Having a voice and a place: local youth driving urban development in an East German town under transformation

ABSTRACT

In small towns with ageing societies, the voices of the young often tend to get marginalized in local policy discourse. The paper explores how young people are trying to counter this trend through the creation of a self-organized youth and sociocultural centre in Görlitz, a town that suffered major transformation in the aftermath of German reunification. Görlitz also made national headlines when a Eurosceptic right-wing party gained a large share of votes in recent elections. In this context, it is quite surprising to see an initiative like the sociocultural centre emerge and grow into a relevant urban development player. By combining research on youth participation and spatial (in)justice, the paper argues in favour of the important role of youth as active drivers of local development and creators of less institutionalized platforms for democratic engagement. In transformation towns such as Görlitz, initiatives like the youth and sociocultural centre can be game changers in terms of countering spatial injustices by creating positive narratives over the town, fostering pluralistic public discourse, and preventing youth outmigration.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth participation
• spatial justice
• transformation localities
• Görlitz
• youth and sociocultural centre

1. Introduction: at the crossroads of youth exclusion and regional inequalities

The EU Youth Report 2015 points out that the socioeconomic divide among youth is growing, putting many young people at risk of marginalization and political exclusion (European Commission 2015). At the same time, concerns have been voiced about increasing regional inequalities between and within EU Member States (Hudson 2017; Bürk 2013 for Germany). While the Youth Report does not discuss the implications of territorial disparities for youth inclusion, there is a certain relevance in linking these two issues, especially regarding peripheral and socioeconomically struggling towns where opportunities for young people (in terms of jobs, qualifications, and cultural amenities) have dwindled. Many thus choose to move away, with severe implications for the ‘remainers’ in terms of their marginalization and how they perceive themselves (Meyer 2017).

Young people define their collective identity and social belonging in the complex spatial context of their institutional and everyday environment (Lees 2003; Meyer 2017; Pardue 2012; Walther 2018). As a consequence, opportunity structures should go beyond the provision of jobs and education (Andersson et al. 2019; Forkby and Batsleer 2020). In particular, researchers argue that self-organized forms of spatial appropriation enhance self-efficacy and self-expression among young people (Zimmermann et al. 2018). As yet, most research on youth participation and the creation of such spaces has focused on large cities. However, a German study of youth interests indicates that especially those living in suburbs, small or middle-sized towns report a lack of open spaces – public or semi-public – for encounter and leisure activities (BMU et al. 2018, 37). For such communities, providing spaces and activities specifically targeting young people can be an important factor in countering outmigration and reviving positive local narratives (Duxbury and Campbell 2011). However, despite being viewed as their locality’s future stakeholders, young people seldom feel specifically encouraged or attracted to participate in local development processes, especially as they are often very formal and highly institutionalized (Batsleer et al. 2017). This can fuel a vicious circle in places with a high ratio of youth outmigration, where the interests of a demographically ageing population tend to dominate the political agenda, with less attention paid to opportunity structures for younger age groups.

In this context, the Rabryka youth and sociocultural centre in the middle-sized town of Görlitz in East Germany is an interesting example of an initiative by and for young people actively engaging with local development processes. A youth protest emerged there in direct reaction to a missing focus on youth politics, with more and more young people starting to voice their interests and launching a variety of sociocultural activities and initiatives providing less institutionalized access to participation and local development. Their case is particularly relevant, as Görlitz has undergone several socioeconomic and political transformations over the last decades, aggravating feelings of frustration with and distrust in established political institutions among parts of the population (Kamuf, Matzke, and Weck 2019). In recent local and regional elections, a Eurosceptic right-wing party was able to win a high proportion of votes in the town. In response to this party’s nationalist rhetoric, the youth group responsible for creating the sociocultural centre aims to foster inclusive and pluralistic democratic engagement, taking a clear stance against any form of discrimination and extremism.

From an external perspective, it is surprising to see an initiative like Rabryka emerge and grow into a relevant urban development stakeholder in Görlitz. In this paper we analyse which factors influence the role and workings of this initiative and explore its potential to redress spatial injustices in the town. By highlighting local capacities for change, we contribute to contemporary debates on geographies of discontent (Rodríguez-Pose 2018), calling for greater emphasis to be put on the procedural dimension of redressing spatial injustices in transformation localities. To understand the complexity of the initiative’s role in Görlitz, we look at two research strands: literature on transformation localities and spatial (in)justice, particularly procedural justice; and research on youth participation (see Section 2). In combination, these two research strands provide the conceptual background for our analysis (see Section 3).

