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Sharing Place: Think Pieces invite external contributors to explore the theme of sharing place from diverse perspectives, and offering a broad range of reflections, ideas and provocations.
In this edition of our Sharing Place: Think Pieces, The Architecture Foundation Young Trustees explore the notion of ‘inside’ and ‘outside‘ in both our discourse and decision-making around how we shape our places.
The Architecture Foundation Young Trustees are a self-funded voluntary group whose work centres around creating a more equitable and inclusive built environment.
Formed of 11 practitioners, we represent a mixture of backgrounds and lived experiences which form a basis for our world views and, in turn, guides the work we do together and how we do that work. Our careers range from those in ‘traditional’ architectural practice, to those working in the public sector and in the engagement sphere and with this, we each view creating space through a different lens.
Our inherent diversity, rather than being tokenistic, is our greatest strength and naturally lends itself to an intersectional approach to all we do. Our varied backgrounds give us an intrinsic understanding of the changes that can and need to be made within our industry to ensure that we are shaping a built environment reflective of all people. We represent the change we want to see across the industry.
We believe in the power of collaborative working and as a non-hierarchial collective, this is evident in our workstreams. These bodies of work typically span our two year tenure as a Young Trustee – and sometimes beyond – focusing on issues and conversations missing from mainstream discourse. We bring our own insights to these issues, but importantly, actively seek out those perspectives and insights that can directly inform our research and outputs. We believe this is the only way to equitably create space.
These have varied from facilitating local people to give walking tours of their area to engagement-driven research on creating inclusive playspaces (with a guidance document forthcoming in spring 2025). In June 2024, we were grateful to be joined by The Glass-House’s very own Sophia de Sousa as part of the wrap-up panel discussion for the Thesaurus for Change workstream.
As part of this work, we have explored the limitations of the default language we as built environment professionals use when talking about creating space, and ultimately challenge designers to be less insular in their practice. We advocate for a new vocabulary – one that places more importance on using everyday, easy to decipher language, moving away from typically jargon-filled discussions. We hypothesise that this usage is often subconscious, owing to how deeply ingrained this language is in our training and then through practice. Nonetheless, the effect is to create and uphold a barrier to all people engaging in discourse about our shared built environment – creating a sense of those “inside” vs those “outside”.
This insularity speaks to wider, more systemic issues across built environment industries, but particularly within architecture. Design teams have often worked in silos, disregarding the people who will engage most frequently with their built forms, with engagement seen as a “tick box” exercise.
We envision a future where engagement within practice and development is no longer viewed in this light and undertaken only to fulfil statutory obligations. This propensity to only speak inwardly is ultimately to the detriment of ensuring the places we create reflect the people using them. Instead, we want to see more designers, developers and local authorities being committed to sustaining meaningful engagement with different groups throughout design processes.
This means considering what developing a radical language of care and trust might look like and how this can evolve over time and be adapted to respond to different groups. In doing so, we envision a clear way to build a symbiotic relationship, one with improved trust and understanding between the two groups. This has to start with those of us working in the built environment considering how our own diversity can contribute to creating safer spaces for sharing lived experience and building trust with communities, and the impact that a lack of diversity within the industry can have in building that trust.
We are bolstered by a more mainstream shift towards those that herald collaboration and drawing on the lived experiences of different individuals and groups to bring projects to fruition. The day jobs of our Young Trustees George Pope and Lily Holbrook, for example, are evidence of this. Respectively working for MATT + FIONA, specialists in youth engagement within built environment projects and TOWN, a developer committed to embedding engagement into the process of realising new places and spaces, they bring this expertise and knowledge to our workstreams.
We believe our way of working, and, specifically, the power that we find in our diversity, can be replicated more widely through our industry to create this common language of trust. To enact this change, we are believers in challenging the status quo that has long been established and call on others to join us.
About the Author
Architecture Foundation Young Trustees
We are the Architecture Foundation Young Trustees, a volunteer-led group of architecture workers focused on reshaping the way the built environment is experienced and discussed. Through events, workshops, and research projects, we work with students, professionals, and the public to champion emerging and underrepresented voices in the industry. Our network is designed to support young practitioners by sharing perspectives, experiences, knowledge, and ideas through social events, architectural discussions, and an online community.
About the WEdesign 2024/25 Series: Sharing Place
WEdesign is The Glass-House’s annual series of free interactive public events, held online and in-person in cities across the UK, where we explore collaborative design in placemaking through discussion, debate and playful co-design activities.
Sharing Place brings people together to propose more equitable ways of sharing our places and spaces, as well as creating places to share experiences, skills and other things we value, through thoughtful placemaking.
Our online events create provocative spaces for conversation and are open to participants across the UK and further afield. Our Think Pieces bring together a series of blogs from a range of voices to explore the WEdesign series theme.
WEdesign in-person events are safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively to generate ideas and solutions, co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice through hands-on making activities, discussion and debate. These events are co-facilitated by students from our WEdesign Student Programme, in collaboration with our partner universities in cities across the UK.
WEdesign is supported by the Ove Arup Foundation.
Find out more and book a place at one of our WEdesign Sharing Place events here.
Visit our WEdesign page to find out more about the WEdesign Programme and how we work with partner universities, students and external contributors here.
