Architecture for kids podcast with Dr Jenny Wood Co-Founder and Co-Director A Place in Childhood (APiC), Policy and Research

I’m delighted to be taking part in the Architecture for Kids podcast. The right of children and young people to have a say and be listened to is vital in how we create better places. I look forward to talking about our research and practice on creating child-friendly places in Scotland.

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. 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 Dr. Jenny Wood. Jenny is the co-founder of A Place in Childhood. She's an experienced research and participation specialist. She's a leading expert in children's human rights and the built environment and has led multiple high-impact action research projects with young participants. Prior to A Place in Childhood, Jenny concluded a PhD which highlighted the implications of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child for the Scottish Town Planning System. She is author of many academic papers and reports, including the first overarching review of the child-friendliness of town planning systems across the UK. A Place in Childwood is a community interest company that facilitates projects which enable the rights of young citizens to influence meaningful improvement to place and society while building lifelong skills for a prosperous and equitable future. Place in Childhood has worked on many co-design projects with children and young people, including the Children and Young People's Place standard tools, research on independent active travel and the participation of teenagers in public space and co-designing public spaces opportunities in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Jenny, thank you for talking to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 2:09

Thank you very much. Good to meet

SPEAKER_01: 2:10

you. What subjects were you good at school and And what subjects did you enjoy most in

SPEAKER_00: 2:15

school? I enjoyed quite a lot of subjects at school. I was a bit of a nerd. There could be a reasonably long list. I think the ones that I really, really enjoyed were geography. I did enjoy history for a while until we learned about the world wars too many times and nothing else. I also really enjoyed religious studies because I found it really fascinating to hear different perspectives on the world and why different people think different things and philosophy. And once I got to upper years, like A-level, I was lucky enough to be able to do A-level economics. I found that had to be a really fascinating subject and that I really enjoyed. I guess overall, it was the humanities that I really liked in the social studies subject.

SPEAKER_01: 2:50

And how did that influence your career?

SPEAKER_00: 2:52

I always found environments and cities really, really fascinating, which I think is a lot of why I found geography interesting and understanding how people think and different motivations for doing things and history and how our world came to be. I think that motivated me to want to do something quite practical in the real world. And I think those subjects just really gave me insights into how the world works which has always been fascinating and the way that things could be not just the way that things are but how they've changed over time and how we could actually kind of make our own futures and create things from a new I found that to be really interesting I found learning about the concept of regeneration in geography to be really fascinating I remember watching an educational video about the regeneration of Deffield when I was about 14 or so and I immediately thought oh I want to be a town planner that sounds like the most interesting job ever And then when I looked it up, I found that not many people agree with me. Most people think that's a super boring job, but I wanted to be a planner from that point forward. I just started learning about what that involves, what subjects would help me get there and different cities and towns and things across the world and how it came to be. I was a bit of a geek for cities and how human development came to be.

SPEAKER_01: 4:02

Were you supported in your choices as you were growing

SPEAKER_00: 4:05

up? I definitely felt supported by my family in those choices because they've always given me lots of independence to think about what is important to me and to define my own path in life which I really appreciate they were very happy to encourage my like of things like planning I said things like I really want to see other cities of the UK because like we lived near London it's always going to London but how come I've never been to all of these other places in the UK and so my dad I'm really lucky he just decided well that's a good point let's go and see those places he looked into finding ways that we can go and have these day trips and to see you know Manchester and Birmingham and all sorts of other places that are really interesting I was lucky that I felt that that was encouraged by my family and even when other people around me would be what do you mean you want to be a planner why don't you just study geography careers advisors that had no real idea what a town planner was and what that career track would be so my family was incredibly supportive in that and giving me that freedom I think also to explore myself I also feel quite lucky that I was given quite a lot of independence to go to London and go to other towns and things just by myself or with my friends when maybe I know some other people weren't given those kinds of freedoms I really think that that helped to encourage me on this career

SPEAKER_01: 5:15

path. Tell us now about the career. You are the co-founder of A Place in Childhood. You're doing a lot of different programs and research to do with children and young people and the built environment. Do you want to tell us how did that happen and where you are today?

