There is no space in Crewe that is specifically for girls.
I'm Crewe born and bred
and there is not one space that I know that is just for girls.
And I don't.
I feel like it's going to be a very long time until we do have that.
So public spaces
are important to everyone's physical and mental wellness and wellbeing,
but public spaces
are also really important to adolescents in that kind of transitional phase
where you're going out or you're kind of getting a better sense of the world.
You're learning how to socialise outside of your home
and public spaces that encourage you to independently make sense of that,
but also provide a safe space to do that are so important.
It's a space where they can start to
exercise autonomy.
You think
a lot of the time for young people, they don't have any autonomy in school.
They may have some autonomy at home, but actually they may not.
And so if you don't give people, young people, the space
to develop their autonomy in the public realm,
where else are they going to learn?
Public spaces are a really important metric of a well-functioning city,
and it's actually a really good litmus test for
if we're doing a good job designing and maintaining our cities.
But after a decade of austerity, these are the exact kind of spaces
that are getting chronically underfunded.
And when they are getting an investment, that investment
tends to be in the form of like a MUGA or a football pitch.
And these things don't actually reach everyone.
They're actually only for a small demographic of people who play sport.
And so we really wanted to set up our project to ask
those users and conduct a form of peer research
where the people who we’re asking about are doing the work themselves
and imagining how they would like to see public spaces in the future.
A lot of the time when public spaces designed or when we were planning
for public space, or even when we think about public space and policy,
the people involved in making those policies are never girls and young women
in the UK, only 14% of people working in the built environment are women.
So it's a huge gender issue, but it's also an age issue like youths
are never included in consultation processes or are seldom included.
So it was important for us to be able to bring in the voices of girls
and young women so that they were authors of the research
and they could present the work and be like, here's the issue.
To be very clear, I don’t think anybody intended to set out
to make spaces that were dominated by boys.
It's just sort of the way that it's happened.
I think multi-use games areas and skate parks are brilliant in that they are
a signal to teenagers that this is a place where you are entitled to be.
And that's really important.
It's just not working for girls at the moment.
So we need to think about how do we adapt these spaces
so that they work better for girls, or do we provide something else?
In addition, the green space that we looked at in
Crewe was really interesting because there was already
a pretty nice multi-use games area.
But then they were thinking about what else we're going to do.
Ooh, let's put an enormous football pitch in the middle of the grass and the girls
are just going
really, because that means Saturday and Sunday
that whole area is taken over by 11 a side, boys and young men.
Is this really what we want?
And nobody's saying take away the MUGA from that green space.
Absolutely not.
What we are saying is that, well, with that big bit of grass in the middle,
maybe we could do something different.
Crewe is also a great place for us to work because we felt
that some of the challenges
that Crewe facing as a city are ubiquitous to the rest of England.
And by that I mean, for example, it's
town centers really struggling against outside retail parks.
The car access dominates pedestrian access
and it was historically well and still is a huge train hub
which has actually disrupted a lot of the connectivity around the city.
So there was a real issue that we felt that the young girls
could respond to and react to, which they did incredibly well.
I don't really go to the center.
I stay sort of round my area because I'm so used to it.
And the the center isn't a very it's not it's not a safe place.
And I'd say that lighting is a big part of that because there isn't enough
and half of the places that you go down are just
pitch black and you can't see what you're doing at all.
I find it quite
depressing really, because if you think even like Poundland
doesn't want to stay here or can't stay here, and what does that say
about the future of our town center?
Um, so it is quite morbid, really, walking through
and seeing everything that I used to see when I was younger that I really enjoyed.
Now that we don't have them anymore, it's just depressing, really.
And it just doesn't give me good hope for the future, I suppose.
Yeah.
When they got out there and they were actually putting
physical things on a map or noticing things
about their environment, they were seeing like
it was a way of teaching them how to see things differently.
Right?
And they realised that a lot of things that were important to them
weren't on maps
and a lot of things that were significant to them weren't on maps like lighting,
wasn't on a map, even though that was a huge
determinant of whether they would use this space or not.
