Local interventions enhance physical activity and inclusivity for adolescent girls in socio-economically deprived areas, suggesting a community-driven model.
• Local park-based physical activity (PA) interventions for teenage girls: • Have women PA leaders & teenage girls as Park Ambassadors to – • co-design walking pathway & group walking sessions (combined with intensive PA); • co-deliver park safety training & social media campaign for adolescents. • Informed by intersectional rights to the city & gender-transformative approaches. Parks are important spaces to engage with physical activity (PA) for adolescents, but challenges remain in transforming them into inclusive spaces for adolescent girls. Guided by intersectionality as a critical inquiry and praxis, with gendered understanding of Lefebvre’s notion of ‘the right to the city’, this paper presents a whole-of-community approach to co-produce local park-based PA interventions for ethnically diverse adolescent girls in socio-economically deprived urban areas in Bradford, United Kingdom (UK). We facilitated eight workshops, each was comprised of photo-elicitation discussion and feeding back research findings activities, with 37 adolescent girls, boys, and parents across two local parks – one was in a predominantly White British neighbourhood, and the other British Pakistani which was also co-developed with local adolescent girls. Three themes from the workshops are: 1) the limitations of focusing on park quality; 2) social support to improve adolescent girls’ confidence as active citizens, and; 3) multi-sited educational interventions to transform restrictive gender norms. Building on these themes, intervention ideas related to walking, youth workers, and Park Ambassadors are assembled into complex interventions called Girls and Their Parks (S-PARKS) . We also call for greater use of a whole-of-community approach to intersectionality for co-producing PA interventions for adolescent girls.
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Istiko et al. (2026) studied this question.
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