SPEAKER_00: 5:29

From that dream to become a planner, I worked out I wanted to do a degree in urban and regional planning. I moved to Edinburgh and did that at Heriot-Watt University. And I found it really fascinating, like a lot of the theory behind a lot of how to and cities develop the different policy levers and the ways that we can do all of these things have improved people's lives but I think what I found after completing the degree was sort of learning what the reality of a lot of planners jobs was was not actually very inspiring because a lot of planning has unfortunately traditionally just been managing where things go or where they don't go there's actually a lot less of that utopian blue sky thinking that they used to be when we created sort of new towns or garden cities and concepts like that which I thought were really interesting I didn't quite know what I really wanted to do with myself. I knew that I still like the idea of planning and planning principles, just helping to make people's environments better, but that maybe I wasn't going to find a place in practice that really suited exactly what I sort of wanted to do. I think from working with a charity called Planning Aid Scotland, who were doing some programs, talking to children about things happening in their local areas and how they could be involved. I started to read up more about children's rights. I've also always really liked children. If I wasn't going to be a planner, I was going to be a primary school teacher I liked working with children and from the point of view I think of someone that did get a reasonable amount of freedom to explore urban environments as a child I started to see how it's a bit strange that we don't just see children and young people out and about on our streets that's actually if you think about it a bit concerning because our environment should be for everyone and children and young people know a lot about their environment we're actually missing a trick if we're not asking them about it and trying to create environments that actually nurture them and give them kind of independence and opportunities and also make people parents feel that it's safe to let their children do that and that there are activities and that children are welcomed in these places from I guess that very realization and from some encouragement from the universe I decided to do a PhD on children's human rights in the Scottish town planning system which I really enjoyed and that was really fascinating I learned a lot from it and I looked at children's human right to play which is also to play rest leisure and access cultural life and also the right to participate in the matters that affect them which are things that are very relevant to planning like the planning process and what planning is meant to deliver but it's not something that at least in the context of Scotland was really specifically provided for. I could see quite a lot of gaps in policy and really well-meaning planners. I'm not saying that planners don't want to make these changes but they didn't have the policy levers to be able to do it or the experience to know how to work with children in a collaborative way. At the end of my PhD and sort of speaking to other friends that had done similar things in the built environment, landscape architecture or an environmental psychology how children learn in outdoor environments sort of put together sort of the starting point of a place in childhood which aims would bring children more into our environment and try to find ways that children's rights actually are respected in the places that they use so that it could be through the town planning systems and making physical changes to their environment it might be getting them involved in landscape design or creating briefs for architect we don't really have the design skills at a place in childhood but we have the co-creations skills also just advocate for children's rights to be more up there on the policy agenda across everything to do with the built environment and also to do with things like education and how we might connect the dots and integrate those things we were founded really in 2018 and since that point we've evolved a little bit to look at all sorts of different things all sorts of different systems that children and young people interact with and doing research with them around it what we tend to tell children and young people that we're there to do when we're working with them in a session is to never hear from them about the change that they'd like to make in their communities and see if we can find ways together to make those happen with and for them and we want the children to have the opportunities to do as much of that themselves as possible rather than for it to be a plan that they create that someone in an office can and they deliver on we want it to be something where at least some of those actions develop mentally appropriately are things that the children can actually take forward themselves so that they have maximum impact and agency within that and they realize that they have the abilities to be change makers as well

SPEAKER_01: 9:41

I'll do by between the professional expert and the children as the expert of their own environment or the environment you're trying to set up.

SPEAKER_00: 9:49

I think if you see it almost as children are like the commissioners of what they need in their environment, they might not be able to do the design work. They're not planners. They can't create the policies. But what they can say is this is what we need. And here's some of our ideas for how that might be designed and our ideas for what those actions might look like. And then having conversations with the stakeholders, we try to bring them into the same room. We create a child for the environment that the adults come into is the children's space they thought about what their top priorities are to sort of talk to these people that might be able to make some of these changes happen it's a discussion about who is able to do different things there are some things that the children obviously can't do themselves but there are sometimes we close down opportunities where children maybe could do more about something maybe they could actually be involved in designing a physical object now if someone's willing to let them be part of that they can certainly be members of their own community they've got an idea of a proposal they'd like to take forward and maybe there's existing community group that they can work with to make that happen or maybe we can help them in the school develop some idea and find funding to make it happen the children don't have all of the expertise and the advice but what we try to do is start with them and bring the expertise and the advice to them that could help make them make as many decisions as possible in the future and it's obviously it's not always perfect and we're trying to bring around more changes as we progress through APIC and do more and more projects but it's not always an easy thing to do to get other people to realize just how much input children can have if we give them the tools to be part of it and help them realise that they can make that change too.

SPEAKER_01: 11:19

In terms of the children and youth engagement, the landscape and in comparison to the rest of the country, how does Scotland sit?

