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

Philadelphia eighth-grader Eden Boyd knows her voice matters for her city’s future.

“There’s a lot going on in the world right now…younger people do have a responsibility,” says Boyd, who has recently stepped into the world of urban planning through a new urban design program for youth. “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, a free academic enrichment program for underserved youth, to participate in an urban planning program that helps youth design and imagine a more equitable future for the city’s next 250 years.

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 better 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,” Sakina Parks, Breakthrough program manager, said during a Dec. 6 event that celebrated the students’ work.

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

The workshops covered issues including displacement, reimagining care-centered schools and recreation centers, and thinking about how public spaces can serve longtime residents rather than prioritizing tourists or future development.

“Putting them 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,” Parks says.

The project emerged as a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzmann School of Design, DesignPhiladelphia and Breakthrough.

Architects Rashida Ng and Eduardo Rega Calvo conceived of the idea as a public exhibition for the city’s 250th anniversary, with the goal to “uplift a civic visioning process for Philadelphia and its future,” after years of evaluating housing injustices and neighborhood planning trends.

“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 says. “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.”

When they decided to bring youth voices into the project, they reached out to Breakthrough to collaborate given its model of peer mentorship and youth engagement.

More than 20 years ago, Ng was a student in a DesignPhiladelphia program, giving her the confidence that it would also be an ideal partner. DesignPhiladelphia partners with schools across the city to bring design education to K-12 youth, making it accessible in spaces where it traditionally isn’t.

Still, allowing youth to have input on development decisions and engage deeply with their student teachers is new for the organization. DesignPhiladelphia’s director of design education, Michael Spain, says that though he’s been doing similar work for years, he has “never worked in a model like this before.”

“What we brought to the table is a framework of developing a curriculum to actually do this, it’s kind of a new experience for DesignPhiladelphia,” Spain says. “When [kids] see they can be a part of it, that’s when they open up.”

In addition to Ng and Rega Calvo, classes were instructed and led by a group of UPenn architecture graduate students and undergrad teaching fellows with Breakthrough.

UPenn graduate student Taryn Jones says the experience was beneficial for everyone in the classroom. “Teaching is special because it makes you into a student forever,” she says. “A great way to learn something is having to explain it very clearly to somebody else.”

Students began by visualizing their ideas through paper collages — “a very common architectural medium,” Jones notes. They then worked on their shoebox-sized models of “third space,” representing social places beyond school and home, such as recreation centers or libraries.

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

Boyd’s model of a third space, for example, featured 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 says. “Designers should remember that even with technology, we must always remember our roots and have consideration with humanity in our designs.”

Ng notes that Boyd’s work “demonstrates mature spatial thinking,” with areas of lounging, exposed structure overhead, and a loft space and a nook for small groups to gather.

Students then moved into drawing maps, which they transformed into 3D neighborhood models filled with schools, residential buildings, green spaces, hospitals, bridges and other components made of paper. Youth also got a chance to generate AI models to help them envision their designs.

“The stuff that [the students] say about how they’re thinking about spaces, blows me away,” Michael Spain exclaimed. “But you need to get the opportunity to express that, and this is a way to do that.”

This story was made possible with support from the Knight Foundation.

This post was originally published on Next City.