It was well and good
talking about what was in a space, but when you actually saw it on a map,
saw how little, I don’t know, benches there is there, or lighting
or open spaces and space for people to feel safe.
When you actually look at it on a map and you've got the visual representation,
it really, it really puts it kind of out of words and into real life.
And you can see the reality of the space.
Well, we have a lot of like betting shops on our high street.
Well, what's left of it, it's just typical males that would use it.
It makes me feel most excluded.
As a woman, we kind of have one shop or one clothing store within.
It's kind of sandwiched in between male barbers and betting shops
that have mostly got a male audience.
And there's more betting shops than there is clothes shops and food shops.
And that just says right there that it's a, it's a male orientated area,
which is probably why a lot of females
and younger groups of girls and stuff don't go there anymore.
There's nothing for us there anymore.
We're very obviously not the designed audience
for those shops and for that part of the High Street.
There’s a lot of young people in Crewe, so we need places to go to.
So like the Market Hall and the theater, really nice places to get together,
to have some nice food with your friends, have a few nice drinks, socialise their
really important because that's what young people do at the end of the day.
Memorial Square, that is
probably that the most lit up place in the town center.
So at nighttime, that's probably the safest place to be.
Especially as women.
That's why I really like these spaces, because I don't feel threatened
or in danger at all.
Anything like that.
I mean, it's a nice open space, don't get me wrong, but
it's the classic kind of park for how girls have been left out.
There's a little play area for young children
which I would never, ever use now, maybe when I was four or five, but, um,
I wouldn't ever go in there now and then there's the MUGA
the big like kind of court for like basketball and football.
And as much as I would love to advocate for females in sports,
they're not designed to keep women in.
It's all men that use them and all boys and they all gather in like congregate
or play sports together.
And we're just left on the side.
I think one of the big things that we found in our research was having
like big benches where girls can all sit together
and we're not all like in one line on a bench,
but we're kind of round each other and with each other
in a space that we actually want to go and hang out in.
And that's something that I would really like to see.
I feel like every park should have at least
a public toilet, you know, like a unisex public toilet where anybody
is welcome to use it and it's free to use because it's nature, isn't it?
Like we can't help if we need to go to the toilet, do you know?
I mean, it is nature and you don't think about girls
like they could put a urinal somewhere and that would be fine for lads but for girls.
We need a full toilet.
The privacy and everything like that.
But nowhere offers that.
I would really like to see a world where
people, communities, not just young girls and women,
but local people can be empowered through research, through peer research,
through these methodologies to have a say in what's going on around them.
One of the key takeaways that I took away from this is how local
people have amazing responses to local challenges. It's
about giving them the time and the space and the commitment to eke that out.
And that's something that I think higher education
can play an important role in doing.
And I really hope that this sets a sort of benchmark for what that can look like,
you know, not just here at LSE, but also elsewhere.
The most important thing we're doing
is trying to encourage lots of people to have a conversation about this, both
internally within councils, within developers, architects, planners,
landscape designers, all of these people
to start thinking about these issues and having the conversations,
but also to start having a conversation with teenage girls, what do they tell us
about what they would like?
And we're very focused on recognizing that
all of this is very location and community specific.
So it's no good somebody saying to make space for girls
right now, give us a shopping list.
What is it we need to put in our parks to make sure girls come.
Come along. We need a list. We need a list. There's no point in doing that.
I think,
Julia and I learned so much from the young researchers
and like in some ways it was really frustrating because
some of them were bringing up things about public space
that obviously we have internalized over so many years.
But like hearing some of the girls talk about things about safety or ways
that they keep safe or frustrations they have or how they really don't see
themselves represented in space was kind of sad
to see someone younger than us reflect on those things, but also was so valuable
and how much they notice these things and how aware they are of their environment.
And given that awareness, why are we not listening to them?
We shouldn't have to change who we are in a public space.
You know, like women are harassed in the street
all the time
and we shouldn't have to change the way that we walk to avoid the harassment.
But actually there should be things put in place
that stop it in the first place so we don't have to go that long way home,
the safer way home, everywhere should be safe for us.
There's nothing wrong with who we are as women.
There's something wrong with the place.
And the change should come from the place, not us.