It is not always easy for children and young people to get their voices heard when it comes to the planning of the cities they live in. But their input is important for a whole range of reasons including that cities need to be fit for purpose, young people's health and counteracting climate change.
In this third episode, a student from Helsinki University, Gaëtan Gamba, and a recent alumni of Södertörn University, Jasmin Adolph, speak to two researchers, Romina Rodela from Södertörn University, and Natalie Gulsrud from the University of Copenhagen, about urban planning and youth involvement. This podcast was made possible by funding from the A.P. Moller Foundation.
Go to The New Nordic Lexicon for further reading on this and many more subjects!
Sound credits: Summer by tictac9 from freesound.org.
It is not always easy for children and young people to get their voices heard when it comes to the planning of the cities they live in. But their input is important for a whole range of reasons including that cities need to be fit for purpose, young people's health and counteracting climate change.
In this third episode, a student from Helsinki University, Gaëtan Gamba, and a recent alumni of Södertörn University, Jasmin Adolph, speak to two researchers, Romina Rodela from Södertörn University, and Natalie Gulsrud from the University of Copenhagen, about urban planning and youth involvement. This podcast was made possible by funding from the A.P. Moller Foundation.
Go to The New Nordic Lexicon for further reading on this and many more subjects!
Sound credits: Summer by tictac9 from freesound.org.
Hi everyone and welcome to this podcast for The New Nordic Lexicon. We are currently at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden, with other students and researchers from the universities of Aarhus, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Södertörn The subject of this podcast will be the climate and sustainability in general. And this episode specifically will be about urban planning and planning with youth in the Nordics.
Nicola Witcombe:The New Nordic Lexicon is a collection of articles, podcasts and films based on research about the Nordic region and the world. The New Nordic Lexicon brings young people together with researchers and a dialogue on Nordic society, history and culture.
Jasmin Adolph:We have two researchers who traveled all the way here and who will be helping us with this episode, whom we'll introduce later, we're going to start first introducing ourselves the interviewers. So my name is Jasmine, and I am an alumni of Södertörn here in Stockholm. And I just finished my master's degree last summer in international journalism. And I'm excited to be conducting my very first interview for The New Nordic Lexicon.
Gaëtan Gamba:And here along with Jasmine, I'm Gaëtan and I'm originally from Switzerland. I'm studying European and Nordic studies as a master degree level at the University of Helsinki. Today, we will have Natalie with us and Romina. So Natalie, would you like to introduce yourself?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Sure. Thanks. My name is Natalie Gulsrud and I'm an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen with a focus on the governance of urban green infrastructure and nature based solutions. So I focus on bicycle infrastructure to urban forest to community gardens and to green commons, and how we make decisions about this areas of the city.
Romina Rodela:Hey, my name is Romina Rodela. I'm associate professor in environmental governance and management, and at Södertörn University I'm conducting research in the broader area of environmental governance from within which I'm looking at participatory processes, at how that accommodates for the need of the lesser presented groups. And we are looking particularly through the project of Planning with Youth into questions related to the involvement of young people is participatory planning procedures.
Gaëtan Gamba:Thank you. As part of the consultation for The New Nordic Lexicon, we found out that many young people and researchers were interested in the climate and many mentioned democracy as a particularly Nordic value. In this podcast, we're uniting these two issues in talking to researchers who are not only involved in a sustainable approach to city planning, but are also part of the project Planning with Youth, which they will explain a bit more about later on. If we start to talk a bit with Romina, you have looked at a lot the involvement of children and young people in planning processes, something which makes the process more democratic in a way. It may seem ? to you. But why is it important to get the young people and children involved in urban planning?
