Big Data and Adolescent Play in Public Space

Significant strides have been made through design and policy on “youth rights to the city” toward improve young people’s health and wellbeing outcomes. However, adolescents, especially minorities, are frequently confronted with institutionalized disparities as they are denied access to participate in urban, public space, through policy (e.g., posted ‘no loitering’ placards), policy implementation (e.g., police profiling and monitoring), and physical barriers (e.g., skate stops). The current situation has led to a lack of adequate data to support design and policy to improve youth outcomes because: 1. only within the past decade have young people been recognized as having positive developmental opportunities associated with activities outside of home and school; 2. young people, especially those facing socio-economic disparities, are aware of their a priori delinquent status in public space and typically move-along in the presence of an unknown adult. Their status limits current research to known samples, such as focus groups and participatory ethnographic methods. While multiple comparative indices on youth health, well-being, and academic success exist, no similar large data set on young people’s participation in public life is available

Surfing the YouTube: How social media is changing landscape research

Accessing insights from underrepresented populations, such as adolescents, remains a persistent challenge in the research and design process. The paper will investigate the utility of online videos of user-posted materials as an innovative research tool. Unlike traditional in situ approaches to studying human behavior and public space, online videos permit access to multiple sites based upon the population or activity of interest. The approach is similar to studies of behavior using unobtrusive observation—where participation or interviews might interrupt the activity under observation or where access to the setting of the activity would otherwise remain inaccessible to the researcher

Design Intent and Conflicts of the Ownership: Can a New Vision Rescue Taliesin East?

THE PROGRESSION OF Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin East from an evolving experiment to a decaying relic provides an example of a discursive space and insight into the concept of ownership. A recently-submitted master plan for Taliesin’s buildings and landscape intends to preserve the architect’s home in the remote bluffs above the Wisconsin River near Spring Green, WI. Its current state refl ects how tensions which underlie the challenge of interpreting design intent can threaten the only thing capable of representing the architect’s work. The presentation will explore this discursive relationship between a cultural landmark and an occupied, living landscape through historic notes, drawings, and photographs. The goal is to question how to interpret the role of design intent in the cultural representation of Taliesin

Big Data in the Big Easy: How Social Networks Can Improve the Place for Young People in Cities

Access to social data on human experience of place has never been more available than now. Social media, smart phones, and the Internet of Things provide glimpses into individual activity across the globe. The nearly-boundless stream of information is called “big data.” Today, physically and even socially disconnected individuals can benefit from the similar experiences of others to adapt and change their environment. I argue that big data provides two critical benefits for landscape architecture research and practice: (1) big data opens a window into previously inaccessible human experiences of designed environments, introducing new metrics for evidence-based design and new ways of improving design literacy; and (2) the design, planning, and management of the land—especially in cities—can benefit from scraping big data to support urban ecological design. My study of YouTube use in New Orleans shows that big data can advance landscape research to support positive, interdependent relationships between people and built environments. Landscape architecture would benefit by harnessing this resource to better understand relationships with place and encourage individuals to participate in the design, creation, and evolution of cities

Engaging Youth Rights to the City Through DIY Skateparks

Concrete is plastic when wet, brittle before it cures, course without polishing or wax, cheap, readily available, easy to mix, and easily demolished. The paper presentation will unveil how a group of skaters and non-skaters, young people and young adults, failed and eventually triumphed to create the first public skate park in the City of New Orleans

Sk8ting the Sinking City

Hot, humid, cracking, and sinking, the Crescent City seems unlikely for skateboarding. Frequently referenced for being \u27up to no good,\u27 unsupervised adolescents seem an unusual candidate to create opportunities for environmental justice. The paper examines how settings afford prosocial behaviours amongst skateboarding adolescents. Young people have a unique capacity to improve settings for play. Using evidence collected from site observation and YouTube videos, sk8ters reveal that supportive places can arise from blight and vacancy. The research has broader implications for sustainability and environmental justice professionals working with vulnerable populations to transform degraded spaces into beneficial places

