For Gen-Z, by Gen-Z

 I was asked to give a 'provocation' last week to a workshop led by the Glass-House Community Led Design and Urban Design London on co-designing design codes. My thoughts below are not exclusively about design codes, but could apply to any co-design process in the built environment. I wrote this thinking about my own two Gen-Z kids and I was rather aware - when giving this provocation - that most of the audience were in their later years in life.

What if the only people we should be co-designing with are Gen-Zs?

The new National Planning Policy Framework asks Local Plans to look forward a minimum of 20 years, and that this should be at least 30 years if you are planning for strategic scale new developments – the kind of things for which design codes are intended – new communities, new villages, urban extensions, major regeneration sites, which take decades to build out.

Someone who is 65 now – possibly the typical person who has the time and energy to get involved with most current engagement work around planning and design – is unlikely to see the outcomes of the work they have influenced. If they do live to see it, it won’t be affecting their life for long. The predicted average life expectancy for a 65 year old man is 18 years.

Someone who is 25 will almost certainly see the outcome, and will be living with it for a long time. The consequences of the physical changes being planned for now will shape their life outcomes directly. Design codes now could affect their health; their ability to house themselves through different stages of their lives; the ability to work; their finances.

If we said that we only co-designed with Gen Z, what would that mean for how we did this? For a start, almost all of them are in school, further or higher education. What's great about school and local FE colleges is that (leaving private schools aside) you reach a real cross-section of society there - there's no exclusivity around class, race or gender. So you wouldn't need to worry about representation - that's already done for you, particularly if it became core curriculum, in the same way as it is compulsory to do PSHE or PE.

Secondly, Gen Z don’t have a lifetime of lived experience that they bring to the question about how places should look and feel, and – while they are all about the influencing online -  they aren’t used to influencing stuff that really matters. They will be really nervous about shouldering the responsibility of shaping a place and affecting so many lives. So you would have to give them the support and confidence that they aren’t going to make silly decisions. They would need to feel sure they knew what they were doing.

You could do this through building that knowledge and those skills through the full curriculum - making place-making a normal, embedded part of learning. Geography lessons would involve mapping your local neighbourhood, maths questions would be about how much volume can be added to a terraced house and the most efficient envelope-to-volume ratio, in science you would calculate how heat travels through the most common forms of local brickwork and how much insulation needed to be added to get to current Part L.

It would need to involve TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. Maybe Snapchat could develop filters for places where you can add a new cycle lane, some street trees or a couple of extra storeys in different styles onto buildings. You could duet on TikTok between different ideas for the old MOD site across town, or do funny explainer videos about SuDS and planting for pollinators. Minecraft could get location specific as kids across an area collaborate to build their neighbourhood in blocks, modelling, knocking down and remodelling each others versions of the perfect street.

Normally younger people do the support jobs for older people - the administration, the legwork, the research, to enable older people to make the decisions and shape the world. If only Gen-Z could make decisions about our built environment, older people would have to become the support for them. They would need to be the researchers, the administration, the fact-checkers, the technical advisors. Older people would have to use their experience and skills without being patronising, without using language that obfuscated, and without trying to skew the resulting decisions.

And if we only co-designed with Gen Z, what kind of places would result?

Maybe they would be traditionalists. Maybe they would be radical. Maybe they would take the task really seriously and be both sensible and radical. They wouldn't come with the preconceptions or the cynicism of older generations. Maybe the design approaches that they developed would actually be better for everyone. More healthy, safer, more inclusive, better adapted to the realities of climate change. Maybe they would take better care of the places that were created - put more work into building communities there, looking after the trees, ensuring that the contractors didn't skimp on the details. Maybe some might decide to become planners or architects to ensure the vision they created was seen through. 

We want places to work for an uncertain future, so shouldn't they be shaped by the people who have most to gain, and most to lose? Or is it that older people just can't cope with the idea of giving up control?