SPEAKER_00: 11:27

If we were to talk about policy, first of all, in terms of policy, I'd say Scotland is doing really well in comparison to the other UK nations. I don't know how much you want me to talk about policy, it might be too dry. I could name a whole bunch of things that fall together to actually increase the embed children's rights across policy making in Scotland it's a lot of it is quite new but there's provisions in planning to look more about children's play and whether or not there's good enough facilities or opportunities in general it doesn't just need to be playgrounds there's also provisions to get children and young people directly involved in what we call local development plans here and we also have a lot of legislation around children's well-being and rights in education and things around learning for sustainability which is very much community focused and outdoor learning. There is a lot going on in Scotland in policy terms is really, really exciting because it's quite new. It doesn't mean that a lot of it is bedded down and we're still sort of finding our feet in how these things are going to work. There's also, as in the rest of the UK, there's severe resource constraints. Great policy ideas don't necessarily be down to the ground because there just isn't the resource to make it happen or there isn't the experience yet to make it happen. It's definitely ahead of certainly England in terms of children's rights and planning and placemaking. I know Wales is doing quite a lot of exciting things but I'm a bit left in the know as to what's going on now I just know that their policy also looks lovely but in terms of practice I wouldn't necessarily say that Scotland is ahead on practice I don't know enough about what's going on in the other UK nations because I think the pandemic has made it quite hard to actually know what projects might be happening down south we're not traveling so much but I can certainly see that there's a lot going on in London that looks really exciting in terms of actually on the ground work and I would just love to bring more of that in Scotland and actually have more cases studies to show if where children's input has actually really made a difference on the ground we're certainly working on it and I know that there will be things that I'm not aware of but from my perspective there's not enough of those examples of where children have actually been able to make that input in Scotland we don't have not that Scotland has tons of cities but we don't have any child-friendly cities not by UNICEF or anyone else's standards we have Aberdeen which I think was attempting to become a child-friendly city but I don't know that this probably shouldn't make the cut But I think they might have put it on pause at the moment because of resources, which is really disappointing.

SPEAKER_01: 13:48

What programs does APIC is currently developing or facilitating around Scotland?

SPEAKER_00: 13:54

We have quite a few projects on at the moment, but I think one that is really exciting that we're really enjoying doing at the moment, it's much funded by a charity, Pass for All, who I think they might just be Scotland based. I'm not 100% sure, but they focus on sustainable travel choices. That's about walking, cycling and encouraging public transport, right? than car use it's also match funded by five local authorities across Scotland and we've worked with those local authorities to decide on a place that we work with the children and young people in where there's some kind of overlap with something that they're trying to do or some really good opportunity to make change we have quite a range of different areas from rural remote to rural but quite accessible to somewhere bigger we have city neighbourhood we have a really good range and from this we're creating children and teenagers 20 minute neighbourhood plans that concept is about having easy access to the facilities that you need without needing to get in a car essentially being able to walk 10 minutes in one direction and 10 minutes home and get most of what you need day to day which is concept that has been obviously developed with more of an adult mindset children can't necessarily walk as far and they have different perceptions about their environment we are working with group of children and young people to put together their 20 minute neighborhood plans for them of what their area looks like what's good what could be better what's changes they would make and therefore their priorities would be and we are also working with them to think about how they might take those ideas forward and again work with the stakeholders at the council or community groups that are interested to have a discussion about what they want to change what they want to make better and see what we can actually make happen and this is all just linking in with various things that are ongoing and seeing if we can support them to make some things happen if they're not already happening it's a child-led process as to what's important to them and it's really exciting because we're actually getting some really good engagement from lots of different groups with completely different backgrounds across the country we're getting to see what it's like for children and young people in different areas and we're getting tours around these places by the children and young people themselves we're asking them to just tell us what's important to show us as if we're joining their school and we just need to know what's what and they're creating this plan taking us on this tour taking all of the photos that need to go into the plan coming up with the priorities to that need to go in and then discussing that with stakeholders at the showcase event and we're getting really good interest as well from the stakeholders like at the council and everything which is really nice to see we're seeing that there actually is quite an appetite to have those conversations with children and young people but they don't necessarily have the experience to make it happen we're hoping that this might be the start of understanding a bit better how we can embed having those discussions between children and young people and the adults that can make things happen and have tools available from this project we're going to have these plans for all of these places but we're also going to have a how-to guide at the end and what we're calling a policy map which is what are all of the levers that could help connect these things to the things that are happening what are the levers between education and play policy and planning policy and transport policy where sometimes these departments don't work together and they don't see what the opportunities are from our experience so far trying to see what barriers we can overcome and document that process to hopefully help others see what could be done differently in future

SPEAKER_01: 17:09

in terms of the impact that this work will have on children and young people as well as on the built environment. Do you want to talk about how do you think this will impact?

