The built environment sector faces significant challenges in designing urban spaces that include and benefit marginalised communities, particularly for LGBT+ young people. Too often, public spaces are designed without – or even against – the needs of LGBT+ young people and feel actively ostracising and unsafe.

Publica CIC and Mosaic Trust collaborated with young LGBT+ people from Mosaic’s weekly youth club in Camden to explore what safety, belonging, and visibility look like in public space. Engaging in street tagging, collective mapping, model making, and manifesto writing, they identified what and where feels safe, accessible and inclusive in the area. Together, they envisioned a Camden where every young person can live freely and authentically. 

Our collaboration with Mosaic Trust aims to platform and empower the voices of queer youth into the centre of conversations about how cities are made - at a local and London scale. Working across three objectives: access, advocate, implement, we want to confront the lack of youth collaboration and lack of diversity in the built environment sector.

As gender-based and sexuality-based violence rises, most responses often rely on and perpetuate outdated, binary - and sometimes harmful - ideas about who young people and gender diverse people are and how they use the city.

This is the young persons of Mosaic Trust’s manifesto for change.