Romina Rodela:The fact is that cities are not planned for all different social groups that inhabit cities and some are having more presence than others and those who do not have presence very much in terms of infrastructure, youth, and children. The way cities are built today, it's not really taught to work for them. In terms of safety, in terms of roadcrossings, presence of cars, there are multiple incidents that often will involve children. Another thing that comes forward is health. Today, cities extremely polluted and those who pay the highest price are vulnerable groups and among them children. Two days ago, European Environmental Agency released a report on air quality in Europe, and it is highlighted the children's suffered the highest impacts in terms of respiratory respiratory disease. Earlier attempt for youth inclusion actually were based in the ideas put forward by the United Nation Child Rights Convention. Sweden is currently the only country that has transposed this convention into planning by introducing a new requirement for planners to engage youth and children in participatory planning processes to include the voices. So I would also mention that perhaps this is not sufficient to resolve the ways children being impacted by current urban planning, let's say a traditional government planning, but it's a very important step.
Gaëtan Gamba:So would you say that the case of Sweden is an exception? Or?
Romina Rodela:Absolutely. Sweden is currently the only country that has this requirement. It is, I mean, it can be really considered a front runner, because this is a policy innovation. To have a law that requires inclusion of the less represented, and what traditionally would be required vulnerable group in participatory processes is unique, is new. And it bears a lot of challenges. Because if you think planning is a field of expertise, cities are made by engineers, by highly educated people who think through very complex schemata. So how do you bring the voice of a child into that debate? It's a challenge. So the planners are currently facing now a number of questions: how to do that. In Sweden, it is very much a practice to use dialogues and consultation with youth. And that is part of a broader tradition that Sweden has, in terms of youth engagement. Sweden has a long tradition for bringing young people into certain political, let's say, decision making areas.
Gaëtan Gamba:Sorry, could you like give us some examples?
Romina Rodela:Yes, so youth has been engaged in debates right around education in the past, so how far that went, maybe I'm not the best to comment. But it's known that young people have been part of this debate, not the least in terms of a voice to the table that represents a group. So that comes as part of a tradition. And that is no other country I can think of, could be compared to Sweden. But at the end of the day, there are also challenges because as I mentioned, planning is a place of expertise. While the challenge young people they are still evolving. And we cannot approach young children with a map and start to put on them very heavy, loaded information. So you have the challenge, how to engage young people and children in debates about very complex questions that are very new to them. And that those are the questions or the challenges that the planners are currently facing. And our project, we're also Natalie's partner, is trying exactly to deal with this, it's to think of methods of engagement that go beyond those that are classically known, that are perhaps the most straightforward. So we have experimented with a number of different methods, methodologies, we have been engaging with young people, people aged 15+, not very young, because of practical reasons. And we have seen that certain matters work well, others a bit less. But that is the contribution of the project Planning with Youth: to try to expand and put forward information and other repertoire of tools on how to engage children and young people in participatory planning processes, which also I would like to mention might not always lead to having very strong impact on the final decision, that's another topic.
Jasmin Adolph:Natalie and Romina have written about some of these planning processes not being sufficiently democratic. Could you say more about this?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Essentially when we're talking about democracy, we're talking about how are people involved? Whose voices are heard? What kind of decision making processes do we have? And what are the common goods? Like what are the societal contracts in our society? So when we look at a Nordic context, we see this kind of external reputation of, you know, good democracy and good practices, good governance. If we look, you know, side by side, from Sweden, to Denmark, to Norway to Finland, we see different manifestations of this. So I can speak to the Danish context and say that in a Danish context, planning is actually quite hierarchical, meaning that the state has very sort of top down initiatives in terms of how decisions are taken, specifically around state run lands. We have a planning law that is very market based, meaning that you know, sort of what best for landowners comes first and foremost. And at the local level, there's 98 municipalities in Denmark, municipalities have a very strong role in terms of planning. So environmental planning and management is deregulated to the municipal level. And that has a lot of consequences because it means that we don't have regional planning, as we have before. So previously, in a different time period in in Denmark, there was regional planning, which provided a lot of advantages. Every municipality has its own municipal strategy. And that means that municipal strategy accountants also for ways in which environmental law in planning law is then realized. And this is done through an overall municipal strategy. And then it's broken down into local plans, and local plans will cover kind of a