In an east London borough where levels of violence against women are high, a group of teenage girls has been given a voice in the design of a major regeneration project in the hope of making a difference.
“Feeling safe is a genuine problem for them,” explains Linda Thiel, a director at White Arkitekter, who has been leading the firm’s involvement in the regeneration of the vast Gascoigne Estate in Barking & Dagenham.
The girls are pupils at Greatfields School, which currently has 950 pupils, and were taking part in White Arkitekter’s Flickrum – Places for Girls project.
“They were telling us they were not allowed out by their parents after dark because it’s not safe, so they get stuck at home,” says Thiel. “It seems reasonable at their age to be able to have dinner at a friend’s house and then walk home but they were not allowed out after school.”
Police statistics help to explain why: in the year to March 2022, the borough’s crime rate was higher than average for the Metropolitan Police force area, with almost 100 reported crimes per 1,000 population. Violence and sexual crimes were also higher than average, at 36.92 per 1,000 population. Domestic violence, when reported, sits within these figures. Nevertheless, it is small wonder these girls’ parents want them off the streets and away from public spaces.
But Thiel believes the built environment can play a part in making daily life safer for girls – if its designers and decision-makers engage them in the process of creating it. What’s more, she believes there is commercial as well as social value in designing more inclusive spaces.
The property sector is waking up to this, as illustrated by the flurry of support for a new campaign to address violence against women and girls in the built environment. Launched by urban design and public realm practice Publica in September and welcomed by the London mayor, its signatories include Grosvenor, the Portman Estate, Great Portland Estates and Almacantar.
Ellie Cosgrave, director of Publica’s community interest company and research, who is leading the campaign, says several projects are now in the pipeline that will showcase gender-inclusive design. She has also authored a new report for the London mayor’s Good Growth by Design programme covering the key principles of a gender-informed approach to public space provision and, crucially, practical ideas for how those working in the sector can develop ways to engage women, girls and gender diverse people in the making of the public realm.
Gender-equal space
As ever when it comes to urban design, Sweden seems to be ahead of the curve on this. For White Arkitekter, the starting point for its own Places for Girls project was a piece of research published around a decade ago by Stockholm University. It showed that public places were used 80% by boys and only 20% by girls after the age of eight and estimated that girls felt 10 times more insecure in these spaces.
“From a Swedish perspective that was very alarming because we always like to consider ourselves as very gender-equal,” says Thiel.
The practice embarked on its own piece of research, inviting a group of 13-18-year-old girls from a Stockholm youth council and several youth leaders to work with a theatre company to help it find out what had gone so wrong.
The results were communicated to politicians, planners and developers using street theatre featuring two teenage girls moving through an urban environment. The decision-makers were able to walk around the local area while listening to the girls’ voices on headphones to share their perspectives.
The experience laid bare the lack of facilities and safety infrastructure designed with girls in mind. “They have been looking at us the entire time, but they have not seen us,” was how one girl summed up her view of those shaping their local environment.
“This is a white spot on the map,” acknowledged one participant from the City of Stockholm urban planning office. “I cannot think of one reference of a place designed for young girls.”
“Even women like me who have worked in this industry for many years were shocked that we haven’t had a bigger impact on the environment in these places,” says Thiel.
What should be at the fore, she says, is the principle developed by the US urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s – that “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”.
By designing for the needs of vulnerable groups such as teenage girls, disabled people and older people, the result becomes better for all. “There are commercial aspects to this – it can benefit local shops and the value of homes,” Thiel says, adding that data from projects in Sweden is beginning to demonstrate this.
In Stockholm, the project’s teenage collaborators created their own 1:50 models for a specific local space. Their proposals included places for sitting together face-to-face, protected from the weather, and places where they could feel comfortable sitting alone. They wanted a sense of intimacy but without feeling trapped, good lighting and places with identity.
The project enabled the girls to be listened to as the experts in being girls in their local area – rather than having their perspective marginalised in the design process. Thiel calls the methodology “normkreativ”, a Swedish word summing up how it challenges the norms of the design process.
Bringing Sweden to east London
Bringing “normkreativ” from Stockholm to east London may sound like a leap, but Thiel, who set up the firm’s London office in 2015, says it could not be more relevant here.
