2025 Lindsay Jones Memorial Research Fund Awards

This project explores the cultural embodied experiences of young girls (ages 8–16) navigating transformations in their built environments as informal housing settlements in Ahmedabad, India are redeveloped into formal apartment housing under national in-situ redevelopment policies. Through a phenomenological and feminist spatial lens, the study examines how girls experience, interpret, and make meaning of community spaces before and after redevelopment. Using Photovoice, girls document spaces that hold significance for their social connection, play, and self-identity. The research focuses on how changes to semi-private and communal spaces impact girls’ embodied experiences of safety, agency, and relationality within their neighborhoods. By centering girls’ spatial stories, the project highlights the often-overlooked gendered and generational dimensions of urban redevelopment. In doing so, it contributes to scholarship on the meaning of place in shaping cultural self-identity and well-being, offering insights for more socially and spiritually responsive approaches to designing community spaces in urban housing transformations.

The intended outcomes include:

• Advancing theoretical knowledge on the intersections of gender, youth, and urban space in the Global South, with a focus on symbolism and cultural significance of built environments.
• Contributing to feminist phenomenological understandings of how community spaces mediate personal and collective well-being, fostering self and cultural expression.
• Generating applied insights for more ethically and spiritually responsive approaches to urban housing design, emphasizing the embodied, emotional, and symbolic dimensions of community spaces.