from for all this work? And where is the money going to come from for all this inclusion that we all agree is going to happen and have to happen? It's not just me dealing with people, with everybody else, but how are we actually going to challenge the economic structure that we've created for ourselves to be able to get that value redirected into that work that we want to do and for me that's just a personal question because otherwise with a lot of movements and we spoke about it it's 40 years 50 years in the making some of this and it's just not happening and I'm reading papers from 18.5 who are saying exactly the same thing that we're saying today and it's just not happened because the system that we have is just not channeling the value into that work I think that's the question that I always keep asking is like how are you actually and not just on a short-term basis on a one procurement project where you know set up a bit of money but how are you actually going to change the structure of organisation to be channelling money into that work. We worked on one project with the Wellcome Trust on engaging young people in health and science research with two organisations called Beatfreaks and Shift and I was working with Beatfreaks. The Wellcome Trust in their funding processes started changing some of the ways they actually fund projects to be able to recognise their needs to involving people and that's a structural change in a funder. So you want structural changes in the way that money is being channelled in councils, in developers, in an architect's work. Most of the architects I talk to have only ever spoken to a young person when the designers call and he just think, yeah, but young people don't just use schools. Maybe 40% of their life, the rest is out there and we just don't talk to them about it. Because in schools, you think, oh yeah, we should talk to young people because it's school. Therefore, we'll set aside a bit of the budget and the time for somebody to go and do it. In another case, we're not doing a train station and thinking, oh, you know, young people, one of the main people using trains, the moment they become independent, they start using public transport. But we're not talking about those issues with them.

SPEAKER_01: 27:02

But even with your parents, they use a train station or airports. The building manager says theirs is ours. Funding to set up these systems in place and to behave to generate a life to them another reflective note that you want to leave with before you go I

SPEAKER_00: 27:15

always say this to absolutely everybody clearly listening to this podcast when this stops go find a young person and just talk to them on the train on the street one of your friends child or something like just have 20 minutes conversation with a young person and just ask them about all the work you do and what they think about it just have that conversation I think a lot of people just don't have that conversation and then that becomes this barrier that they don't even realize it's a barrier but they just don't know how to talk to young people and the key is they know very differently just talk to like you're going to talk to anybody else

SPEAKER_01: 27:47

thank you very much to my guests today to all the listeners and please subscribe to architecture for kids podcast and leave your rating and the review recommend us to your friends and family and to find out more about it visit our websites antoniocaplan-portfolio.co.uk buildingcenter.co and please join me again next week for another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture Cardiff University.