neighborhood. And within that local plan, you'll have agreements on what can be built, where, how many parking spots should be allocated. And now more recently, thinking about how much green space should be included? How do we count for greening and diversity? These are still quite technical processes, and those that are active citizens who are involved in these kinds of decision making processes, but you could say they're a bit more expert driven. And maybe, for good reason, right? Because when you're working with quite technical approaches, oftentimes it makes sense to have those who are educated, and who are very much involved in the process to be leading the way and to be facilitating that. The question then becomes, how do you hear voices? And how do you include new and diverse voices in these decision making processes. And that, of course, is always difficult. And I think you have to think about it in terms of the scale of infrastructure, from smaller projects all the way up to mega projects. What we can see both through anecdotal examples, but also research is that when you're looking at mega projects, can speak about the construction of the metro in Copenhagen, you can't include resident perspectives very well. These are massive projects that needs to be implemented over a specific period of time, with very large budgets that have to do with huge agreements and partnerships across different agencies, landholders, and are incredibly complex. So we do not have a tradition for really including a lot of resident involvement, there's very symbolic involvement. So they're kind of closed governance processes. But if you go down to sort of more local decision making you see a great tradition for what we call agenda 21 processes are really opening up for residents of all different types of backgrounds, and all voices, like including also people who are homeless, people who maybe don't necessarily like, you know, belong in Denmark, but also in terms of residency permits, and so forth, kind of economic refugees, you could say also being involved in these processes. So really thinking across sort of the margins of society, how do we include those voices? Those can be very inspiring processes.
Gaëtan Gamba:So from that perspective, why is it so important that young people are implicated in decisions that are related to their environment?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:I think that's a really good question. And it has to do with what kind of knowledge is involved in a city planning process and in technical environmental departments. And what we see is that there's a lot of technical knowledge involved. So there's experts, engineers, there are experts associated with understanding land value and providing kind of economic forecasts. But what the kind of knowledge that oftentimes gets downplayed or is not taken as seriously as sort of ecological knowledge, and how that links to social practices as well. So going back to my statement, that this is also about political economy, what kind of values are thought of is the most important, and what is thought of as valuable. And here we see sort of land prices, market values, and kind of innovation and disruptive sort of processes for green growth has been very much valued. And then how ecological processes are built into decision making processes is more fraught. And that isn't because we don't have that knowledge at the municipal level. There are so many well versed, knowledgeable, really well intentioned people working at the municipality of Copenhagen, for example, who know everything about trees, know everything about biodiversity, know everything about plants, and would like to realize the green city, it's very difficult to realize the Green City and four year decision making processes. So this is sort of a statement about the voice of nature, and how that gets involved in decision making processes. So the idea of ecological justice.
Nicola Witcombe:This is a New Nordic Lexicon podcast on why are young people important in city planning?
Gaëtan Gamba:You're both involved in a project called Planning with Youth that you've been already, like, discussing. And you have tried to find effective ways of involving young people in decision processes. But can you tell us a bit about an effective example of consulting young people that happened maybe in Sweden or in Denmark?
Romina Rodela:We set up situations, workshops, over the course of one day or a week where we engage youth on a method. And then we collect information about how the method felt on them. What we meant to do with planning is to test how meaningful different methods are for young people, in order to provide them guidance and some research insight for planners, for them to be able to make decisions, what method to use. What we come to, we tested many methods with studios, games, paper crafting, cardboard scrapping, participatory maps, from paper and pencil to digital map. So we really tested a long list of methods. And what we have accumulated in terms of insight is that it's really context dependent. It's very hard to generalize and say, a widely held assumption is when you have young teenagers, we often heard from planners, it's good to use digital games, because that's what young teens are passionate about. So you connect to their level, and you help them to tell you more about the city, we have tried that. And the outcome was to our surprise, as well, that the youth were not really feeling the best position to use, let's say Minecraft, to express their views and ideas about their living environment. That is one of the quite interesting outcomes, we as adults, often have prayer stated opinion, so how you would like to see or engage with questions that might not always be correct for the young people. So we have tested these methods. And we are currently actually developing our toolkit, where this insight will be synthesized and made available, free available for planners or whatever, what are the profiles to use?
