Open Collections

Stuart, Jessica

Forms of urban design engagement (i.e. public workshops, town hall meetings, neighbourhood association meetings) are often ineffective at providing residents with the opportunity to contribute to urban design decisions. The average resident does not have the experience, technical expertise or vocabulary necessary to visualize the spatial implications of different design proposals. Involving youth aged 10 to 19 in these typical forms of urban design engagement can be particularly challenging because the format of such participatory activities are not attractive to most youth. Partnering with the City of Revelstoke Planning Department to test and apply research methods on the ground, this project seeks to discover how digital media tools such as social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook), blogs (Wordpress), and web-based video (YouTube, Vimeo) can be used by local governments to increase youth involvement in urban design decisions. Through a summer video contest that asked contestants to convey how they move around Revelstoke, it was discovered that youth were most responsive to the digital medium of film. Facebook was determined to be a useful social media tool for promoting urban planning engagement activities and generating buzz around planning topics or issues among youth. We learned a variety of lessons while designing the video contest, recruiting youth, promoting the contest, and reviewing submissions. These lessons have been translated into a number of key recommendations for local governments like the City of Revelstoke to consider in future youth-oriented participatory planning events.

Graduating Project

eng

2014-01-03

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/45716

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/