Reflections on the First Annual Young Planners Network Conference

Written in partnership between Youth Authors:
Eduardo Arias, Amina Gurhan, Jinelle Ribot, Martin Salazar, Esther Taufa, and Deszeray Williams

...and Adult Authors:
Andrew Williams-Clark, Meredith Phillips Almeida, Alissa Kronovet, and Madenh Hassan

Edited by:
Darcy Varney

Bushwick, Brooklyn

Introduction

In May 2007, at the Planners Network Conference in New Orleans, 15 youth and 6 adults from New York, New Orleans, and the Bay Area convened for a mini-conference. The group spent four days together getting to know each other, presenting their work, learning about the city of New Orleans post-Katrina, and attending parts of the Planners Network national conference, where they presented a well-attended workshop entitled, "Youth Participation in Planning - Where do we go from here?"

The young planners and adult allies who collaborated in New Orleans committed to continue sharing ideas and experiences and building on the growing momentum of youth participation in planning nationwide. Young Planners Network (YPN) was born. Since then, YPN has tripled its membership, established five local chapters – in New York, New Orleans, California’s Bay Area, Chicago and Denver – received fiscal sponsorship and capacity-building support from the Center for Cities & Schools at UC Berkeley, and reported on the work of its members at conferences and in journal articles. This April, YPN held its first annual conference at the Academy of Urban Planning High School in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York.

The conference represented the culmination of a year's worth of organizational development and raw momentum, bringing more than 130 high school-aged young planners and adult allies from New York, New Orleans, Chicago, the Bay Area, Denver, Boston, Seattle, St. Louis and Toronto together to learn and share strategies for increasing youth participation in urban planning. Jinelle Ribot, a young planner from Brooklyn, said that “helping host the conference made me feel like I was a primary source of knowledge about New York City.”

YPN Member Accomplishments

The first night of the conference, the Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment hosted a reception at its new LEED Gold certified building, giving students the opportunity to meet each other, get oriented and share their work and successes over the past year. This was the first time attendees truly got a sense of the range of ways in which youth have made an impact on their communities. Among others, students from the Academy of Urban Planning talked about mapping the sites of historic fires in their neighborhood, and Emeryville, California, YPN members reported on their success in reserving two seats for youth on their city’s comprehensive plan update committee.

Mobile Workshops

AUP student and faculty conference organizers worked with a variety of educational institutions and community-based organizations to arrange six engaging mobile workshops for conference attendees on Friday. Martin Salazar, a young planner from the Bay Area was inspired by the “Environmental Justice in the Bronx River Rivershed” workshop:

“I enjoyed learning about how three separate groups from New York called Voice, Action, and Rocking the Boat worked together. Rocking the Boat provides research on the Bronx River and if there is anything wrong with it then Voice and Action spread awareness of the issue to the rest of the community and to the city council. A prime example is when Rocking the Boat discovered that the Brooklyn Zoo was dumping fecal matter into the river and Action reported the Zoo. They eventually made the Zoo stop its practices and pay heavy fines to the city. This is powerful because everything was done by youth my age, and it stressed research. Without research, there would have been no discovery and no action would have been taken.”

Another workshop, “NYCycle,” left an impression on Chicago YPN member Orlando Gomez:

“I learned about bike messengers and how dangerous their jobs can be if they aren’t on their toes 24/7. I also learned about innocent bystanders on bikes being struck by cars and how they leave an all white painted bike seat at the scene of the accident as a memorial. We visited one of the memorials. The tour taught me so much, and when I travel back to New York this summer I will act as a tour guide to my friends and wow them with my bicycle knowledge.”

Classroom Workshops

Saturday’s classroom workshops exposed attendees to a diverse range of urban planning topics, issues and solutions in which youth are engaged around the country, from mapping health disparities to deconstructing stereotypes. In one workshop, organizers from A-VOYCE in Boston facilitated an “Edible Charrette” in which youth worked together to calculate costs and materials needed for a miniature mixed-income housing development, then built models of their proposed developments out of toothpicks, gumdrops and marshmallows. Groups planned out and calculated the most strategic combination of affordable and market-rate units, green space and parking lots. One group won a bag of gummi bears for putting lots of thought into their model and making the most convincing argument to the organizers – the “financiers” of the project.

Amina Gurhan, a young planner from Toronto, enjoyed the “CITI Youth: Mapping the Five Boroughs” workshop, most:

“I found it really cool that young individuals actually influenced the decision making of community board members throughout New York. What I also liked about this classroom workshop was the hands-on tutorial that the CITI map technicians introduced to us. Through maps created by CITI Youth Map technicians, community boards are given a broader perspective about whether planners should be allowed to build new projects and if it’s a good area to build in or not. What I learned most out of this session is that youth actually can have a say in planning processes and by working with community boards they can learn more about major issues facing their neighborhoods.”

Keynote Addresses

On Saturday afternoon, Roger Hart, director of the Children’s Environments Research Group at the City University of New York and author of the book, Children’s Participation, gave an inspiring presentation on youth participation in planning from a global perspective. Many attendees were surprised to learn that the United States has lagged behind other nations in terms of incorporating youth participation into local government planning efforts. Dr. Hart challenged young planners to make their voices heard, even when it seems that adults are not willing to listen. Founding YPN member Cornell Carney gave a moving keynote address about his struggles and successes as an active member of his New Orleans community, including advice for both young planners and adult allies in the audience. Last year, Carney appeared in the Spike Lee documentary “Children of the Storm”, which featured the work he is doing with the Young Planners Network as well as other leadership initiatives he has taken part in during the rebuilding process in New Orleans. Please see the YPN website for transcriptions of each keynote address.

Planning for the Future of YPN

At the YPN annual meeting on Sunday, attendees shared what they learned from the conference. Eduardo Arias from Richmond, California, said, “I realized that all of us are dealing with a lot of dilemmas in our cities and we had solutions to fix the bad.” Deszeray Williams, one of the founding members of YPN, was inspired by the differences between the first meetings in New Orleans in 2007 and the 2008 conference: “There were more youth and adult-youth that attended this conference, and I think it’s a great opportunity … they can express their thoughts and problems in their communities when change is needed.” Esther Taufa of Richmond, California, said simply, “What I learned is that working as a group gets our voice heard and it’s pretty cool.”

Youth and adults reached a consensus around five major goal themes for the upcoming year: institutionalization, expansion, communication, supporting youth action and integrating new power bases. YPN aims to structure the organization in a manner that celebrates youth participation and leadership. In that vein, youth and adults signed up to staff committees charged with setting concrete goals for each theme and developing work plans to achieve them.

Based on the large number of attendees at this year’s YPN conference, a consensus goal for the coming year is to expand our base to eight chapters, including one in Canada. The organization will also publish several articles about youth participation in planning in a newsletter and other periodicals. YPN is currently accepting submissions of local case studies, suggestions of articles for literature reviews and all kinds of artistic expressions of youth participation in urban planning from young planners and adult allies around the globe.

The next YPN conference will be in May 2009 in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. Get involved by visiting the [lnk1], or contact info@youngplannersnetwork.org.

YPN is committed to working together as young planners and adult allies to define our goals and create plans to achieve them. We seek to facilitate growth in the movement to “create a place at the table for youth in planning” by fostering the sharing of best practices and providing a venue for networking and dialogue for the youth, adults, government agencies and community organizations involved in this work.