Gaëtan Gamba:So from that perspective, why is it so important that young people are implicated in decisions that are related to their environment?
Romina Rodela:Yes, that relates a little bit to what have earlier mentioned that there is a lot of preconceptions about what you or your children needs, and wishes to have in their environment. And very often these ideas are projections filtered through an eye of an adult, for instance, the idea is that young people need to hang out, and therefore they need more skating parks. So now that filters the needs through his own eyes, and you cannot go beyond that, but the reality of things is the youth is not a homogeneous or static category. Young people are very dynamic, you know, you don't have a young people young, for a very long period of time, you always have generations and they change. In fact, if skating parks would trendy and appealing for youth, a strategy to get them out of their house and you know, move a little bit. Nowadays, they're not so popular any longer, or maybe other things might be speaking to a person of that age compared to 10 years ago. So it is important to engage young people. So to answer your question, because there are trends, there are differences, what their needs and wishes are over generations and the best ones to tell you what their living experience with places and spaces is. What they really need is actually the young people and not the filter of mature expert who thinks that skatepark are good for kids. So that's why we believe very much that youth and children are important interlocutors, when we talk about places or spaces where they should actually be enjoying as well.
Gaëtan Gamba:This example that you gave actually, like reminded me a lot about my childhood, and seeing how, you know, you had always a playground in the school yard. That was a big football field. And it was mainly, you know, thought of for boy children, and even for a certain category of boys children. So what about also this? Like, could we add a gender perspective to this to this whole thinking as well? Is it also a fact that these spaces are also thought for men by men? Maybe? Could you elaborate a bit on this?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Yeah, you just mentioned a very new wave of critical urbanism in relation to the subfield of children geography, that is exactly saying that most of the urban infrastructure outdoors meant for recreation targets a lot to young people who are mostly male, or who likes sporty things. And there is a movement, especially growing up in the UK, or in the Anglo Saxon world, where they try to expose the fact that there is very little in terms of infrastructure or places meant for, for girls, who perhaps or boys who might not be sporty, it's also a lot of stereotyping, that old boys should be playing football. And then after 10 years old boys should be skating, and you know, like general waves of what, how you should be and what they should be doing. So currently, there is a debate happening, there is a lot really being done. And maybe I can mention there is a lot of activism, because I haven't mentioned but at the bottom, or the bottom layer of even the children, the UN child convention, is a massive effort from activists and advocates for the well being of children who pushed through and managed to put in place all these institutional structures. And now we have NGOs, and activists advocating for the right of teenage or young girls to be allowed a place in public spaces. And there is an NGO, which is really great. And I would like to mention that because they're doing great work is called Make Space for Girls. And they're doing a lot of really hands on intervention in the public space. They're based in the UK, where they put out infrastructure that caters to the needs of girls. And unsurprisingly, it is not the football field. And they do that together with girls, they engage girls, work with them, ask them questions, allow them space to express, allow space to the young people to think through what they really need and wish to see. So it doesn't come to just that, you know, the expert who has a PhD in planning, who will decide how this place will look like. So they put up a lot of participatory methodologies and bring the younger as in conversation with planners and practitioners to make places also for them, for the for the young girls.
Jasmin Adolph:That sounds amazing that those projects are actually in place and happening right now. And people don't just talk about it, that it should be done, but it's actually being done. That's really great to hear. And speaking of rights. Generally, when reading more about your work, you have talked also about intergenerational justice. Could you also explain it here? What is meant by that? Exactly?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Yeah, sure. I was actually thinking, piggybacking off of your answer, it would be interesting to bring in the concept of intergenerational justice, which assumes that the voices of youth today and those who are not even born need to be accounted for in decision making processes, for example, around climate change adaptation, the next 30 to 50 years, because that's their future. Right? So it's an ethical framework that is very much based on kind of a legal idea of what the future should be. And what we're trying to do is understand how it fits into a planning perspective. And that's very complex. Do you want to build off of that?
