Youth-Driven Change: The Nashville Youth Design Team, A Youth Participatory Mapping Collective

Abstract

As cities rapidly change, young people’s participation in local decision-making is crucial for achieving more equitable urban spaces. Involving youth in community development and planning decisions contributes to the resistance of prevailing assumptions about whose voices matter in local decision-making processes. In light of this, the Nashville Youth Design Team (NYDT), a youth-led participatory mapping collective, was formed during the summer of 2020. The NYDT provides young people with an opportunity to capture and represent the spatial knowledge of their peers and leverage mapping as a tool to drive policy change. In this presentation, university and community counterparts will trace the formation, goals, and outcomes of the NYDT, focusing primarily on the team’s work over the past 2 years. During this time team members further developed an open-access ArcGIS Online map, which spatially represents factors in the built environment that contribute to or detract from youth wellness in Nashville. Using the map, the team identified what young people see as the most pressing issues in their communities and then pinpointed areas in the city with the highest need of ground-truthed design solutions to support youth wellness. From this the young people developed advocacy tools and design interventions which are currently being implemented across the city, including the first tactical urbanism project to ever be supported by the Tennessee Department of Transportation. It is through this presentation that we hope to outline the processes, outcomes, benefits, and challenges of co-producing knowledge and engaging in advocacy with young people.