Category One off activity: Children

Playing planners: two to five year olds reveal their urban encounters, visions for their cities . The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child requires decision makers to also listen to young children on matters that affect them, but hardly anyone engages with children under five years old. Therefore, we set out to understand young children’s experiences and perspectives of living, playing and learning in an urban environment and how this understanding can be used to support the planning of more inclusive environments.

Category: One off activity: Youth

Euston Tower Creative Producer Project

The Euston Tower Creative Producer project was an initiative created in partnership between Beyond the Box CIC and British Land, aimed to creatively engage with the local community of Camden, its businesses and its residents, exploring the future use of Euston Tower. The projects’ purpose was to centre young people at the heart of the development, empowering them to have a voice in the decision-making process, whilst using creativity to discover what the local community wanted to see from any future development and feed this into the design team’s work.

Category: One off activity: Youth

Ham Close Regeneration Community Building

The purpose of our work for the proposed Ham Close Community Centre was to involve young local people in the design, layout and internal appearance of the new Youth and Community building on the Ham Close Estate in the London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames, which forms part of a larger residential regeneration project. A prime objective was the fact that youth workers at the club from Achieving for Children (AfC) had raised the issue that young people and young residents of the existing estate had little involvement in the initial design of the regeneration project.

Category: Long term programme: Children

Kan Ya Makan Programme

The programme was developed in response to the 4th August 2020 Beirut Blast to give children a voice in the recovery of their neighbourhood in Beirut. It sought to address children’s needs by engaging them in a series of activities that explored their relationship with one another, their community and with the environment around them.

Category: Long term programme: Youth

Build The Traineeship

Build The Way (BTW) is an innovative nine month traineeship for underrepresented school leavers interested in learning more about a career designing and making buildings, spaces, cities, and communities. Its purpose is to provide alternative routes of entry into the industry with the ultimate aim of further diversifying the profession to help ensure cities are designed by those who inhabit them.

Category: Long term programme: Youth

PLACED Academy

This is a free-to-access 10-month creative programme. It addresses the need to increase greater representation in the built environment, providing a comprehensive programme of regular support for 14-18 year olds across the northwest. The Academy increases participants’ self-esteem, breaks down barriers to professional careers, exposes participants to a variety of career routes and develops a broad range of skills.

Category: Education Collaborations

Clean Air Route

The St John and St James Primary School Street forms part of a new Clean Air route on Grove Street, N13. Delivered by Enfield Council’s Journeys and Places programme with Jan Kattein Architects, the project aimed to improve air quality around the school, enable students to travel actively to school, and make the area greener and healthier. Through our collaboration with schoolchildren, we sought to empower young people to take ownership of public space outside the school gates, stimulate imaginative play and give students the opportunity to put their learning on environmental issues into practice.

Category: Further/Higher Education

This Must Be the Place

In 2022 two groups were set upthrough local schools - at Ebbsfleet Academy (an after school programme for 22 x Y9 students) and at North Kent College (50 x Sixth form art students) - to work with Define, the landscape architects designing a large urban park in the area. Both groups created visual outputs to illustrate their ideas for the park which were subsequently provided to Define:

Category: Online/IT Projects and Resources

Design Future London

In partnership with Microsoft, the GLA introduced a Minecraft world of Croydon centre to schools across

London, enabling students of all ages to engage with the gaming environment to address real life planning challenges in the city, including challenges around the future and role of town centres, place making, and heritage.

The key learning from introducing gaming was that it created an environment that young people could engage with, and facilitated very different ways of thinking about our town centres future.

Category: Research – Pedagogy or practice based

The Studio: Reflections

The Studio is a practice-based project in the framework of the Erasmus+ Youth In Action program where three European design studios from Oslo, Paris, and Berlin­­ share knowledge around common values on eco-design, learning, and inclusion of youth in creative processes. The project’s main intent is to reflect on learning and design. In a world where we constantly distance ourselves from the physical, the goal of this research is to reclaim creative spaces through design-based explorations.

Category: Community Engagement

Tendring Colchester Borders Garden Community

Colchester and Tendring councils and Latimer by Clarion Housing Group are working together to plan for a new Garden Community.

Latimer recognised from the outset that youth engagement and empowerment were going to be key objectives for the project. The significant timeframe means young people will be its primary users. They therefore collaborated with MATT+FIONA to ensure young people’s ideas and values are placed front and centre.

Category: Community Engagement

This Must Be the Place

This Must Be the Place is a pioneering placemaking programme of research, artists residencies and co-commissions, created collaboratively with local young people. It aims to enable them to be involved in the development of a new garden city under construction in Ebbsfleet in Kent.

Young people are invited to co-lead the programme, exploring and shaping Ebbsfleet as it’s built and consider innovative and radical placemaking ideas with partners including architects, designers and policy makers

Category: Diversity in action

‘Sessions’

Narrative Practice is an architectural mentoring and research platform with the primary objective of improving diversity and representation within the profession. The ethnicity and diversity data from the Architects Registration Board clearly highlights disparities. Through Sessions, their aim is to empower young practitioners and students via short- and long-term mentoring support, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, to engage and advocate for addressing evident inequalities in the field.