Romina Rodela:So there is this principle that it all invites you to think about the future in ways that you always think about, who is coming next rather than say, actually, this area is the best one to put housing, even though it's fertile because it's the closest to the train station and so the housing will be most having the highest market value. So you wait, you know what the benefits is today, against what actually benefit me might be in the future, although you don't know what will happen.
Gaëtan Gamba:Okay, thank you for this explanation. And just if we go back a bit to the, to the project of Planning with Youth, we talked about the case of Sweden. But is there also similar tendencies in the Nordics or other European countries also know that answer them as part of the planning, review of the project? So could you tell us a bit more about the other.
Romina Rodela:So we have a project partner, which is ? University, and they are basically engaging with interviews with planners in Holland, and Holland, that is not very different from other European countries when it comes to engagement of field meaning that it's not very central. But what do they have as well, like Sweden is they have a very strong force of activists and advocates for the rights of the children. And while youth and children are not, by law, or by practice very much equally special planning, they have the need to include them as part of a broader debate within the planning field. And there is lots of NGOs that work with urban areas that could cater to the needs of youth and children. Holland has also a very strong and vibrant placemaking community with different individuals who, as part of their profession, or in pro bono actually engage with this topic. So that is the situation in Holland, so might not be having the institutional the formal institutional structure like Sweden, but as I mentioned earlier, only Sweden has them. No other countries has this law.
Gaëtan Gamba:But that's interesting, also, to think about the fact that like, these countries are very exceptional in a way and they are maybe willing to implicate youth in the decision process. But is this like a bit too much of an exception that could not happen elsewhere? Like what about extending these kind of ideas elsewhere?
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:So it seems to be a front runner that has a tradition, and probably the political sphere in Sweden, likes being a front runner and likes to inspire. And I have to say, when we go around with the project, and we talk in other places about what Sweden is doing, we do get a lot of questions. So Sweden, you know, through our work, you can see that people are inspired, people are challenged, because the first, you know, I got the answer: "Wow, you have this Sweden?" And then the second question: "Boy I bet that that's not implemented in practice!", especially if I if stopped a planner, because they know how hard this. So I think what happens now, what I would see is the spirit inspires a lot, the practice here, but we also need to be realistic and consider that this is not like a copy paste model that would work elsewhere. It's very hard. Even in Sweden, there are challenges, you know, and that will be another topic. Some municipalities are doing well, others are struggling, others are not doing it. So you know, it is. But it's a broader debate. I think it's very good that it's happening, because as I mentioned, there is this report published by the European environmental agency that just highlights the huge amount of health implications for kids that come from cities planned in a way that they are just forgotten. And as someone said earlier, and remember who if you make cities planned for kids, you make cities good for everyone.
Jasmin Adolph:Many thanks to everyone and for your time, and we would like to thank the research group of which nordic.info is a part, Reimagining Norden in an Evolving World, particularly the branch at Södertörn University for supporting this podcast. We would also like to thank the A.P. Møller Foundation for supporting The New Nordic Lexicon. And thank you both Natalie and Romina.
Natalie Marie Gulsrud:Thank you so much!
Romina Rodela:Thank you. Likewise.
Nicola Witcombe:The researchers you've been listening to a Romina Rodela from Södertörn University, and Natalie Gulsrud from Copenhagen University. The students interviewing on this podcast were Gaëtan Gamba from Helsinki University and Jasmin Adolph, an alumni from Södertörn University. The New Nordic Lexicon podcast series will mainly be in English with some episodes in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. Subjects range from the invasion of Ukraine and security in Europe to minority languages in Finland and Sweden. The New Nordic Lexicon is brought to you by the team behind nordics.info at Aarhus University in Denmark, with students and colleagues from across the Nordics and beyond.