Together with Birmingham City Council, RIBA West Midlands has created a platform to hear the views of young people in the city about their surrounding built environment. We will be updating this page with the latest outcomes from each monthly meeting.
Birmingham has the unique position of being the youngest city in Europe with 40% of the population being under 25, and as the UK’s second city and with the arrival of HS2 in the next few years, there is a significant amount of development and investment arriving in the city.
Normally the decisions about the future of the built environment are handled by civic leaders, planners, developers, and architects that are much older than 40% of the city's population. The RIBA West Midlands team began the process of working with the city council and their youth services to bring a new voice to the city council.
Working with the Birmingham Youth City Board, a group of 11 to 22-year-olds, from a broad cross section of the city, joined RIBA West Midlands, Birmingham City Council and prominent architects from across the city at the office of Howells. At this inaugural session the group were introduced to some of the key concepts of the built environment, asked for their reflections on key city landmarks and then tasked with working in teams to build their own architectural structure from spaghetti and marshmallows.
From this session the group will work with RIBA and Birmingham City Council on a number of events exploring their built environment. This will include site visits, reviewing forthcoming development plans and looking at interesting concepts in place, such as art within architecture. The next session will partner with Eastside Projects to explore this in more detail and understand the views of the panel on these initiatives.
We would like to thank the Birmingham City Council team of Andrew Fuller, Juliet Faulkner, Alice Jones and John Killock, all of the brilliant team at Howells including Dav Bansal, Shauna Bradley, Rheya Mills, Sara Luhar and Matt Plows as well as Alexa Woodward of Cordia Homes and Brian Tefula at PCPT Architects, for their support and enthusiasm to see this come together.
