Beyond street harassment
Nov 2024 - ongoing
Street harassment isn't just individual bad behavior—it's young people conforming to a toxic status quo because they feel powerless to change their environment. The breakthrough? When you give youth actual agency over their public spaces, they become the solution architects.
Graduation Project by Juliette van Driel
This innovative design research project tackled street harassment in Rotterdam by empowering young people as creative problem-solvers rather than treating them as part of the problem. The central creative component involved speculative design practices that transformed abstract concepts into tangible, engaging experiences.
Juliette van Driel created alternative futures of public space – imaginative scenarios and physical objects that brought these visions to life. These weren’t just theoretical concepts, but concrete materials that young people could touch, discuss, and reimagine. Through participatory workshops, youth engaged with these speculative designs to envision how their neighborhoods could be different.
The creative methodology was deeply participatory, involving guerrilla street interviews, generative sessions in youth hubs, and iterative design testing. Rather than lecturing about harassment, the project invited young people to dream and design their ideal public spaces, using these creative explorations as a springboard for critical conversations about inequality, safety, and community.
The result was a workshop format that repositions urban planning as a collaborative creative practice. By engaging with speculative objects and scenarios, participants didn’t just critique existing problems – they actively imagined and designed solutions, transforming them from passive subjects of research into active creators of their urban future.
This approach demonstrates how creative design methods can make complex social issues accessible while fostering genuine youth agency in shaping their communities.
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