UPenn architecture professor Rashida Ng and a student during the Dec. 6 culmination event. (Photo: Kait Privitera)

This story was produced as part of Next City’s joint Equitable Cities Reporting Fellowship with Germantown Info Hub.

For eighth grader Eden Boyd, who recently stepped into the world of urban planning and design, her voice matters for a better tomorrow.

“There’s a lot going on in the world right now… younger people do have a responsibility,” Boyd said. “Even though we kid off sometimes, we can actually use what we know to help the world become a better place.”

With Philadelphia celebrating its 250th anniversary next year, Boyd was one of more than 20 eighth-grade students selected by Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia (BGP) to participate in an urban planning program that helps youth design and imagine a more equitable future for the city’s next 250 years. BGP offers free academic enrichment programs for underserved youth and is headquartered in Germantown.

As part of the “New Philadelphia: The People’s Vision is Coming Soon” project, students from across the city effectively ran their own planning and architecture studio in the Sharpless building of Germantown Friends’ School, designing models of urban infrastructure to address their neighborhoods’ needs.

These designed neighborhood models will be displayed in a public exhibition next year for the city’s 250th anniversary, with more details soon to come.

“It really exposed our students to them feeling like they have some sort of input in their future communities in Philadelphia,” said Program Manager of BGP, Sakina Parks.

“It made them stop and reflect on how their communities are currently, [in ways that] they may have never stopped to think about, and where they would want to see change in their environments to then create it,” Parks said.

Within their designs are solutions that respond to impactful topics within urban planning, such as displacement vs. staying put, looking at what care-centered schools and rec centers could be, and thinking about how public spaces can serve residents rather than just tourists or future development.

This program was formed through a collaboration with UPenn’s Weitzmann School of Design, DesignPhiladelphia, and Breakthrough, after Presidential Associate Professor of Architecture in the Weitzman School of Design, Rashida Ng, alongside architect and university lecturer, Eduardo Rega Calvo, conceived the idea after years of evaluating housing injustices and neighborhood planning trends.

According to Ng, the goal of the project, since its conception, was to “uplift a civic visioning process for Philadelphia and its future.”

“There are celebrations and moments of reflection every 50 years; A main part of [this project] was recognizing the contradictions in the founding of this country and the kind of voices that were left out,’ Ng added ‘The vision for New Philadelphia was to bring in those voices and the counternarrative of what Philadelphia could be if it were founded on visions of collective care and community.”

The culmination event of the fall program was held on Saturday afternoon, Dec. 6, at the studio they worked out of, where participants, parents, and instructors came together to celebrate and view the work that the students did throughout the entire course.

Before the event, there were nine total workshops that were held every Saturday, with a curriculum that consisted of a diversified range of discussions and activities that kids used to express their ideas. 

For Parks, putting these students in a position where they feel like “they have a voice and can even come up with ideas, can definitely spark some interest for some of them in the field of urban planning or architecture.”

Alongside Ng and Calvo, classes were instructed and led by a group of undergrad teaching fellows with BGP and UPenn Architecture Graduate students, like Taryn Jones, who feels “teaching is special because it makes you into a student forever.”

They began with forming ideas through paper collages — a “very common architectural medium,” according to Jones.

They then worked on their shoebox-sized third-place models, which were designs that represent the places that they heavily value away from school and home, such as recreation centers or libraries.

Eden Boyd’s third space model gave viewers a glimpse of the types of spaces that she imagines for the city, as she created a community center with a restaurant and gathering spaces. ‘Spatial justice’ was one of the main themes she carried with her through the semester.

“These words appeared in my ideas when I allowed for my space to be open and adaptable,” Boyd said. “Designers should remember that even with technology, we must always remember our roots and have consideration with humanity in our designs.”

Spatial Justice implies the creation of areas and infrastructure such as housing or parks, that prioritizes equitable access, resources, and inclusivity in the planning process for all people involved.

Ng added that her work “demonstrates mature spatial thinking, including a loft space and a cozy nook for small groups to gather, exposed structure overhead, and areas for lounging.”

“It was really cool to hear them talk about their own third [places]: the real-life places where they find comfortable and safe, and what they would want to see more of,” Taryn Jones said, while adding that they also introduced the students to the idea of scale and gave them scale figures.

Then they moved into drawing written maps that they then turned into 3D, neighborhood models made from paper, where one could implement schools, residential buildings, green spaces, hospitals, bridges, and other designs to accommodate community members better. 

AI models were also utilized, as there was an activity where they wrote down details of a neighborhood or development, and then added it to an AI generator to get a visual of how it would look. 

Before the program came to fruition, Ng first sought out both partners in the late spring as she was searching for collaborators who could help the voices of the youth into this project.

“We were looking for a youth program that had a long-standing relationship with their students. Breakthrough has that,” Ng said. “They have a model of peer mentorship and youth engagement that we thought would be appropriate.”

DesignPhiladelphia (DP) came to mind for Ng, as she was a student in the program over 20 years ago. 

DP is an organization that partners with schools across the city to bring design education to K-12 youth, making it accessible in spaces where it traditionally isn’t. Her experience with the organization gave her the confidence that it would be an ideal collaboration.

DP’s Director of Design Education, Michael Spain, mentioned that even though he’s been doing similar work for years, students engaging in these deep discussions and activities with student teachers who run the show was a first.

Giving kids a chance to see themselves adding input on development decisions was everything for Spain, expressing that “Students truly don’t get an opportunity to because they’re in underserved communities, or they don’t think about design as something that they can be a part of.”

“When they see they can be a part of it, that’s when they open up,” Spain said. “The stuff that they say about how they’re thinking about spaces blows me away, but you need to get the opportunity to express that, and this is a way to do that.”

Eden Boyd shared a similar thought: “I’ve found myself opening up to more periods of the creative structure of architecture, [as well as] sharing my ideas about new structures and what the future can be.”