Idea

Project MyHood – Engaging Youth in Actively Creating a Sustainable and Greener City aims at young people (13-18 years) to help them become aware and active citizens caring for their living environment with an emphasis on climate change and sustainable city and participating in the decision-making process. 

 

The concrete aims of the project are to open the process of strategical urban planning of public spaces to the youth; to enable the participation of youth in public decision-making via offline and interactive online tool; to raise youth awareness and education about the issues of today ́s world connected to climate change and adaption in the city. 

 

WHY?

For the city to become sustainable in the long term, the behavior of its inhabitants has to change via everyday decisions. Children become adults and understanding their impact on the environment might lead them to a more sustainable way of living and empower them to initiate changes in their neighborhoods. Therefore, the project focuses not only on improving public spaces but also understanding the environment they are living in. 

 

To understand our living environment, the rules and laws of a sustainable city have to be clear to children in the context of the liveability of public spaces, blue and grey water cycle, water retention measures, extreme weather mitigation measures, air quality, etc.). Understanding the place in physical and environmental aspect will help to create a bond to the place children live and build a bridge between physical and virtual. 

 

The things that children want are fundamentally the same as everyone else’s: safe streets, green space, clean air, somewhere to call home, and the freedom to be themselves. However, the voice which children and youth have currently on improving the environment of our cities is significantly underestimated. Everyday choice designers, planners, or policymakers usually don’t involve children. 

How?

The project proposal is tackling the issue mentioned above by creating a methodology to engage young people in creating a sustainable and greener city, bringing specific content concerning climate change education and enabling children to participate and research public spaces using the interactive online tool. 

 

Through the use of MyHood tools, we intend to actively engage the young generation to start perceiving their living space in a more complex way. We want to bring youth by using our tools to understand that caring for their living environment and participating in the decision-making process can bring positive changes and foster a close relationship with their living space, which is so necessary for the motivation of personal action. 

 

The concrete aims of the project are to open the process of strategical and urban planning of public spaces to the youth, to enable participation of youth in public decision-making via offline and Interactive Online Tool, to raise youth awareness and education about the issues of today ́s world connected to climate change and adaption in the city. 

 

The project focuses on developing three key results:

 

1) MyHood METHODOLOGY OF ENGAGING YOUTH IN CREATING A SUSTAINABLE AND GREENER CITY – connecting the knowledge and current strategies about climate change adaptation in our living environments with appropriate pedagogical methods and tools so that the target group (youth) will better understand the topic and at the same time engage interactively with their environment directly. Furthermore, the methodology will select the appropriate tools for engaging young people in the decision-making process connected with urban planning based on the knowledge and findings on children’s and youth’s physical, cognitive and mental development stages.

 

2) MyHood ENVIRONMENTAL CONTENT – a specific educational learning material together with participatory tools for active engagement. The Environmental Content will be structured into sections and can be used for learning about sustainable urban environments etc., and also as the participatory tools to get to know, understand and evaluate certain public spaces.

 

3) MyHood INTERACTIVE INLINE TOOL – this interactive tool will provide the youth users with interactive learning material (about climate change and sustainable city environment) that will pop-up while using this tool to evaluate certain areas or a future urban development project. The evaluation will be sent to the decision makers (the urban planners) to gain valuable data from a group of citizens that is currently missing.