Teenage girls are a neglected group in public realm provisioning. While the most common youth facilities, such as MUGAs, football pitches, skate parks and BMX tracks are intended to provide for all teenagers, they end up being dominated and often territorialised by teenage boys. As a result, girls and young women and gender diverse young people often find themselves disproportionately excluded by design from the public realm.

 

Teenage girls should have a right to public space; their needs should be proactively considered as provided for by the Public Sector Equality Duty (under the Equality Act 2010); and they should have access to the benefits that the public realm offers. Such exclusions are not intentional. Too little research into girls’ experience of space and what they would like to see in the public realm has left councils and developers with few real options other than to continue with designs that don’t meet the needs of girls and young women or gender diverse young people (and only meet the needs of a minority of boys and young men). The Spencer’s Park Engagement Programme (SPEP) sits at the crux of this issue. It is a partnership programme between LSE Cities at the London School of Economics, Countryside developers and HTA architects, and the charity Make Space for Girls, working with the Astley Cooper School initiated in July 2022.

 

In its first phase, the SPEP consisted of researching, mapping and evidencing the public realm assets, provisions, and amenities for young people in the local area and of running four workshopping days with year 9 girls to understand how they used and experienced the public realm local to the proposed development at Spencer’s Park, and to discover what their perspective of “good” public realm looks like. Spencer’s Park, developed by Countryside, provides a huge opportunity to create a new neighbourhood on the Northwest corner of Hemel Hempstead. In the development’s second phase, it will deliver 600 homes, a new primary school, open spaces, shops, and commercial space for the town. Hemel Hempstead is a well off area in Hertfordshire, which has largely become (since its inception after the Second World War) a commuter town linked to central London. Hemel Hempstead, like most areas in the UK, provides the typical youth facilities described above: it has many green areas, children’s play spaces, sports venues and skate parks. However, teenage girls have been inadequately considered.

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With this in mind, considering the need for girls and young women in the proposal of Spencer’s Park is critical. The aim of SPEP is therefore to further understand how teenage girls experience the public realm, and to contribute to best practices for making public spaces better for teenage girls.