Juice Festival – NewcastleGateshead’s festival for families and under 25s – has been awarded £4,500 by The Exchange Collaborative Awards programme to fund an exciting project that brings together young people from the region and academics at Northumbria University in a bid to understand young people’s participation in urban design.
Now in its tenth year, the annual multi-art form festival, which takes place every October half term, has established itself as one of the leading events for children and young people in the UK. Juice builds young peoples’ creative, artistic and leadership skills through direct design and delivery of the festival programme.
Partnering Juice Festival in the Mapping the Future project will be Sebastian Messer from the Department of Architecture and Built Environment and Jon Swords and Mike Jeffries from Northumbria University’s Department of Geography. Last year the same team were supported by Juice Festival on their highly successful year long Mapping the City exhibition where a series of maps was created by young people based on their different experiences of Newcastle and Gateshead.
As part of Mapping the Future, young people including those from Team Juice, Juice Festival’s open-access programme for 16-25 year olds, will be given the opportunity to work alongside the Mapping the City team at Northumbria University.
Participants will create designs, plan and draft a ‘policy manifesto’ for hypothetical new developments and planning in Newcastle and Gateshead, using real life planning and policy to inform their ideas.
The collaboration will look at developing the skills and capacity for young people to have a greater involvement and agency in architecture and the built environment.
Chris Batstone, Juice Artistic Director, said: “Juice Festival’s work with young people supports them to express views and share dialogues about their place and role in society. A key area of concern for many of the young people that we work with is about their access, use and interaction with public and cultural spaces.
“This collaboration with the team at the University of Northumbria will help Juice build a greater knowledge of urban design and planning, best collaborative practice, and how we can offer young people-led consultancy and design services to local authorities and other stakeholders.”
Through the process both Juice Festival and Northumbria University hope to gain a greater understanding of research techniques and engagement practice for working with young people.
Sebastian Messer, Senior Lecturer from the Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Northumbria University, said: “There’s a lot of really creative work taking place in Newcastle and around the North East with young people to develop their skills, knowledge and active citizenship. We are delighted to be part of this and to be collaborating with Juice Festival on this project.
“It is hugely important that young people are not overlooked in the way that we design and manage our cities and we hope that this collaboration will help young people’s voices to be heard so that they can advocate, on their own behalf, for their Rights to the City to those with power and influence over the development of the built environment.”
Juice Festival 2017 will take place from October 20th-29th and will feature children & young people’s creative ideas and responses to the Freedom City 2017 programme. http://freedomcity2017.com/