Places for Girls — a co-design workshop with Mossbourne Community Academy

This year the London School of Architecture worked with local school, the Mossbourne Community Academy and Swedish practice White Arkitekter to host two workshops entitled ‘Places for Girls’. Taking place in June, Places for Girls focused on empowering girls — in this case, twelve students aged 12-13 — to be more involved in the design and planning of their local area. The workshop emerged following research carried out by Stockholm University, which concluded that 80 per cent of public spaces in Sweden are geared more towards the needs and interests of boys than girls.

Organised with Caro Communications, four LSA students: Alice Hardy, Seyi Adewole, Sara Lambridis and Annecy Attlee worked with Mossbourne students in four groups. Together they identified areas within the vicinity of Mossbourne Community Academy where the girls felt safe, scared, happy and places where they’d like to see changed. From this, short design manifestos were produced, to be used later on.

After that, a second workshop took place where the groups worked on designing interventions for the places they had previously outlined, using the manifestos as design guides. Sketches, collages and models were produced, with these interventions later being presented at the 2019 London Festival of Architecture.

Watch a video that was produced after the workshops took place below.

“You can really tell how environmentally conscious they are and how important it is for them to see this reflected in public spaces,” remarked Alice, Seyi, Sara and Annecy on the workshop. “Another thing to note is that all the interventions have been free, you don’t have to spend money to access any of them. The manifestos make it very clear what their aims are and how they would like to see public realm shaped to suit their needs. All of this has been formed in the model and you can see where they’ve made it into a tangible physical intervention.”