Poor city design correlates with poor mental health. Urban Minded sought to involve young women, among those worst affected, in determining how planning can support wellbeing.
Even a small space can produce a lot of joy if it has meaning for the people using it.
Outside a youth culture house in Esbjerg, Denmark, an entranceway cut into a hedge has opened up and revived a former unused and unloved non-space, creating a “secret garden” that has been built with and claimed by teenage girls. Although its area measures only about 50m2, it is a tiny corner of the city where a demographic mostly forgotten in urban planning finally gets to feel that they belong.
Mental Health – A Contemporary Epidemic
This is the result of a seven-month participation process conducted by Urban Minded, which involved about fifty 13-16-year-olds in discussions about what it’s like to be a young woman in Esbjerg.
The initiative, which began as a year-long research project in Copenhagen in 2022, is led by Henning Larsen and funded by the Rambøll Foundation. As the name hints, Urban Minded was set up to understand how cities can be designed so that urban spaces support – rather than be detrimental to – the mental wellbeing of girls and young women.
It may not be talked about much, but the World Economic Forum recognises poor urban mental health “as a foundational concern for the twenty-first century”. Thinktank Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health claims that good urban mental health is fundamental to “people’s enjoyment, coping skills, and relationships, educational achievement, employment, housing and economic potential,” as well as physical health, suicide prevention, and keeping a check on social care costs.
Yet many design features in cities are known to undermine mental health. Citizens are exposed to a barrage of excess light and noise, for example, have little contact with nature, find few opportunities to incorporate exercise into a daily routine, lack privacy, and feel unsafe.
Breaking The Cycle of Perpetually Poor Design
Part of the reason this happens is that trainees are still taught to design cities that cater to a default citizen: the white, affluent male. He is more shielded from these problems than other demographics – including women.
Making up around half the urban population, female citizens experience the city differently to men, but their lifestyles are rarely reflected in planning. As Ricarda Goetz-Preisner of the City of Vienna Department for Women, Austria, said at the 2026 Urban Future conference: “Women are the only majority who are treated like a minority.”
Despite being a young Iranian woman herself, Yalda Pilehchian was on the verge of being dragged into the same “uncritical and conventional” practices, which “are usually rooted in patriarchy”. In her early career as an architect, one of Yalda’s first tasks was to design a masterplan for a city she has never been to and knew nothing about. This galvanised her belief that “there is something wrong with the architecture practice the way it is. You sit at your desk and design without knowing who you are designing for.” Without these insights, we fail to meet the needs of urban societies, causing diverse groups to feel excluded and unwell.
Our CityChanger makes it clear that architects are not the only ones at fault. For example, “it is also a question of how projects are organised, how the tenders are designed, and where the budget is allocated”. But, as Urban Minded has shown, urban designers are a major part of that ecosystem.
Degrees of Participation
To be fair to the Danish, they do give people a chance to have their say: there is a lawful requirement to hold a public hearing on any architectural project. Great in theory, but “it usually happens pretty late in the projects, when the decisions are already made,” Yalda observes. Citizen input is therefore rarely reflected in the final product and people grow weary of the engagement cycle. “You build up expectations that you can’t live up to.”
The answer, she says, is to start consultation much earlier, when their perspectives can have more influence.
But architects and planners are not trained in participation practices. Expecting them to naturally be competent in engaging large, diverse audiences is a big ask.
So, it’s just as well that a new breed of practitioner is emerging, which brings personable skills, and a human-centred focus shaped by varied first-hand experiences; city architects like Yalda, who are determined to create inclusive, resilient, healthy, and future-ready cities.
She didn’t go through with the masterplan. Instead, the experienced inspired Yalda to enrol on an urban studies master’s degree with 4Cities, where she learnt to incorporate multidisciplinary perspectives and prioritise democracy in her work. Years later, our CityChanger brought these skills to the Urban Minded project.
A Project of Partnerships
The project set out to understand young women’s experiences, and to use this information to envision more informed design recommendations. Yalda did not work on this in isolation
Urban Minded is coordinated by Maya Shpiro, Henning Larsen’s Social Impact & Co-Creation Lead, and during the first year they had support from Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health.
It started with a consultation with 25 girls in Copenhagen, resulting in two manuals: one for process and one for design. Ideas based on these initial findings were piloted and tested in Esbjerg a year later, thanks to a partnership with Esbjerg Municipality, Catapult Projects, Dorte Buchardt Westergaard, and product and play designer, Natalia Gajo. This time they involved about fifty 13-16-year-olds in discussions about what it’s like to be a young woman in Esbjerg. From this came a further urban space and a strategy document, which summarises their findings in Danish and English.
Generations are changing. If we want to design cities that work better for young people, we need to ask them, to understand their perspectives.
Communication on Their Terms
The Esbjerg document is also a revelation in communicating the young women’s experiences, taking on the style of a comic book. As an aesthetic that represents and is enjoyed by the participants, it is another way to stamp the girls’ identity on the project.
The only glossy photos – which usually permeate publications about architectural projects – are drawn over in a similar cartoon style. Illustrations depict girls enjoying a diversity of activities, imagining a city that caters for their range of interests, from martial arts and dance to gaming and music. This gives them a visibility as individuals – not a homogenous group – that they have long been denied.
