Politicians and the media are increasingly describing young people as key actors in addressing climate change and building a sustainable future. A pilot-project from SLU aims, in collaboration with municipal and civil-society actors in Malmö, to build a platform enabling young people’s participation in the social, cultural, and political processes addressing climate change and a sustainable future.
The project activities centred around a literature review, and an informal ‘climate café’ for local youth in a neighbourhood in Malmö, Sweden [1], as well as a new collaborative project established with the local municipality and other academic institutions.
The aim of this research in Malmö is first, to gain a deeper understanding of young people’s perspectives on climate change in their everyday-lives, and second, to build an experimental platform with the goal of increasing young people’s political agency in shaping sustainable urban futures.
The literature review as well as the climate café was framed around the idea of ‘reverse participation’ (see Figure 1 in appendix for theoretical model) which turns traditional participation on its head. Rather than seeing ordinary citizens as occasionally participating in for example research-, governance-, or other institutional process, it urges the perspective that the institutional representatives gets to participate in citizens’ everyday-life processes, and thus grants both authority and expert-status to citizens living their daily lives with the struggles and opportunities this hold for action. While the model might look similar to a classical, collaborative planning process for institutional actors, it centres the question of who has authority to act in the process and upon its findings.
As a temporary conclusion[2] upon the literature review findings is that reversing participation for urban youth in climate change questions is currently not the predominant approach within the literature, but is emerging. More traditional forms of participation centring on academic and institutionalized agency still dominates, but as the three cases show, other forms of participation for urban youth are arising.
Model of future workshop. Illustration from the project.
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The combined findings from the literature review and the event points strongly to the need for a more long-term engagement with a range of locally trusted actors[3]. Working with actors from Malmö municipality and university, a research project has thus emerged that attempts to apply a reversed participation approach. This project will incorporate the findings from this seed-project in a four-year in-depth engagement with local youth and participation in sustainable urban transformations around climate change and development of the city’s blue-green infrastructure. The future engagement will be developed as an action research project in a cross-field between critical pedagogy, urban sociology, human ecology, governance, and landscape architecture.
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[1] Several of these activities had to be cancelled due to the covid-19 outbreak and related legislative measures advising work from home, and discouraging travel, meetings, and events. This painted a new picture of what kind of activity could come about, and resulted in project-visits being cancelled, meetings moved to online platforms, and the final event changing in character due to lack of emerging partnerships.
[2] The full report will be developed subsequently.
[3] While the climate café is for now a single event, several actors (local youth institution ‘Aktivitetshus Holma’ and an NGO ‘Klimatprata’) have expressed interest in participating in further activities of a similar kind. Due to the relatively informal character of the event, however, this potential pathway will not be further introduced here
Project funded by SLU Urban Futures.
Name: Frederik Aagaard Hagemann
Department:Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management
Faculty: Faculty of Landscape Architecture, Horticulture and Crop Production Sciece (LTV)
Contact: frederik.aagaard.hagemann@slu.se
SLU Urban Futures
urbanfutures@slu.se
www.slu.se/urbanfutures
SLU Alnarp
SLU Urban Futures
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