Empowering youth by providing open-ended place-making processes in safe public spaces.

By Chaochen Fan

Introduction

In Sierra Leone, persons under 35 make up about 80% of the population, and 45.6% of the total population is between 15 and 35. However, youth are the most marginalized, facing exclusion from policymaking, insecure labor markets, limited opportunities to acquire skills, and little mental health support (ACRC, 2024). Started in 2018, Creating Space for Young People in Urban Sierra Leone is a cross-sectoral collaborative effort between Urban Synergies Group, the Sierra Leonean NGO Youth Dream Centre Sierra Leone (YDC-SL), the University of Makeni, and the University of Canberra funded by the Danish Civil Society in Development (CISU) (Dreamtown, 2019). These organizations run workshops where youth propose diverse projects that are relevant to their communities, including new water supply points, basketball courts, and soap businesses that can increase family incomes, especially for girls. These programs show how the creativity of youth can be harnessed to improve their well-being while also benefiting their communities.

Analysis

The workshops in the Creating Space for Young People in Urban Sierra Leone project are held in eight public community centers built throughout Sierra Leone from 2018-2021. The simple structures provide safe, public gathering spaces for brainstorming, education programs, and collaboration between NGOs, CBOs, and youth. The organizations thus view “public spaces as an open-ended process of place-making in the African context” (Gregor et al., 2022) that goes beyond the built environment.

The approach taken in this project, i.e., to use placemaking strategies to support broader human development goals, echoes the UN-Habitat Global Public Space Toolkit that focuses on empowering communities and delivering a positive impact, such as basic infrastructures and economic and cultural sustainability that improve people’s lives (Shafqat et al., 2021; Gregor et al., 2022). The public spaces created by NGOs and CBOs provide safe, accessible, free, inclusive, and enjoyable spaces to hold regular workshops and educational events, encouraging youth to share “future possibilities” (Luckett, 2022) that may lead to more youth-friendly social environments, public spaces, and more stable incomes for the community.

Dreamtown, Youth Dream Centre Sierra Leone, and the other NGOs/CBOs position themselves as “co-participants” in a collaborative process, supporting projects that emerge “as a result of the cultural demands of the community, defined by community members” (Perry, K.Y., & Rappaport, J. 2013). In this case, CBOs and NGOs encourage and value the knowledge of actors in local commissions and communities, including marginalized young groups. Moreover, the organizations give the communities the right to choose and implement the proposal they select.

Implications

The Sierra Leone youth programs provide a model for improving the social environment in the Global South by creating safe, welcoming, and vital public spaces, learning and listening to community members, and empowering communities by collaborating with civil society groups. Creating safe and welcoming public spaces is the first step to creating future possibilities and positive change. According to Jirón (2010), to avoid discomfort in public spaces, marginalized people will “tunnel” into untouchable spaces to seek security, however harmful they are to their physical and mental health (Young, 2003). Thus, providing public spaces is not simply about building physical structures but about fostering social activities that allow marginalized community members to dream and speak.

Second, the case of youth organizing in Sierra Leone shows that planners should be humble and position themselves as active learners. The most challenging part of the process is to free our minds of Western systems of thinking and actively listen to and learn from local people and their “resistant texts” (Winkler, 2018). By doing this, we can support community needs instead of serving our own goals of appearing as “innocent professionals” (Roy, 2006) without benefiting local residents. Moreover, this case provides a powerful example of the importance of youth in and for planning. Their innovative ideas, as exemplified in these projects, show that they should not be restricted from the planning process.

Lastly, this case shows planners can empower residents by partnering with civil society organizations. According to Miraftab (2009), planning should not be understood as an exclusively technical domain led by trained professionals but rather as a contested field characterized by the interactions of multiple actors. Planners should partner with organizations and communities and “act as advocates and facilitators for actors involved in the planning process” (Nunbogu et al., 2017). Such a willingness to shift from development decision-making to acting as facilitators of community initiatives, thus maximizing self-governed initiatives for the benefit of society, is essential for a more critical planning approach (Nunbogu et al., 2017).

Creating Space for Young People in Urban Sierra Leone proposal process. Source: Dreamtown, https://www.dreamtown.ngo/newsandstories/2018/6/13/new-project-creating-space-for-young-people-in-urban-sierra-leone

Koeyor Community Centre serving as a public space for youth. Source: Youth Dream Centre Sierra Leone. https://doi.org/10.32891/jps.v7i1.1507

A new well to serve 5,000 inhabitants originally proposed by youth in the Dwazark community. Source: Dreamtown Denmark September 15, 2021.https://www.dreamtown.ngo/newsandstories/2021/9/14/dwarzack-urban-space-challenge