Direct quotes make the girls’ experiences crystal clear: “We put the voices of the girls at the centre because it is about the human experience,” Yalda explains. “They formulated it much better than I could as an architect.”
Where Do Girls Go?
In the girls’ own voices, the document raises the issues that directly affect their lives. Unlike a majority of adolescent boys, who flock to sport fields and skate parks for their fun, girls often face social and design barriers. Discussions in Esbjerg revealed that most young women have few – or no – spaces of their own in the city. They are uncomfortable and bored.
With little else to do after school, they regularly go to the city centre. In Esbjerg, this is largely a commercial space with little by way of social areas to linger or enjoy for free. They feel pressure to buy or move on. “That shapes them as who they are,” Yalda explains. They feel unwelcome in their own city.
At other times, the girls effectively disappear from view: “They would just go home and call their friends on social media because that doesn’t cost money.” So urban design has an influence on screen time too. The girls themselves expressed sadness at being confined indoors on gadgets, but have limited options.
Urban Minded: What Good Design Looks Like
As stated in the project’s design guide, Urban Minded does not expect to single handedly solve the myriad challenges that young women face.
The guide also stops short of serving up plug-and-play solutions, instead offering an adaptable framework that architects, developers, and planners in any city should consider when aiming to make urban spaces more inclusive, particularly for young women.
Done right, thoughtful, inclusive spaces can “indicate to them [girls] that they are invited and welcomed into public space and that the city is theirs to experience”.
The guide shows that this can be achieved by providing a variety of spaces that are:
- Age appropriate but encourage play
- Free to access
- Multisensory, including vivid colours, smells, and sounds
- Comfortable to be in
- Suitable for all body types
- Linked to their everyday interests
- Well-connected and easy to move around in
- Free from judgment, societal expectation, or the gaze of boys, men, parents, and teachers
- Near nature and water
- Safe
- At times lively or secluded, adapted to changing needs and moods
Good Design Made Real
In Esbjerg, the girl’s secret garden serves as just one small but significant example of this in practice.
Yalda says that it required very little money to make, showing how budgets are not necessarily the barrier to creating inclusive urban spaces. Mostly, it’s down to a lack of understanding what’s really needed.
We don’t need expensive projects all the time. It’s just about understanding human behaviour.
That too isn’t too hard to overcome if engagement is done right. Because they were involved from the start, the girls were still invested after seven months. Twenty of them helped to build and paint benches, fixed around a grand central tree. Lighting and artwork were installed to make the space attractive, safe, and usable after dark.
There’s even a bright sculpture of a young woman that gives the girl’s a sense of ownership.
But the physical space – as good as it is – is not the point, Yalda says. “Just the fact that they were asked to be part of the design process, that’s what they were proud of.”
Who Should Be Designing for Girls?
One question remains: after getting it wrong for so long, should men be prevented from designing cities?
Yalda thinks not.
“I keep asking myself, does it matter that I’m a woman? Does it matter that I’m from Iran? It matters to some extent because I know things that other people wouldn’t because I have the lived experience.”
But inclusive design is not only gendered; it is intersectional, and each of us may be able to relate to different challenges that underserved or excluded groups experience in the city, be it parents of young children, people living with disabilities, migrants, elderly populations, POC, low-income households, etc.
Equally, we all have the potential to allow unconscious biases to bleed into our ideas. For example, Yalda comes from a middle class family, which gives her a privilege that others don’t have. “If I don’t learn to question that, then that’s my blind spot,” she realises.
So, our CityChanger believes, anyone has the potential to be an inclusive city planner, as long as they are prepared to undergo some self-reflection, learn how to ask the right questions, make efforts to understanding the responses, and use this all to formulate designs that cater to society’s diverse needs.
Targeted Participation
Now working at the Danish Town Planning Institute, Yalda has developed a two-day course to pass these skills on.
Democracy is one of the institute’s founding pillars, and part of the course is dedicated to teaching municipal architects, planners, and designers how to involve citizens who do not engage with Denmark’s public hearing process.
She also uses this platform to explain that open recruitment in participation exercises is not conducive to bringing unheard voices to the table. Sometimes we need to separate groups to give them space to engage. It’s this act of targeted participation that worked for the teenage girls.
See the City as Others Do
Delivering the course for the first time, Yalda invited an external expert to help consulting practitioners to see their city differently using Bruno Latour’s Parliament of Things exercise.
They are asked to give a voice to (sometimes abstract) entities that don’t have one, such as nature, money, or a specific emotion. “You talk for them,” she explains. “We use that to show biases and the many perspectives you can see an issue from, which is a quality that the planner should have.”
Participants learn concrete engagement methods “and where you would use them”. Yalda says that, for many of the attendees, the greatest lesson is how to activate and embrace a bottom-up approach “and not wanting to control things”. It’s a big change, but most seem receptive.
Above all, it’s about understanding how people are affected by the physical fabric of the city. And realising that, as architects of the urban future, they as experienced professionals can continue to improve their own working practices by listening to the people in their city.
“The citizens have the knowledge, and they should have the power to have a say in what we are designing,” Yalda believes. “With every single person you talk to, it’s like a new world opening up.”
For guidance about participation activities that actually work – and to see that it’s really not that hard – head to our engagement toolkit, based on Urban Minded methods.