Designing for adolescents: Teen inclusion demands a redistribution of power

 

When adolescents are seen as legitimate stakeholders, the transformation is remarkable. Their insights challenge complacent assumptions, reveal blind spots, and restore humanity to the sterile logic of urban systems. Yet, as one workshop participant said “What’s the carrot to make people want to do it”. 

Institutional leverages such as policy or funding leverage for adolescent inclusive development could inspire stakeholders and reduce neoliberal planning bias which, when combined with evidence-based best practices, would lead to more meaningful adolescent engagement. 

 

Cross-sector collaboration and consistent national guidance are vital to reinforce these systemic changes, ultimately promoting holistic adolescent wellbeing and elevating the societal value placed on young people. This integrated approach highlights the interconnected levers needed to transform planning systems towards greater inclusivity and sustainability.

 

For my dissertation, I developed a framework for what I call adolescent-inclusive urbanism, a systems-based approach that links wellbeing, participation, and governance. While not a linear metrics-based tool, it provides a practical, evidence informed understanding for strategic decision making in creating adolescent inclusive urban spaces.

The framework acts as a holistic guide rather than a rigid step-by-step tool, helping stakeholders create adolescent-inclusive spaces through four core stages:
 

1 Understand – Establish a contextualised understanding of adolescents’ lived experiences, shaped by developmental, spatial, social, and cultural factor

2 Engage and Empower – Build the capacities of adolescents and professionals alike, promoting participatory literacy, shared authorship, and meaningful adolescent agency in urban processes.

3 Co-Design and Implement – Integrate adolescents as co-decision-makers through structured collaborative models, ensuring their perspectives shape planning, design, and evaluation. 

4 Institutionalise and Sustain – Embed adolescent engagement within long-term governance structures by integrating it into policy frameworks, funding mechanisms, accountability systems, and cross-sector collaborations. 

This ensures that adolescent inclusion becomes a sustained institutional practice rather than a discretionary or episodic initiative. These steps form a living, interconnected system. When participation is meaningful, it fosters trust, visibility, and wellbeing. When it’s tokenistic, the system collapses into fatigue and cynicism.

 

Urban space is never neutral. Every bench, every plaza, every line of policy communicates who is welcome and who is not. By designing exclusion into the everyday, we have told an entire generation that they do not belong in their own cities.

 

But when adolescents are invited in, when they are asked not what they want, but what they see, the city changes. It becomes layered, playful, curious again. It begins to breathe.

 

As one stakeholder put it during the interview, “We need to stop seeing youth engagement as a favour, it’s an investment in the city’s future.” Cities that grow with their young people are cities that endure. They are safer, more inclusive and infinitely more alive.

 

The challenge is not about adding youth spaces to the map; it’s about rewriting the map itself, shifting from control to collaboration, from consultation to co-creation, from tokenism to transformation.

 

Ultimately, adolescent-inclusive urban spaces should be designed not merely for access but for stewardship, creating opportunities for adolescents to actively participate in urban governance, co-manage spaces, and foster long-term care and engagement with their environments.

 

Our cities have long demanded that adolescents adapt to them. It’s time they began to adapt to adolescence

 

Benazir Noor Mohamed is an architect with 10 years of professional experience and a recent Master’s degree from The Bartlett, UCL. She serves as an Advisory Board Member at the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), is a strong advocate for healthy and sustainable buildings, and is currently a Research Associate at University College London.