We argue that the youth initiative plays an important role as a game changer in terms of creating positive narratives regarding Görlitz, supporting pluralistic public discourse, and forming a holding function for local youth (see Section 4). The way it is organized both amplifies the voice of local youth and creates spaces for experimental forms of youth engagement. This interrelationship between procedural and distributive elements can be subsumed under the term spatial justice, which, for this paper, is defined as the ‘fair and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and the opportunities to use them’ (Soja 2009, 2). Hence, we see the youth initiative as demonstrating ‘actually existing justice practices as a response to situated injustices’ (Williams 2017, 2217, referring to Iveson (2010)). Nevertheless, we also observe pitfalls and risks for the initiative, which has taken on the role and responsibility of an urban development stakeholder in recent years. While greater professionalization and engagement with local authorities offers tangible outcomes (such as the physical establishment of the sociocultural centre), it could harm the credibility of the initiative among local youth groups, an important asset in a transformation town set on rebuilding trust among youth, supporting their capacity building, and providing less institutionalized opportunities for youth engagement in local politics. We discuss these issues and lessons learned in Section 5.

2. Conceptualizing spatial (in)justice and youth engagement in transformation localities

Görlitz, the venue of our empirical research, is a town with some 57,000 inhabitants located on the border to Poland in the East German federal state of Saxony. After the 1989–1991 fall of the Iron Curtain and German reunification, the town went through a transformation resembling that of many other East German towns. Most of its factories closed down, leading to economic decline, high rates of unemployment and rapid outmigration. To this day, the results of such processes are visible in structural inequalities between East and West Germany (e.g. the underrepresentation of East Germans in national-level leadership positions, the absence of East German companies in the DAX stock market index). On top of this, the region around Görlitz is currently facing a second structural challenge due to the demise of open-cast coal mining (Lorenz and Träger 2020). This is aggravating its vulnerability, especially in comparison to other East German urban agglomerations like Leipzig or Dresden which have recovered faster from the consequences of German reunification. Accordingly, Görlitz can be regarded as a transformation town undergoing rapid socio-economic and political change due mainly to macro-level events (Brachert et al. 2019). For East Germany, scholars argue that the string of top-down induced transformations produced an ‘aggravation of financial and mental living conditions, an upheaval of social statuses, psychological insecurity as well as a subsequently weak acceptance and legitimation of the new order’¹ (Brachert et al. 2019, 97). As a result, large parts of the local population feel disconnected from higher-level policy decisions and unable to determine their own fate and that of their town. Israel and Frenkel (2017) argue that, based on such shared historical experiences and the accumulation of habitual and deeply ingrained perceptions of (in)justice within local communities, ‘places might carry their own habitus’ (655). This place habitus shapes communities’ and individuals’ relationships to local institutions and governance.

A prominent strand of literature is devoted to communities’ feelings of frustration in the context of the so-called ‘geographies of discontent’ discourse (see Rodríguez-Pose 2018). Rodríguez-Pose (2018) argues that many communities in politically underrepresented and socioeconomically struggling places have started to revolt against the perception that they ‘don’t matter’ through the ballot box, voting for EU-sceptic, extremist and/or populist parties. From their perspective, the ballot box is one of the few remaining ways to express their frustration with perceived spatial injustices. In Görlitz as well, election results reflect discontent among the population (Weck, Kamuf, and Matzke 2020). Specifically, the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) is benefitting from a perceived disconnection between local communities and higher-level institutions, accompanied by persistent racist and xenophobic views among parts of the population (Booß 2019; Lorenz and Träger 2020).

