Published today (25 June), the group’s policy letter on Young People and the Built Environment lays out the ways that the government could go further in involving young people in the process of designing and responding to development.
It also calls on the government to pull together many different child-focused initiatives into a more ‘cohesive, proactive strategy’, which gets kids engaged in the planning system.
The letter follows the government’s Youth Matters: Your National Youth Strategy, published in December last year, which presented the decline of youth services and rising youth unemployment as a cross-departmental problem.
The House of Lords letter, while responding to this wider issue, made a series of points specifically related to the potential for better engagement in the built environment to benefit both young people and the sector itself.
These arguments centred on the idea of ‘young people as placemakers, not consultees’, an approach which would unlock the ‘untapped potential’ of young people’s ability to support and inspire good design.
Encouraging more young people to take up careers in the built environment, through ‘proactive, early engagement’, was said to be key in helping to close the ‘acute skills crisis’ facing the sector, as well as funnelling more of the one million young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training into work.
Consulting young people leads to a smoother and swifter planning processes
This could also serve to reduce the commercial risk to developers when taking a project through planning, according to the letter, by getting a wider breadth of feedback and tapping into a demographic which is ‘generally more positive about change and the prospect of new developments in their local area’.
The architecture and planning campaign group MATT+FIONA was cited as finding that ‘consultation with young people leads to not just smoother planning processes but a swifter one’.
The letter also said that participation in the industry can act as a gateway into the wider democratic process, giving young people an ‘understanding of their own agency within local decision-making’.
The idea of leveraging young people’s interest in video games, such as Minecraft, The Sims and Assassin’s Creed was even suggested as a way of creating digital tools that act as highly accessible routes into the world of placemaking.
It was concluded that, although examples of good practice exist, the systems which engage and educate young people about the built environment remain ‘fragmented and uneven’, and more consistency from the government was needed in deploying the tools and policies that are available.
The letter has now been passed onto the government and Parliament, which will have 28 days to respond.
