#Placemaking for young women
May 2024: A bit of background about the #ChchSwing
Five years ago this month, we were testing out the action on the giant #chchswing, as part of the #PlacemakingAtOneCentral programme with Fletcher Living.
Man, you can get scarily high up once you get going! (Poor Mark looked a bit timid once his feet left the ground...)
There’s an interesting back story.
Around 2017, Christchurch Youth Council led youth engagement in Ōtautahi and highlighted that there was a dearth of things for young women to do in the central city.
We had actually exacerbated the problem with the first few projects of our Placemaking At One Central programme: a street art practice area, basketball court and bouldering rocks (with Christchurch City Council) – which were all seen as predominantly male.
This youth engagement discovered that the #1 thing young women wanted in the city at that time was… Instagrammable Spaces.
We noticed that all of the existing Instagrammable Spaces young women mentioned were either interior commercial spaces (certain restaurants, malls & entertainment venues) or entirely passive (like a seat in front of a nice mural).
We wondered whether an Instagrammable Space could also achieve some of the other outcomes in the Youth Action Plan such as providing spaces for physical activity that is non-competitive; and using empty land in the city to create youth-friendly spaces.
Bounce (a youth-led project founded by NZ Red Cross) led a brainstorm process that included outdoor gym equipment, giant outdoor Lego and more – but the ‘swings and flying foxes’ suggestions got the most support.
So we set a challenge to designer Pippin Wright-Stow of F3 Design to lead a process to create a set of mega swings especially for older youth, where Instagrammability was a primary design factor.
It ended up being a public-private partnership. Bounce funded most of the design phase. And then Fletcher Living stepped in to fund the construction to locate them on their future development site on Manchester St near Tākaro a Poi Margaret Mahy Family Playground.
I think it passes the Instagrammability test, with around 1/3 the number of tags as Margaret Mahy Family Playground, which opened four years earlier and had a budget around 400 times larger. But at a glance it seems like people over 40 outnumber the young women posting about it. I really wish we could have conducted a public life survey to understand more about who’s using it, why and how much…
After five years of Gap Filler maintaining them, Christchurch City Council has taken over maintenance – and there’s a queue of organisations/places with their hand up to claim and relocate them when the residential development of that site progresses.
Thanks to Bounce (New Zealand Red Cross), Fletcher Living and Pippin – amongst many others – for bringing this epic project to the people of Ōtautahi.