White was able to develop and adapt the methodology through a project working with 12 and 13-year-old girls at Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney during the 2019 London Festival of Architecture. From there, it was able to bring Barking & Dagenham and the local authority-owned developer Be First on board with the project when it became involved in the Gascoigne scheme.
White gained consent for more than 700 new homes across two phases – Gascoigne East phase 2 and Gascoigne West (both currently under construction) – before being appointed in 2020 to develop an ambitious placemaking framework to stitch the entire regeneration together. Places for Girls became part of the community engagement.
Workshops at Greatfields educated the girls about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – including their right to be heard – and about how planning works in their city. The girls mapped out their routes to and from school and marked the places where they feel safe and unsafe. They then produced their own manifestos and designs.
Arguably the most striking thing the girls shared was how constrained they felt by safety concerns. This helped inform White’s designs and conversations with Be First and the Met Police’s Designing Out Crime officers. “We were able to say, ‘we need front doors’ or ‘we need active frontage here, because this is a main route, so it needs to be overlooked’,” Thiel explains.
Vital information was gleaned. For example, it became clear the girls were missing the safe haven provided by a chip shop demolished earlier in the regeneration.
“It was close to school, and it was their hangout. It was open for long hours and even though there was probably drug dealing going on around there, the chip shop felt reasonably safe because there were people there,” Thiel says. “Obviously the aspiration is that we come back with active ground-floor uses.”
On Gascoigne East Phase 2, which features 526 modular Scandinavian-style family apartments and homes across 11 new buildings, the girls’ comments were fed into wider discussions about whether new courtyards should be gated (the “norm”) or kept open to allow permeability and social interaction.
Safe spaces
The original 1960s estate featured towers and low-rise linear blocks with open ground in between. There were no parameter blocks to create more intimate communal spaces, but people were used to being able to walk between buildings and children could play around them – albeit on poor-quality public ground. The girls at Greatfields, meanwhile, struggled to find anywhere suitable to meet friends.
The hope is that communal courtyards, with benches and trees and perhaps younger children playing, should offer a safe and easy place to do that; somewhere communal but more private than the 50,000 sq ft park at the heart of the scheme “where other things might be going on”.
“If you lock these spaces up, then you need a key fob to get in or you need someone to let you in – it’s very restricted,” Thiel explains. Being able to flow through the space is also important for safety. “It sounds sad to say, but you always want to have another escape route,” she says.
But keeping spaces open also presents challenges for policing. The upshot is that they will be kept open with the option built in to close the gates at night if necessary.
There were strong correlations between what the girls in Stockholm and their peers in London felt they needed. “The girls talked a lot about wanting to be able to sit under some kind of roof or cover,” says Thiel. They needed something in between the play areas for younger children and the open recreational spaces where teenage boys might play basketball.
To answer that, White’s designs for Gascoigne incorporate sheltered spaces – such as benches beneath tree canopies close to residential blocks and children’s play areas on Gascoigne West Phase 1 – to create a “series of opportunities for teenagers to hang out”.
The girls’ comments about lighting led to designs for hanging lights across courtyards in addition to the “norm” of lights close to the ground plus tall light poles.
For now, much of the regeneration is a construction site. But Thiel plans to return to Greatfields in a couple of years to speak to a new group of girls. She’ll be asking them what works and what doesn’t and looking at how the landscape architecture has been delivered.
Coming in last, she acknowledges this is always a budget that comes under severe pressure. Local authorities and housing associations are interested in the work, and so too are a handful of private and commercial developers with whom she is having conversations. And with Publica’s campaign gaining serious traction with some big-name investors and landowners, real estate may finally be understanding the important role it places in delivering safe spaces for all.
How real estate can deliver more equitable places
For developers and investors looking to create more inclusive and therefore safer physical environments, a new report by Dr Ellie Cosgrave for the GLA may offer some valuable advice.
The 51-page report outlines the need for designing spaces for all and the challenges that come with that. For those serious about utilising the power of the built environment for good, it offers up 10 key questions built environment specialists should ask themselves when approaching any project.
Those questions include whether project teams are gender-informed and diverse, whether this is being reflected in design, whether inclusive engagement with the community is being undertaken, whether appropriate policies and strategies are in place to support women’s safety in the longer term and, crucially, whether budget has been set aside to deliver.
Read the Safety in Public Space – Women, Girls and Gender Diverse People report
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