City Play: Post-Affordances and the Transformative Power of Place

Landscape architecture research and practice often focus on demand or instrumental value of the land to serve some need, like a healing garden or playground, or the intrinsic value of the land due to unique characteristics, like a protected wilderness or geological phenomenon, but rarely does the discipline concentrate on the transformative power of the environment. Sarkar (2012) suggests that transformative power refers to those unanticipated experiences with the environment that change or transform our worldview

Offrir aux adolescents des banlieues des expériences d’habitat positives dans leur quartier

La population d’adolescents habitant les milieux suburbains est très importante. Cette réalité est cependant encore trop récente pour être prise en compte par les praticiens de l’aménagement, ce qui expliquerait pourquoi l’environnement physique des adolescents est rarement conçu pour répondre à leurs besoins. Le présent article traite des besoins fondamentaux des adolescents vivant en banlieue et suggère aux concepteurs des moyens d’améliorer leur qualité de vie en créant des lieux de repli dans leur quartier. Les valeurs et besoins particuliers des adolescents serviront à évaluer la qualité des espaces ouverts suburbains. Nous nous intéresserons essentiellement à l’environnement physique, en nous appuyant sur des études dans les domaines de la psychologie, de la sociologie, de la psychologie de l’environnement ainsi que sur l’histoire des transformations urbaines et sur les théories et pratiques en architecture de paysage. Une étude de cas portant sur un projet inspiré du nouvel urbanisme servira de fondement critique et permettra l’examen des espaces ouverts à la lumière des critères issus de la littérature.The population of adolescents living in suburban environments over urban environments is pervasive and yet remains a relatively new construct for the design professions to consider—presenting a gap in how the physical environment is designed to meet their needs. This paper discusses the basic needs of suburban adolescents and suggests how designers can improve their quality of life by creating places of retreat within their neighborhood. Values and needs specific to suburban adolescents are used to assess the quality of suburban open spaces. The focus of this paper is on the physical environment, with background supported by studies from the fields of psychology, sociology, and environmental psychology, history of urban change, and theory and practice in landscape architecture. A case study of a New Urbanism development serves as the critical basis from which real open spaces are reviewed in light of criteria drawn from the literature

Deep play, urban space, adolescent place: a multi-sited study of the effects of settings on adolescent risk/reward behavior

The extant literature on the play behavior of youth normalizes adolescent behavior in public space as transgressional, resistant, and in need of social control. The dissertation counters this trend by looking to see if physical qualities, peer effects, and neighborhood context of settings play a deeper role in youth behavior. The study documented urban context, peer effects, physical features, and play behavior across 21 urban settings in New Orleans. Unobtrusive observations employed a highly innovative technique based on YouTube videos and analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling. Coded observations of risk-taking and prosocial behavior demonstrated some stability in behavior amongst adolescents—“youth” ages 12-19—within each site, suggesting that site-specific factors can constrain youth behavior. Yet, more interesting, teens appropriated sites. Specifically, the study found that (a) adolescents consistently adapt play behavior due to settings and (b) that adolescents adapt sites to support play behavior. The latter finding is novel and diverges from normative theory on adolescent behavior by suggesting that teens exercise interdependence when engaging in urban environments away from home and school. Interdependence is a term derived from economics that means mutual dependence upon others for some needs. That adolescents display increased risk-taking behavior in environments with low appropriation and increased prosocial behavior in environments with high appropriation advocates for cities to support adolescent appropriation of urban space

Performance Landscapes for Active Youth.

As a counter-point to the need for researchers using big data to engage in complex statistical analyses, here I suggest that big data also opens the door to rich, qualitative analysis. Access to hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute from 75 countries and 61 languages provides an unprecedented opportunity to delve deeper into how designed environments are interpreted to support social and cultural diversity in cities. The approach follows recommendations by Cushing (2015) for landscape architecture to develop as a research-oriented profession with broad social relevance. Cushing cites Low (1981), who similarly called for more socially responsive design in a paper that responded to the need for a research methodology in landscape architecture to engage at the individual level