Sheffield Youth Takeover

How does the project address the Liveness Charter aims?

Co-production

Anna White set up her thesis as a co-design project in order to learn how to become a community architect, as this is how she wanted to practice in the future. She worked with a group of 12 'young advisers', local teenagers from across Sheffield, supported by young people's charity Sheffield Futures. Anna facilitated a series of codesign workshops with the young people every two-three weeks through the development of the project, using Live Works Urban Room as their base. 

Co-production was embedded at every stage of the project development, from brief-building and design development, to the final presentation by Anna and the team at Live works, to an audience from Sheffield Futures, Sheffield City Council and local youth organisations.  

Equitable

This project was driven by Anna's belief in the importance of inclusive design. The project asked "How can teenagers reclaim their right to the city?" and "How can the architect combine their expertise and speculative vision with the desires of clients and users within codesign practice?". This project was a testing ground to understand the role of the architect as designer within a collaborative co-design process. Anna was keen to support the creativity, ideas and lived experiences of the young people she was working with through the professional skills she had acquired through her architectural education and practice experience. An inclusive and equitable process was developed that exhibited the young people's ideas and creative work alongside Anna's architectural and technical outputs - demonstrating the equality of all forms of production within both the examination and public presentation. 

Experimental

It was unusual for a MArch Y6 thesis project to be conducted as a 'live' design studio project, although there have been more done in this way since. As a result, this thesis project was experimental in terms of its process and output - both being very different from a more conventional design project. Anna found running a co-design project to be both an enriching process and a steep learning curve. She learnt valuable leadership skills, how to facilitate creative activities, how to manage ideas and how to create a coherent architectural design from many voices. Being 'live' the process was inherently uncertain and Anna had to navigate through the contingencies of participants' diaries, the weather, illness, disagreement within the team, while also ensuring that her thesis project met the expected learning outcomes. 

Sheffield Youth Takeover was an inherently experimental project that questioned conventions around design authorship, architectural form and representation, and assessment. Anna embraced the riskiness of her strategy to produce a richly realised project that represented the ideas and lived experience of her collaborators. 

Meaningful

Anna was motivated to produce a co-design thesis project to demonstrate the value of student projects that get involved in the real world so that they can have actual benefit to real people. She says that it made both her and the teenagers realise the impact and importance of speculative design. Initially during the workshops there was a focus on early 'real' 1:1 interventions because there was an opportunity for them to be realised. However, the more hypothetical the design of the building, the more everyone became excited about how speculative designs can push boundaries and rethink how we run our cities. 

The teenagers said that they have been able to do something they’ve never done before, meet people from opposite sides of the city, modelling, designing, finally feeling like they have a voice to share their ideas and feeling part of something that is bigger than them, with a real opportunity to re-imagine their city future without restrictions.