Jessica Lyons

What impact might the introduction of Progressive Educational Spaces and childhood experience have on the urban context of Westminster?

Societal constructs are embedded in our most dominant institutions – education, family, religion, governance and in the architecture that hosts them. My project focuses on the education sector, where a person's social understanding is at its most impressionable.

Positioning a field of satellite spaces around Westminster to form a network through the site to interrupt the existing city context. I am proposing to use the £25,000 given to each school by the Government to change into an Academy school, plus match funding from the independent and voluntary schools to fund the building of these projects, bridging the gaps between the schools of Westminster by providing shared educational spaces.

By inserting children into the urban context, the aim of the project is to disrupt the current  hierarchies and social constructs that are currently ingrained in Westminster. The five proposals are: The Child Wellbeing Centre near Grosvenor Square, The Forest School, near Carnaby Street, The Toy Library on Savile Row, The UK Youth Parliament adjacent to the Houses of Parliament and the treetop Coding Workshops in Lillington Green estate, Pimlico.

These interventions encourage a change in the environment, whereby the exposure of childhood experience breaks down the social dynamics within the city.