Engaging Youth through the Built Environment: 2022 Erwin-Ramsey Fellowship
Our 2022 Erwin-Ramsey Fellow was interested in creating spaces where young people feel a sense of belonging and pride. Brandon Eley (UVA ’22) came to the Fellowship with extensive experience working with young people for The Gates Scholarship, Young Leaders Summit, Collegiate 100, and Project Pipeline. These experiences developed in him a passion for using his design education to serve young people.
While working with youth in Charlottesville and the surrounding area, one comment Brandon heard over and over was that there weren’t many things for them to do in town. Charlottesville is a sizeable small city, but young people wanted places to go like the shopping and entertainment areas in Richmond or Washington D.C. From this feedback, Brandon initially toyed with the idea of developing a pitch to encourage the City to develop a multi-attraction center like Apex or Surge Entertainment. However, after undergoing further research in some of the nuances of the city and dynamic experiences of youth, he developed a focus which was more tailored to Charlottesville’s specific context.
Over the course of the four-week fellowship, Brandon researched the relationship between youth and the built environment both locally and globally. Young people, specifically teenagers, are rarely considered during the public design process. When they are, they are viewed as a nuisance or problem to be addressed – rather than a vital part of the resident population.
In order to promote the ideals of the Erwin Ramsey Fellowship around community planning and placemaking through architecture, this project takes a three-level approach to interventions involving the city’s youth. By providing equitable spaces of engagement centered on the experience of young people, more of the city’s residents become involved in its affairs, so that everyone in the city sees and feels a sense of belonging, pride, and responsibility.
Brandon developed the project into three scales: small – medium – large, and presented the ideas to students in the city’s Community Attention Youth Internship Program (CAYIP). At the “small” scale, Brandon focused on placemaking. At the “medium” scale, the focus was on skill development. And finally, the “large” scale approached site development throughout the community.
These ideas and frameworks were also presented to a variety of adult stakeholders in the community. The feedback that emerged from Brandon’s many presentations was captured in a capstone hybrid lecture and discussion hosted by BRW.
In attendance were all three former Erwin-Ramsey Fellows as well as architectural professionals, representatives from the City and numerous community members. Brandon was able to facilitate a lively intellectual discussion around youth populations and the built environment they navigate daily. Particularly memorable was the consensus from former Fellows and staff that the work developed each year through the Fellowship has continued to build on itself, becoming more robust and increasingly meaningful.
The Erwin-Ramsey Fellowship is hosted annually by brwarchitects. It is open to graduate students, fourth-year and rising fourth-year undergraduate students at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. The Fellowship aims to deepen architectural contributions to the town where the firm has worked for over 35 years.