Bahanur Nasya is an architect, researcher, project manager, and film producer. She has studied in Vienna and Barcelona, specializing in sustainable architecture, just and fair community-centered-scenarios, and future-proof development concepts. She is working with the nonprofit foundation “Placemaking Europe”, “xsentrikarts-platform for arts” and “Wonderland: platform for european architecture”, and she was also project manager, expert for diversity in urban development projects, lead co-creation tasks around Europe and is leading the research activities in wonderland. In her current work, she combines research with the creation of knowledge transfer products (manuals, films, stories, webinars, papers, publications, and training opportunities), and develops collaborations with citizens, practitioners, scientists, engineers, and decision makers.
The PED manifesto was born out of our experiences while creating positive energy districts for case studies in the DUT-funded PED-ACT project.
Through the participation processes we were engaged in, we realized that a crucial part of establishing PEDs was to bring citizens and citizen groups together, to help them develop and initiate projects in their own way. We also realized society exists as part of structures that determine and allow space for courses of actions, so the energy transition requires much more than technical solutions. It requires a holistic approach.
Youngsters right to the city
The “Right to the City” is a worldwide movement initiated by French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s. The premise of the movement is based on the concept that citizens have an unassailable right to build the city they live in, based on their needs and desires. In parallel the term “placemaking” was established as a response to modernist architecture and urban planning practices. Placemaking is a participatory process that integrates the ideas and skills of people who utilise the space in question and seek ways of improving it for their daily use and needs. The experiences of citizens coming from different social backgrounds and groups vary, however, as do their needs, making it pivotal to provide special attention to some groups during the process of placemaking. In practice, most activities initiated via top-down approaches fail to engage young people in a meaningful way. We have noticed, through our experiences, that there is a lack of understanding of young people’s needs and abilities, not to mention interests. In this chapter, we will discuss different approaches to playing that can help enable and empower young people. We believe these methods promote true engagement and have had a positive impact on their contribution in a placemaking project. In order to do so, we will specifically analyse and evaluate methods that involve playing as a means to encourage young people’s ideas and inspiration. The evaluated methods (three different games) are used in international projects (six different cases). The key aspects were to deal with the unimaginable, to understand what to change and, last but not least, who is going to have which role in the change. When evaluating the different methods, we will also look at the context cases alongside the needs of young people in participatory processes.