SPEAKER_00: 17:19

What we find when we go and speak to children and young people is that they really want to be involved in things in their communities and involved in things that matter to them but they don't know how they might do that and it can be difficult for them to find adults that might take them seriously or they might already at quite a young age realise that no one really listens to their voice about the things that really matter to them. We try to give them the opportunity to really tell us what that is. We often, we do have to have some level of grief for a project, but we always try to keep it as open as possible. So if there's something else that matters to them, we can find a way to talk about it and see if there's something that we can bring to the fore from what they say. Because I think when you feel that you don't have any ability to change anything, you don't feel as good about yourself. So this is also kind of a self-esteem element of realizing that actually your opinions do matter and that you can have an impact in the world. And that panel yesterday where we were talking about just children already know they're at the bottom of the pecking order in terms of influence they're very aware of that and we go into school sometimes and they have really big things that really matter to them I think about a couple of weeks ago there was like an eight-year-old boy that was really just struggling to explain how sad homelessness makes him and how powerless he feels to do anything about it by giving these opportunities where we can actually talk about whatever is important to them and then try to see what we can do about it or get the children the information that they want to understand better about something or try to find the children that really do want to be involved in some kind of bigger change and give them an opportunity to be involved in something that's a bit kind of higher level sometimes we have projects where we want like a national panel and then we can think about some of the children that clearly wanted to have an influence in the more overarching strategic decisions and then we can hopefully give them that kind of opportunity so I think it's about their health and well-being ultimately also their education their ability to deal with our ever complex and uncertain world like we're creating children and young people to live in a world that we can't imagine yet from my point of view I think we need to give them all of the tools that we can to deal with the complex issues that we need to tackle being things like climate change we have a lot of young people that are really really concerned about it and they don't know what they can do and we have adults that are saying that all of their hope is in the next generation and that's actually quite a big thing to expect if young children and some of them are actually really taking it on but they don't know what to do and they're scared about it it's all just about addressing their ability to see themselves as agents of change and also I think see that they're not alone in some of these things that actually there are ways that they can make change happen as much about an understanding of the systems that are happening and what is really going on as it is about being in a position of power like sometimes the ability to make change is more about your attitude than it is about your job title it doesn't mean that it's not really hard it's not that us as adults always have this stockpile of power and we take some of the power out of our cupboard and we give it to the children and then they have power it's actually we all just need to see where the opportunities are and if we can help them see the opportunities then they actually have the ability to exercise power and make things happen

SPEAKER_01: 20:24

and on the built environment what will be the impact do you think

SPEAKER_00: 20:27

better environments for children and young people but also ultimately for all of us because they have a very ingrained sense of their environment usually they're so much more reliant on it than most adults are we work with them we often find that the any adults that come into who speak to the children are surprised at how well they know their place and how much they notice about what is and what isn't working. The impact, it depends in every community, but it could be places that are just much more welcoming to children and young people, places where there's less vandalism and less kind of antisocial behavior because children and young people actually have their needs met and they have places where they feel that they can go, where they are welcome, where they've had some input in deciding what goes there. Also, it's not a built environment profession, but what comes up so much is just about litter and doing something about that so it's about the maintenance of our public spaces is one of the impacts that actually children tend to want to have most because it has the biggest impact on them on a day-to-day basis just the co-designed places and the ability to have independence and to get out and about and to feel safe and to have spaces that make their parents and carers also feel more like it's okay for the children and young people to go outside because there's lots of reasons to not let children go outside but if we can take away some of those reasons we can improve it for the children but also Also for everyone, really. Do you think

SPEAKER_01: 21:43

that educational system could be doing more to help children and youth engagement and policymaking creating this vision that we're talking about? Some of them is already reality, but a lot of it is still a vision.

SPEAKER_00: 21:55

Again, in Scotland, we're quite lucky with the curriculum because it is quite flexible and we have this policy initiative called Learning for Sustainability, which is about understanding your world and the change that you can make and getting outdoors and being involved in the community. And we also have... children are taught about their human right I don't know if this is the same in the rest of the UK because I don't spend very much time in schools outside Scotland but most of the time if we go into a school and we say does anyone know about children's right they will have done a little bit on it they might not be able to tell you all of them but often they can tell us about the right to play and that's a really good starting point and it's something that a lot of schools are actually getting really good at here is talking about that and integrating that into the curriculum from the Scotland perspective I think it's more about connecting the dots And it's about resources. A lot of schools really want to be involved in these bigger projects and give their young people a bigger voice within and also outwith the school environment. But it's just carefully where there's difficulties with recruiting teachers. There's other needs that need to be met, constrained funding for various things. But we find that schools are really open to doing this kind of thing. Once we can show that we really want to integrate it with what matters to them and what matters to their young people, and we can be flexible around finding the resource is to make it work. I'm really positive, I think, about what's happening in Scotland at the moment. I'm sure it could always be a bit better, but I think we're similar to a lot of the policy stuff. We're kind of at the start of a bit of an adventure and there's a lot of interesting more project-based learning here and you'll know much better what it's like in the rest of the

SPEAKER_01: 23:29

UK. In terms of parents and guardians and carers, what is their role and how interested are they in this conversation? And if they could be doing more, I'm sure that everybody could always be doing more.

