Beyond the bucket: what the young people want.

Say goodbye to guesswork and let users tell us what and where to build.

Our task isn’t to sanitise youth space into something adults are comfortable with.

Charlotte Knowles

Senior A&A Consultant, Hoare Lea

Thinking about this article took me back to my school days, when student representatives would stand up and say: “Vote for me and I will get you a swimming pool, pizza in the canteen, and no homework”.

Of course, those were never the candidates that the teachers seemed to favour, which perhaps says something about how adult systems are often only willing to hear young people up to a certain point.

That same tension shows up in planning and design all the time. The industry says it wants to create places for young people, but too frequently we design from adult assumptions about what they should want, where they should be, and how they should behave. The result is spaces that may look youth-friendly on paper, but do not always work.

If we want places to genuinely serve this group, we need to start with lived experience. This means meaningful engagement with a variety of young people at the earliest stage possible for a project. Outcomes may not always be what adults expect to hear, but they are often what shapes where young people actually choose to spend time.

Discomfort versus irrelevance.

A good example is the much-discussed chicken shop, which Royal Society for Public Health research has found can function as an important third space. It is cheap, warm, dry, familiar and one of the few places where teenagers can sit for a while without being asked to leave.

With fast-food restaurants being heavily linked to child obesity, this may make some adults uncomfortable, but discomfort is not the same as irrelevance. If young people are gathering there, it tells us something important about what is missing elsewhere: accessible shelter, informal sociability and a sense of welcome.

The same applies to where they want to be. Adults often assume youth provision should sit in the centre of things – visible, tidy and easy to oversee. But young people frequently prefer the edges. They want pockets of space where they are not constantly watched and where they can relax, be loud and be themselves. That does not mean designing for anti-social behaviour, it means recognising that they often need a level of privacy and freedom that adults are reluctant to allow.

If young people are gathering there, it tells us something important about what is missing elsewhere: accessible shelter, informal sociability and a sense of welcome.

Fringe benefits.

This has come through clearly in projects of our own where we’ve mapped how young people move through and use a space. Their preferred places were not always where adults would expect them to be. While we engaged with the local demographic during a masterplan development, they said they were looking for somewhere informal to exist without being told off – somewhere they could talk, laugh, swear, vape or just hang around. The value of the exercise was not just in identifying a location for youth space, but in understanding patterns of use, comfort and visibility.

Moving from assumption towards agency.

If we ignore the realities of how young people use space, we risk designing places that are technically for them but not practically used by them. That is why they need to be involved earlier, and in a way that goes beyond token consultation. They should not just be reacting to adult-led ideas; they should be helping shape where things go, how they function and what they feel like to use.

There is also a wider point here about agency. When young people have real influence over their environment, the benefit is not only in the place itself, but in the process. They gain confidence, decision-making power and a sense that their views matter. That is social sustainability in a very practical sense.

The challenge, then, is not to sanitise youth space into something adults are comfortable with. It is to understand what young people really need from place, and design with that reality in mind. Sometimes that will mean a formal youth centre, sometimes something more informal, or smaller, more dispersed spaces at the edge of a site. Sometimes it may mean something else entirely.

The point is to stop guessing. If we want places young people will use, we need to let them tell us where to build, what to build and why it matters.

Let's Talk

CharlotteKnowles@hoarelea.com

Ruling the roost: poultry effort results in cultural phenomenon

Move over, Colonel: newer brands such as Popeyes, Wingstop, Slim Chickens and Dave’s Chicken are increasing the chicken-shop share of the fast-food market
Growth driven by Gen Z and Millennial consumers who visit chicken shops more than twice as often as the UK average, according to data from Meaningful Vision
In terms of chicken-chain concentration, London leads at 5.68 per 100,000 people, with the West Midlands at 3.60
Chicken shops led growth in store numbers during 2024, leaving other fast-food operators lagging
Appeals to protein-focused youth contingent, and those struggling with economic pressures