A
Place to be?
Name
Hannah Elizabeth Back
Education degree
Kandidat
Fagfelt
Architecture
Institute
Design and Visual Interaction
Program
Strategic Design and Entrepreneurship - Architecture, Design and Business
Year
2026
This project asks the question do we have places to be? Or more specifically do young people have places to be? In the UK decades of austerity have squeezed youth services, including the closure of many youth centres and a decline in investment in youth infrastructures. This leaves young people with fewer places design and intended to be used by young people.
The consequence of this for many young people, especially those in smaller and rural towns, is an increasingly strained relationship to place. This tension works to erode the social and spatial fabrics of places.
As a result of this problem identification, this project set out to explore the youth relationship to place in a rural town in the UK: Holyhead. The research question asks, ‘How might we explore, represent and support youth place attachment in Holyhead?’.
This was a theoretical master’s thesis meaning a written assignment was the final output. The project was guided by place attachment theory, spatial planning literature and participatory design methods. The process of exploring the youth relationship to place was a key focus and involved fieldwork and participatory activities with young people. The result of the research was a spatial strategy to centre young people’s needs and preferences in Holyhead.
Exploring youth place attachment
A participatory approach to exploring youth place attachment was taken in this project. This involved undertaking a range of research activities with young people.
Based on place attachment theory, the activities were designed to gain a better understanding about how young people: thought about the town, felt towards the town, behaved towards the town, as well as key places they felt positively or negatively connected to and why.
Activities with the young people included a range of drawing activities such as drawing mental maps of places in their weekly routine and drawing statues to represent youth culture in Holyhead. They also evaluated and annotated maps based upon their experiences in place, and took part in group interviews and discussions.
Through these research activities it was found that in Holyhead many young people felt strong connections to social networks in place, however few young people felt any affiliation for the built environment, for instance the Highstreet did not feature as a positive place in any young persons drawings. The lack of positive relationship with the built environment was found to be linked to the lack of facilities and places intended to be used by young people.
Mapping of places important to a young person in Holyhead
Representing youth place attachment
Following the fieldtrip to Holyhead there was an enormous amount of data about young people’s attachment to place. This data was primarily as stories and anecdotes, but also drawings and mappings.
To process this data collaging was used as a tool. A large subjective map of Holyhead was created to represent the places to which young people were attached. Only places mentioned by young people were to be placed on the map. Places mentioned multiple times by multiple people, or with strong sentiment are mapped larger than those mentioned less frequently. Distances between places are represented as was communicated and felt by young people, not geographically.
Subjective mapping of youth place attachment in Holyhead
Supporting youth place attachment
Following the representation of youth place attachment, a spatial response, plus a social and spatial strategy was devised with suggested transformations to the town to support a strengthened youth place attachment.
The spatial strategy involved undertaking spatial transformations on pieces of land that hold emotional significance to young people, and contribute to reinforce the urban centre, to have a two-fold effect of creating places to go, and to symbolically illustrate a prioritisation of young people. Secondary smaller-scale interventions are proposed to add diversity, variety and support the wider roaming and movement critical to the way in which young people spend time.
The social strategy involves a communications plan to involve young people in the transformations such that the symbolic actions of the project are made clear to young people, and to ensure that young people’s voices continue to be platformed through the subsequent stages of transformations.
Analysis map of Holyhead
Spatial Strategy for Holyhead
The Royal Danish Academy supports the Sustainable Development Goals
Since 2017 the Royal Danish Academy has worked with the Sustainable Development Goals. This is reflected in our research, our teaching and in our students’ projects. This project relates to the following UN goal(-s)