SPEAKER_00: 23:41

Of course, carers are a really important part of the conversation I think especially around safety and independence for children and young people and the opportunities to be involved in decisions and I think that there is a lot to be said for whole family approaches of working with families and getting them to design things together and ideas and solutions and we certainly find that the children and young people that tend to have the most independence to wander around their environment it's because their family are more familiar with their local environment especially if they walk around it and they cycle around it themselves they're more likely to allow their children to do the same parents getting used to where they live and understanding it from their own perspective and from their children's perspective and having these discussions about getting out and about and how they might be members of their community and what they can do as members of their community I think is a really important role that kind of parents can play in that we certainly involve them in like quite a lot of our research we are what we've sometimes done and get the children's view with their place and collate all that and then have a workshop with the parents and show them what the children have put together and get their reflections from the other side of why it might be like that for their child and stuff and again they're often really impressed by how much their child actually knows about their place and the opinions that they have. I don't know how often parents and children tend to have those conversations about their place and what matters to them. I wouldn't like to presume because I don't actually have children myself don't really know that much about what goes on in that environment but that's definitely a role that parents can play in getting children and young people out and about and involved in the thing that matter to them as well.

SPEAKER_01: 25:13

Is there a question I should have asked you that I haven't asked you and what is that question?

SPEAKER_00: 25:17

Going back to the previous question this isn't really the question but I guess just another point is I think it's just quite interesting what you see the difference between children and young people that actually do walk around their own local area and the children and young people that get driven to a lot of places by their parents and carers and actually the levels of fear I'd say from the children and young people about if they actually do get out and about in their local area walking and cycling they tend to be less scared because you get scared of the unknown they tend to understand much more sort of what's going on that's part of the role of parents is giving those opportunities to walk and cycle and not just be taken to places they actually create their own spatial map of what's going on because we've done exercises where you get children to kind of map their cognitive map from their journey to school and their perceptions and the the children that get driven it tends to be quite disconnected and they don't actually really know where they're going i think there's also kind of understanding of where you're going that comes from those kind kinds of journeys in your local area that i think is really important for understanding your sense of belonging to a place the question is perhaps what is the missing link in terms of making things actually changed for children and young people around their built environments

SPEAKER_01: 26:26

you talked about connecting the dots isn't it

SPEAKER_00: 26:28

yeah exactly i think there's quite a lot of connecting the dots to do and it's quite difficult but i think would be really helpful to you have more of a forum for the people that are trying to make these changes happen to have these discussions I mean obviously the UK isn't ultimately that big but even so it's so difficult to keep on top of what things are going on where that you might learn from and getting that support of other people that might be facing the same barriers that you are even if you can't solve those barriers again it's her saying about the children not feeling so lonely when you're trying to make something change so it's like being able to find the others that actually are trying to do similar or aligned things or even if say a place in childhood had an opportunity where the children wanted to to actually co-design like building or something like that. That's not a skill that we have. Who would we go to? That's the kind of thing where it's not always that clear what the route to making that happen is. But it would be really good if there was more of an opportunity for that. And I think alongside that as well, getting the house builders on side. That's what I really want to know how to do that. If you want to manage to do that, I want you to do that.

SPEAKER_01: 27:31

That's exactly one of the reasons why I set up the podcast was because I was tired of reading articles talking about the three or four people. And I thought there must be more people doing this. Victoria Thornton has done a lot and with TED it's quite easy to see a list of people and so in order to understand what is their vision and body of work I thought the best way is to go and talk to them and make it accessible. That was my interest with the podcast connecting the dots between the practitioners and the creators. There's much more people doing this than what I thought there was and I've been really keen to talk about their work.

SPEAKER_00: 28:06

Thank you for all the work you're doing putting the podcast together. I need to catch up on a few episodes but it's really interesting Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 28:12

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. and follow us on Instagram, Arch for Kids CIC, Twitter, Ant Kaplown, LinkedIn, Ant Kaplown, C-A-P-E-L-A-O. 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.