Full Loop is a collaborative research project focusing on children and young people as agents appropriating and making public spaces through artistic practices. It reflects on cities that are segregated along socio-economic lines, and the unequal effects this has on young people’s access to public and third places, between home and school. The possibility for adolescents to move around and take part in urban culture on their own terms is dependent upon their geographies, the availability of public facilities such as transport options, youth centers, libraries, open spaces, and not least parental trust. We argue that the environment, architecture, and public spaces are important arenas for subjectification and “becoming citizens,” (Balibar 2017) shaping human experiences and ways of learning and knowing. This also means that they constitute a wealth of possibilities for rethinking built environmental practices for inclusion.
In 2021 Full Loop began with an experimental and nomadic initiative, employing a caravan as a mobile research station, and involving a group of six, then fifteen–year-olds from Hovsjö in Södertälje as co-researchers, as well as their youth center educator, crafts people, and a political scientist. Together, we explored public spaces as cultural commons, as well as conversed on the right to cultural commons [kulturell allemansrätt] and through several workshops in different locations pondered over the question, ‘Who appears in public space and who has the right to shape public spaces, and in what ways?’
With these journeys in mind, the project seeks to establish environmental learning as a subject at higher education institutes for future spatial practitioners as well as architecture, and art and sloyd educators. We address ‘environmental’ in this context from a broad perspective of learning with, for and from the environment. A pilot course was held (2023) for students of architecture and art pedagogy including workshops with children at Tensta Art Center that has led to the establishment of a new course, ‘Environmental Learning and Spatial Design with Young People’, in the lifelong learning curriculum of KTH.
A further part of Full Loop is its engagement with policies that shape adolescents’ access to public spaces as cultural commons. We have started to work with multi-actor conversations around subjects that touch upon spaces and practices for cultural commons and environmental learning with concerned actors—from educators, artists, activists, parents to politicians, planners, interest groups, institutional representatives, and others.
A Full Loop of Performance
Three layers, or loops have been important in the development of what we call ‘A Full Loop of Performance’. They take effect on different levels through experimental, reflective, and systematic approaches, including:
- Situated artistic practice: experimenting through art and design projects with young people in public environments.
- The development of a pedagogy of the built environment: reflecting on our experiences and environmental learning as an arena for education and research.
- The reviewing of legal frameworks: safeguarding children’s rights to cultural commons and environmental learning, and the development of tools for multiple actors in education and policymaking.
By performing a Full Loop, from experiment to reproduction and the implementation of learnings, we aim to broaden the contact zones between young people, educators, civil society organizations, public authorities, and politicians to facilitate the creation of more inclusive public spaces.
Research Questions
How would public spaces become more accessible to a broader section of society, especially children and young people, through environmental learning?
How would knowledge that is developed in art, design and architecture practices with young people be made operational for education within the subjects of built environment and the training of future educators in spatial practices?
How would collaborative activities with concerned actors feed into policy making to improve our designed living environments regarding equality, diversity, and inclusion?
Precedents
Full Loop evokes historical precedents such as Elly Berg’s ‘Stadsstudier’ – Environmental Education,’ which she practiced in Stockholm with children, and summarized in a small book dedicated to spatial practitioners and educators, as well as to ‘grassroots-people’ (1980). The 1970s environmental educational strands with their demand for establishing art as an emancipatory occupation (for everybody) (Hummel 2016) have provided inspiration as well as the concepts of ‘deschooling’ by Ivan Illich and Chris Reimer (1970, 1971), and Eileen Adams and Colin Wards’ Art and the Built Environment Project (1976-1979), to name only a few.
Methodology
Full Loop employs a Caravan-methodology. Together with the young people, we transformed a caravan into a mobile research centre: equipped with a podcast studio, self-built outdoor furniture, a ping-pong table, and pizza ovens that expand into space when the caravan stops. The co-created environments have facilitated several workshops, and supported methods of ‘deep hanging out’ (Clifford Geertz, 1998), ‘deep talk’ (a dialogue method, of unclear origin, we got to know at Hovsjö’s youth center), and possibilities forencounters with various publics.
As researchers we orient our attention towards what emerges during the time we spend together with the young, yet try to stay attuned to our research focus. This means that we practice an approach of following the teens rather than trying to exert control.
Theoretical Framework
Through the theoretical lenses of critical pedagogy and critical urban theory (and The Right to the City) (Brenner 2009) we acknowledge the importance to trust young people’s response-ability and their agency. Using the concept ‘civic imagination’, we acknowledge one of our roles in facilitating for young people “to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change,” and to “join a larger collective with shared interests, and to bring imaginative dimensions to real-world spaces and places.” (Jenkins et al., 2020, 5-6).
Ethics
Our expectations as researchers and the co-researchers’ actions have not always coincided which gave us material to reflect on our aims, methods, and findings, and to face ethico-political questions which emerge when collaborating with minors. In our case:
How can we respect their autonomy and integrity? How can we work with their anonymity in text, sound, and above all, in images and video footage?
How can we take care of strong emotions in workshops? What training and competency should we, and/or our institutional collaborators, have, to be able to respond to critical situations in an adequate way?
How can we create a caring environment for our co-researchers?
Since our ambition is to follow the co-researchers and let them lead the group (as much as possible): how can we think about response-ability? In relation to our research aims? To what is said and done?
EDI – Equality, Diversity (plurality), and Inclusion
Regarding the actors who create the built environment and public spaces, and who study spatial subjects at universities to become the practitioners of tomorrow, it is evident that student cohorts in architecture, art, craft, and design do not represent the plurality of society today. Thus, we lack a wealth of experiences and knowledge that are necessary for re-conceiving and re-building more just and resilient cities in the future. Full Loop aims at developing pedagogical materials for raising awareness of equality, plurality (diversity) and inclusion issues in spatial practice education through a cultural commons approach with children and young people.
References
Balibar, Etienne (2017). Citizen subject: Foundations for philosophical anthropology (Translated by Steven Miller). Fordham University Press.
Berg, Elly (1980). Stadsstudier: Mål och medel från 70-talets England. Stockholm: Stadens råd för byggnadsforskning.
Brenner, Neil (2009). ‘What is critical urban theory?’, City. Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action. Vol 13, Issue 2-3: Cities for People not for Profit, 108-207.
Hummel, Claudia (2016). ‘A Contemporary Survey through Restaging – Learning from the 1970s’, https://another-roadmap.net/ (accessed 16 February, 2024).
Jenkins, Henry, Peters-Lazaro, Gabriel, Shresthova, Sangita (2020). Popular culture and the civic imagination: case studies of creative social change, New York University Press, New York.