Category: Mentoring

Mentoring Future Generations

As a volunteer for Reach Out 2 Kids a small, London-based charity helping young people from diverse and low-income backgrounds, my aim was to inspire, support and bring out the best in these young people through their Design for London competition entries. Given the current UK shortage in engineers, I also aimed to encourage them to consider a career in engineering, showing them that engineers can also be female, from any ethnic background, and with English as a second language.

Category: Mentoring

Makers and Mentors

To celebrate the opening of The Black & White Building in Winter 2022, TOG partnered with POoR Collective to launch the Makers & Mentors programme. This new mentorship scheme was created to help young designers grow their experience, not just through study, but by designing and creating a physical piece in partnership with an experienced mentor.

Category: Social Value

Sponsored by Centre for the Built Environment

AHMM’s Partnerships work builds upon the practice’s thirty years of charitable giving and philanthropic support, as well as its active role in educating and developing the next generation of architects. Collaboration have reinforced its belief in engaging with and contributing to the wider world by sharing skills and donating resources in those areas that have the most impact.

Category: International

Established in 2006, by Founder Corrin Wendell, AICP, YEP! has evolved into a nationally and internationally-recognized, female-led, volunteer-driven organization that actively engages with both planners and youth. YEP! is the only non-profit organization of its kind in the United States that focuses on educating young people from Kindergarten through High School about urban planning and civic engagement. YEP! creates opportunities for youth to meaningfully advocate for change in their own communities and built environments while providing support, tools, funding, and resources to planners and volunteers. The mission is clear: to empower youth to contribute to positive change in their communities through civic engagement in planning processes.

Category: Best Emerging not for profit organisation

Make Space for Girls campaigns for better parks and public spaces for teenage girls. A core part of our work is advocating for the highest quality engagement with teenage girls, developing and testing methods for achieving this and pushing for these to become standard practice for developers and councils in place design.

Make Space for Girls have worked directly with over a hundred young people in the last eighteen months. However, this is not our only goal. We also want engagement to become standard practice for councils, developers, housing associations, Parks Friends groups and anyone else with an influence on public space. To this end we do many presentations and CPDs, all of which foreground high quality engagement as the key to creating more inclusive public spaces.

Category: Best Established not of profit organisation

MOBIE’s mission is to inspire, educate and train the people who will deliver our future homes with young people helping to radically improve the way homes are designed created.

The challenges created by MOBIE inspire young people across the UK to share their ideas on the future of homes, places and the built environment.

Category: Best Local Authority

Greater Cambridge Shared Planning (GCSP) is a combined planning service for Cambridge City Council and South Cambridge District Council. GCSP is one of the few UK Local Authorities that commits resources to ensure effective youth engagement. Since 2017, GCSP has been pioneering transformative ways of approaching youth engagement and architecture education to deliver social value. It has demonstrated best practices through its programmes.

Category: Best Built Environment Practice

The projects have significantly shaped the practice; what it stands for and how it works advocating for greater integration between education and practice. The challenges that we face as a society can only be tackled if we work together.

Category: Individual of the Year - Established

Shanks’ passion & enthusiasm for communicating all aspects of the built & natural environment has made for an impactful and popular programme which is increasingly oversubscribed both by potential students and partner companies. Shanks works with each partner organisation helping them to design creative, memorable and inspiring sessions illuminating the various professions and areas of expertise.

Category: Individual of the Year - Established

He is well-qualified in Engagement and Design and comes from a background of planning and urban design. Tom has influenced senior management to ensure that CYP have a say in developments and has been championing the cause since 2017. He has successfully convinced its need and importance and received support from Cabinet Members.

Tom often goes the extra mile to engage children and young people (CYP) who are often underrepresented in the architectural design and engagement process, and to inspire them to pursue a career in architecture.

Category: Individual of the Year - Emerging

No previous study – in NZ or, as far as we know, internationally- has invited pre-literate children to voice their experiences of urban environments or recognise their capabilities of expressing their own unique views and understandings of issues of space, wellbeing and urban sustainability in an entire city context.

Christina’s work breaks the silence of young children’s voices, ideas and suggestions in debates on just, healthy, sustainable and inclusive urban environments and upsets current planning practices.

She conveys to our university students that children are experts on their own lives and capable of voicing their knowledge and experiences when appropriate child-centred research methods are employed.

Category: Individual of the Year - Emerging

With a focus on SWA as knowledge sharers, Clare, with the ad-hoc support of a small EDI committee, has implemented several education initiatives within the practice, with personal involvement in all of them.

Clare provides a framework for small practices with limited resources to drive forward a clear, considered and measurable EDI agenda, sharing architectural knowledge through thoughtful engagement, education and broader EDI initiatives.

PRESS

Press release click here. For press images contact Dionne at info@thorntoneducationtrust.org