This engagement programme was run by us in partnership with Make Space for Girls charity, with the help of Turkington Martin Architects, and the Lancaster West Neighbourhoods Team. 

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We were commissioned through W11 to run an in-depth engagement with a group of local young women residents of the Lancaster West Estate, the wider site in which the Grenfell tragedy occurred, to understand more about the concerns and desires that Lancaster West residents have about their estate. This engagement focused on working with individuals who identified as young women, due to their being largely absent from traditional consultation and engagement events, and from planning and design processes. 

 

We hired three individuals who identify as young women to act as “Young Ambassadors” of their estate – a flexible paid working and learning experience to explore their experiences of their local areas and ultimately to work towards proposals for how to improve the estate. Over a number of months, we guided the Young Ambassadors through a curriculum we had designed for them – a series of lectures, readings, creative activities, workshops, site visits and group discussions – which touched on social scientific and architectural methods. They explored questions around: the history of social housing and housing as a right; the relationship between gender, race and space; and design and its impact on our public lives. 

 

This has been a challenging project for us as one of the many painful parts of the tragedy of Grenfell is that so many voices were overlooked and even ignored. 

 

We have throughout the project been pushed to continuously question: 

 

What does it mean to work in the shadow of Grenfell, particularly when so many people are still waiting on answers? 

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How can we run meaningful engagement without extraction in a place where so much has already been taken?

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And what should our role be in all of this?

 

Our engagement has therefore saught to truly centre, value, invest in and nurture the voices of the local young women we have worked with; and to continuously rethink and unlearn the methods we use and the ways in which we do engagement and carry out consultation processes.

 

We are currently writing an illustrated narrative which summarises the Young Ambassador engagement programme and the Young Ambassadors’ reflections and proposals.