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Inclusive Spaces: Levelling the playing field
17 March 2021, 2:00 pm–3:00 pm
With over 30 million children forcibly displaced across the globe, can play spaces provide places of refuge, equity and inclusion?
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment
Emergencies of forced displacement are prevalent across the globe, as of 2019, 40% of the 79 million people forced out of their homes were children. However, research often ignores the plight of urban refugee children who have limited access to resources and rights within the built environment.
Using Kitengela, a peri-urban town in Kenya as a case study, we’ll explore how play spaces can become significant places of safety, social integration and developmental progress.
Through the process of storytelling and digital mapping, we’ll look at the material and spatial characteristics which promote the naturally occurring play culture – while also foregrounding the issues that prevent both refugee Congolese children and host Kenyan children from accessing play in an inclusive, equitable manner.
This work has been developed by Marie Williams, based in the UCL Institute of Global Prosperity, through the process of co-design, in collaboration with local researchers and over 200 participants in 2020.
About the Speaker
Marie Williams
In 2016 she launched Dream Networks and began a journey to enable inclusive play4all children through the process of co-design. To date Dream Networks has collaborated with businesses, schools and communities in the UK and East Africa to bring play to over 4,000 children. She is a PHD student at the Bartlett Institute of Global Prosperity and an exchange scholar at Yale School of Architecture. Through her situated, participatory co-design research project, she hopes to generate accessible and tailored play solutions that enable children from the Kenyan and Refugee community in Kitengela thrive through play.