2023 Theses Master's

Co-designing Public Spaces with Kids: Building PS32's Community Fitness Hub Through a Semester-long Workshop Curriculum

Lammers, Jim

The wider mission of building a Community Fitness Hub at PS32 The Belmont School is to help advance social, health, and public space equity in the Bronx, specifically East Tremont, which is one of the most underserved and at-risk communities in the city. This project is part of larger efforts exploring the role of ground up planning and public space activation in alleviating these issues of health inequity and increasing accessibility to active, safe, clean, usable, open, and fun public spaces.

My work focuses on elevating the voices of children through a co-design process used to build quality public spaces. Through a semester-long series of workshops with a class of second grade students at PS32, I discovered that co-designing spaces with children is hard, requiring a high level of commitment and a great deal of capacity for facilitators. However, this work is worth it, as it simultaneously empowers the kids, giving them ownership over the space the project is designing for, and educates young people about everything from planning and design to spatial awareness and wayfinding, all while creating more informed and equitable designs for the space that better serve the surrounding community.

Although small, this work can be a step not only in addressing deep inequalities present in East Tremont, but in giving young people the tools and inspiration to take more power over the spaces they inhabit. The result of this work is a replicable curriculum that can be taken and modified for other classes within PS32 and to other schools across the city.