Özlemnur Ataol was one of the invited speakers to an event on ‘Designing Places of Belonging’ on 25 October during Dutch Design Week.
The ‘Designing Places of Belonging’ talk brought experts and audiences with different backgrounds together to think about how inclusive urban environments that users feel they belong to can be created.
This programme is part of a 2-year umbrella programme called ‘Designing Cities for All’, organised by Pakhuis de Zwijger.
Aside from agreeing that there is no single design of inclusive urban environments that everyone can agree on, the speakers approached public participation as a critical concept for achieving those environments during the talk.
As one of the invited speakers to the event, Özlemnur Ataol broadened the discussion to the participation of children as citizens of today. Even though children are right holders, they cannot enter electoral participation, a mechanism for keeping local or central representatives in check. Therefore, efforts to enable children’s participation in urban planning and management are critical to genuinely include different voices, including children’s voices, towards creating inclusive urban environments. To enable children’s participation, Ataol called attention to child-focused policy-making mainstreaming children’s participation and the need for trained mediators (facilitators) to create participatory processes for children.
The other speakers were Sergio M. Figueiredo (TU/e), Nyasha Harper-Michon (UNStudio), Kornelia Dimitrova (Studio Kornelia Dimitrova), and Igor Sladoljev (de Architekten Cie).
