Amy Goes To Festival Of Place!
On Thursday 4th July, I attended my first The Developer and Festival of Place conference at Wembley Box Park representing PLACED. It was an enriching day and lots of important topics were discussed with incisive debate.
A key issue addressed was women’s safety in public spaces and how to create more gender-inclusive environments. I have always felt that the key question is: how do we avoid placing too much focus on design and the physical aspects of the built environment when creating safer spaces for women? How do we avoid this omission, placing all our attention on the ‘hardware’ of cities, neglecting the crucial ‘software’? Moreover, how do we strike the right balance between these elements? Speaking to this issue, panelist Holly Lewis of We Made That quoted ‘Feminist City’ author Leslie Kern – “no amount of lighting is going to abolish the patriarchy.” The panelists also raised the benefits and challenges of data-driven approaches and community engagement.
Later on, I attended a workshop delivered by Susannah Walker, Co-Founder of Make Space for Girls. Make Space for Girls is a charity that campaigns for parks and public spaces to be designed with teenage girls in mind. In the session, I heard about the work they are doing to make safer, more inclusive spaces for teenage girls – a demographic who are, of course, massively unrepresented in the design and development of public spaces. It was promising to see the urgency surrounding women’s experiences in public space being discussed at such a big and established built environment conference. I am glad that these issues have a ‘seat at the table’ so to speak and that a wide range of built environment professionals are being brought into the conversation and presented with what are challenging, but urgent provocations.
In the afternoon, I attended a session titled People and pounds – is there a win-win in backing places to thrive? The session questioned whether there was an approach to development that delivers strong social as well as financial returns. This idea resonates with the work we do at PLACED, where we are, at times, part of project teams delivering community engagement with companies whose job is to speak to the market. At the end of this process of engagement and market testing, all insights (from both the community and market) are brought together to form a memorandum of understanding that helps to achieve the best outcome for a site. The experiences of those on the panel suggested that achieving a ‘win-win’ is possible and I would absolutely agree. I know from my own experiences working on projects that financial and community benefits are certainly not an ‘either/or’, but rather outwardly separate components of what can be an effective, holistic development process.