Challenging frameworks and methods. Strategies and constraints of young people’s participation in the context of Vienna

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Since 2011 Article 4 of Austria’s Federal Constitutional Law on the Rights of Children states in accordance with Article 12 of the UN Convention, that every young person has the right to form and articulate an opinion to be heard in all matters of his or her concern – an important point of reference for young people's participation in shaping urban agendas and spaces. In the last years Vienna has developed several large participation processes targeting young people (see Junges Wien/City of Vienna). The Children and Youth Strategy employs a wide range of methods to reach different groups and has been setting up processes which try to navigate positively between city administration and young people. There are also children's and youth parliaments on district level, run by different organizations and following varying concepts. Most include democracy workshops, interaction with politicians, participatory budgets and strategies to counter biases in engagement. At the same time, the city has failed to find constructive means of negotiation with young people who express their ideas of urban development beyond these participation instruments, namely in the context of climate change protests. Vogelpohl (2018) highlights that Lefebvres (1968) right to city must be understood as one’s rights to co-create the city as a space of one's own socialization in difference and collectivity. Children’s Rights bear a lot of potential to adopt planning strategies and principles. Therefor they have to be ‘translated’ in planning context. However, requirements, methods and considerations regarding the say of young people are still poorly integrated into professional training and protocols (see Kogler/Lindinger 2022). Urban laboratories and participatory research projects at the Technical University of Vienna work on this issue. The contributor has been part of them since 2017. The contribution gives an overview of developments in Vienna and critically reflects methodologies and guiding assumptions regarding process and output effects of participation. Following Liebel (2017) the both cannot be understood separately and South American debates have contributed fundamentally in challenging the conception of the child in this discourse.

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The politics and spaces of encounters: advancing dialogues between and within the Global North and the Global South

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