News
Our City, Our Streets: Women, design and the built environment, LSE
October 2024.
An event I convened in collaboration with Marina Milosev.
Can a city be sexist? Future Of London hosted a panel discussion at the Public Spaces Expo concluded it absolutely can.
Furthermore, the built environment sector has a critical role to play in designing spaces that are welcoming for all. So, what’s stopping us, and how can we overcome these barriers?
➡️ Sector confidence: 75% of Built environment professionals feel underconfident in how to engage communities. To combat this, Al Mathers of The Young Foundation made a convincing case for formally embedding participatory approaches into professional practice and into training – and for practitioners to reframe their roles as facilitators of place, not designers of place.
➡️ Community confidence: Future of London’s recent co-production report argued that true co-production can only happen when the power and knowledge are shared equally between all stakeholders. Jennie Savage FRSA of London Borough of Tower Hamlets highlighted that this approach ensures there is mutual respect for all types of expertise in the process: residents as experts in community and professionals as experts in placemaking.
➡️ Budget constraints: To engage with communities in a meaningful way, Dorréll Gayle-Menzie from Scott Brownrigg challenged the sector to think differently about investment, to think beyond a project-based approach of community engagement. He advocated for funding communities as long-term custodians of place. We will be exploring how the sector and communities can redefine ‘value’ in an upcoming workshop on 6th November (see link in the comments below for details).
➡️ Lack of diversity within the sector: The UK’s placemaking workforce is predominantly white, male, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Dr Bridget Snaith CMLI and Anna Odedun shared insight from their recent paper ‘Weeds, wildflowers and White privilege’ which points to the sector itself – asking us to reflect on the lack of diversity within our workforce.
Our City, Our Streets.
Women, design and the built
environment.
LSE Womens Library: 10th October, 5-7pm
Can design make you feel safe?
What role does the built environment play in replicating gender inequality? Why
does so little data reflect the experience of women and girls in public spaces?
Where are our stories and who is telling them? And why it is important to think
about the design of our streets and public spaces through the lens of gender?
Our streets are
the relational frame through which we participate in public life and they have
historically been planned, designed and built around the absent voices of women
and girls- people who have rich, varied, complex and
diverse relationships with their city, but whose day-to-day activity and
stories are often missing from the design, planning and making of urban spaces.
Through
panel discussion and break out groups we will consider factors
such as representation in planning and design teams, the media, storytelling,
narrative and in data collection which means women’s voices have been absent
from design and decision making.
Panel and links for ticket booking coming soon...
Panel and links for ticket booking coming soon...
This handbook, developed in collaboration with Arup and supported by experts including UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme) and Make Space for Girls.
The event was chaired by Anne Ogundiya, I was delighted to share the floor with Heba Tabidi, Sara Dawes, and Jamie Kerr.
The design charette completed a funded research collaboration with Queen Mary University, working with women aged 18-30 who live in the borough. The event bought together designers, planners, community safety alongside local actors and activists to think through and imagine design solutions to the experiences discussed in our research project.
This was a great event which enabled collaboration and discussion across a range of activity and encouraged useful conversations about how to design and plan cities better, for people. This will be written up as a ‘how to’ document for delivering inclusive design in LBTH.
Huge thanks to Amelia Rose for inviting me to join this panel.
Thanks to the RTPI for writing about my gender inclusive design work at London Borough Tower Hamlets, click on the image above to read the full text.
Future of London Event: Putting Co-Production Into Practice. Great to speak about approaches to co-design at this event, organised by the Future of London.
What role do stories have to play in fostering collaboration between planners and the communities they serve? Join Jennie Savage, Joe Shute and Simon Wicks in an exploration of the power of storytelling to help us jointly imagine better futures for people and places.
This session will explore the need to bring about change via the commitment of built environment policy makers and practitioners and how both the public and private sector have a role to play. We will also think about the need for environmental sustainability and human centred design.
Chair:
- Julia Thrift, Director of Healthier Placemaking (Town and Country Planning Association)
Panellists:
- Jennie Savage, Public Realm Project Officer (London Borough of Tower Hamlets)
- Danna Walker, CEO (Built By Us)
- Dr Lorna Wang, Deputy Head, Department of Hospitality (University of Surrey)
Olamide Udoma-Ejorh - Director, Lagos Urban Development Initiative.
Teles A Cunha - Urban researcher, CeUrbe.
Unice Shipange - Urban Planner/Chevening Scjolar.
Diana Nsekela - Gender specialist, Dalberg Consulting.
Jennie Savage - Associate Public Realm Project Officer, Public Practice.
Paul Crosby - Director, Standard Chartered Bank.
In this session, we’ll show how by employing storytelling and focusing on the relatable tales that underpin planning, its practitioners can win over sceptics and make a powerful case for planning as an indispensable public good.
Speakers:
Rachel Brisely - Ipsos UK
Jennie Savage - London Borough of Tower Hamlets
Simon Wicks - The Planner RTPI
Simon Creer - Royal Town Planning Institute
Jennie Savage
Public realm project officer, Public Practice
Citation: “Over the time I have been lucky enough to know and work with Jennie, she worked tirelessly as the lead creator, author and exhibition designer for the BCP Future Lab project, a collaborative design project to re-imagine Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole town centres post pandemic. This was an action research project which she led through a public consultation programme that ranged from approaching strangers in bus stops to recording vox pop audio, devising and leading workshops and walks with the public, and working with local schools and universities. The incredible findings of this research were used to devise five key principles that indicate a necessary change in culture around town centres and a series of designs that suggest site specific interventions.
“She has proved to me the effectiveness of engagement techniques in creating public spaces, and inspired me too.”