YPLAN

Young Placemakers Initiative (YPLAN) represents a collaboration of URBASOFIA with the URBAN2020 Association, the Centre for Excellence in Planning (CEP) and HSR IRAP University from Sweden. Our expertise has been put to use both in devising and drafting the application of the project as well as in the implementation of the project. YPLAN’s primary objective is to facilitate the transition towards sustainable participatory planning and civil empowerment in Romanian cities through innovative best practice transfer of Swiss youth involvement experience and an applied public space co-design process. The project aims at generating long-term changes in the way the urban planning process is implemented in Romanian cities, reducing the gap between the level of citizen engagement in planning in Romania and the well-developed European countries such as Switzerland. In order to achieve this, we plan to start engaging high school students in urban planning and redevelopment actions in Bucharest. Facilitating the access of teenagers in their forming years to the tools and concepts necessary for placemaking, as well as giving them the opportunity to be involved from the design stage to negotiation and implementation, will contribute to a multilateral formation of the next generations, encouraging and promoting young talent and its involvement in local democracy.

The YPLAN project has three main specific objectives:

A. To achieve heightened awareness towards social public space, planning and civic involvement among 7,000 students in Bucharest, of which a pilot group of 30 high school students and 6 volunteers from the University, to be involved in further piloting activities.

In the first few months of the project, we will focus our attention on raising awareness in 12 high schools in Bucharest and in the online environment through a comprehensive YPLAN campaign.
Where we will deploy our campaign, which high schools we will visit and the results of this large-scale process will be featured in Our Campaign page, on our Facebook page and in the regular YPLAN Newsletters.

B. To achieve heightened awareness towards social public space, planning and civic involvement among 7,000 students in Bucharest, of which a pilot group of 30 high school students and 6 volunteers from the University, to be involved in further piloting activities.

Starting December 2015, the YPLAN team will organize interactive Urban Walks and workshops with a group of previously selected students. We aim at involving the most interested and invested students from our online community and especially the target high schools, through an online application procedure.

The YPLAN team aims at presenting students with a holistic hands-on urban planning and design experience, through 4 Bucharest urban walks with interactive “urban observations” discussions aimed at stimulating creativity, initiative and building a knowledge base in planning.

Furthermore, our students will be involved in 6 thematic interactive planning workshops, in which they will work in teams on designing and redeveloping a selected number of public spaces. The concepts and ideas resulting from this process will be openly shared through the online platform with the online community of young placemakers, in real time and through media, as first results start to appear. Everything we develop will be shared in the Involving Young Placemakers page of this website.

C. To implement on-site a number of 4 redesign projects and to diffuse the project achievements through an online platform, a publication and a final presentation event as a means to ensure the continuity and lasting impact of the initiative.

Our goal is ambitions: we aim at developing, together with the students, a “One hundred ideas for public spaces in Bucharest” sustainable redesign project and advance it to the Municipality of Bucharest as a position document for currently lacking urban policies. The project will represent a holistic approach to the underused public spaces in Bucharest that presently do not function at the level of their underlying potential.
We will select a number of 4 redevelopment projects from the students’ work targeting “soft” interventions in the urban space and implement them in cooperation with the local administration and community members.
Last but not least, our final booklet of the YPLAN experience will represent an illustrated methodology on public space co-design through youth civil empowerment in Romanian cities, and it will be promoted together with the implemented projects in the end conference and the tour events we plan for showcasing the tangible results of the 18-month project.

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