The discourse on ‘geographies of discontent’ has rightly directed scholarly and political attention towards those regions with structural challenges, outward migration and brain drain, coupled with a ‘no future, no hope’ feeling (Rodríguez-Pose 2018, 196). Perceptions of injustice among local populations in these regions tend to remain surprisingly stable despite the substantial funds channelled towards them (204). While some authors derive the need for a better redistribution of funds (in terms of place-sensitive, endogenous economic development) from these diagnoses (Rodríguez-Pose 2018, 205), we intend to highlight the significance of just processes, alongside distributive components. In the work of political philosopher Nancy Fraser, recognition of the interests of marginalized social groups is of particular importance for redressing perceptions of injustice (Fraser 1997; see also Young 1990). Her request is echoed in spatial justice literature, which argues for more attention to be paid to how the procedural and distributional dimensions of spatial justice are interlinked in a locality (Davoudi and Brooks 2014, 2686; Israel and Frenkel 2017; Madanipour, Shucksmith, and Talbot 2017). Davoudi and Brooks (2014) show that feelings of injustice among local populations emerge particularly when responsibility for a lack of resources and/or the capabilities to use them is perceived to lie outside the local community, for instance with higher policymaking levels. In the case of transformation localities, where the transformation of power and control over resources were and are to a large extent coordinated through external and top-down decisions, such perceptions of injustice are particularly present (Brachert et al. 2019; Lorenz and Träger 2020). It is thus not only the lack of resources, but the inability of communities to participate in decision-making processes over resources which is perceived as an injustice. The ‘forms of justice (or injustice) and the process that sets (and normatively defines) them are combined’ (Israel and Frenkel 2017, 659f.). Previous research has identified a number of key tenets to consider for greater procedural justice. These include opportunities to participate in clear and transparent local development processes (Schmitt 2020). The organization of a transparent and inclusive process is relevant, if outcomes are to be achieved which are seen to be fair and which receive wide acceptance among participating stakeholders and the communities they represent. Moreover, deliberative and participatory opportunities for local populations to make collective and self-determined decisions about their community can provide answers to perceptions of injustice from a local governance perspective.

How can such just procedures take shape in relation to youth, the main target group of our case study in Görlitz? Shaped by a high degree of institutionalization and bureaucratization and formalized in political parties and election processes, traditional political processes tend to exclude young people and their interests (Batsleer et al. 2017). Moreover, many such people actively reject participation in, for instance, political parties, suspecting that they are being used as tokens that manifest rather than transform existing power relations. Consequently, Batsleer et al. (2017) argue that a rethinking of democratic processes and participation is required to recognize young people and their interests in local decision-making processes. According to Zimmermann et al. (2018), such a reform would benefit from a broader understanding of democratic participation that considers ‘all (and therefore different styles of) actions of individuals carried out in and/or addressing the public’ (11). This means that daily practices, youth (sub-)cultures and styles represent forms of engagement that constantly negotiate social and political change (Forkby and Batsleer 2020; Geertman et al. 2016). Following this perspective, most young people already participate in public life, albeit in mainly informal ways. Young people tend to shape their social relationships and their place in society through the appropriation, creation, and shaping of physical space (Zimmermann et al. 2018). Due to their limited resources and the increasing regulation and privatization of public space, they often ‘have to settle for the spaces left over’ (20). Examples of such processes include, but are not limited to, parkour (Andersson et al. 2019), skateboarding (Geertman et al. 2016), graffiti culture (Caldeira 2012), and ‘identity-space connections’ (Pardue 2012, 59) within music subcultures. Although they might not be labelled as such, these activities are political, as they deal with questions of local identity, challenge social norms, and/or resist societal processes of exclusion and discrimination (Butler 2015; Young 1990).

Consequently, what is needed is not simply the greater participation of young people, but recognition of the various ways through which they already participate in society (Batsleer et al. 2017). This finding coincides with the literature on transformation localities that recommends the deliberate integration of groups traditionally considered as ‘inactive’ into local decision-making processes, rather than merely extending already existing forms of political participation (Brachert et al. 2019). In the case of young people, active support for the creation of open spaces free from paternalistic expectations and performance requirements is argued to be central to acknowledging and fostering their engagement (Andersson et al. 2019). Importantly, however, such processes must not be misunderstood as an opportunity to silence conflicts by pushing young people off to certain places (Lees 2003). Instead, we should ‘[read] [young people] for what they might say to us about the failures of current representative democratic forms and the possibilities for a democratic Europe to come’ (Batsleer et al. 2017, 179). Hence, the literature points towards the value in acknowledging the conflictual nature of sharing urban space among a diverse population and the importance of negotiating local power relations (Lees 2003). The negotiation of differences in the use of space, between generations, and between formal and informal stakeholders can be a ‘means of learning democracy and participation’ (Walther 2018, 11) not only for young people, but for all involved, including public authorities.

3. Methodological approach

This paper is based on empirical results from the case study of a self-organized centre for youth and socioculture, called Rabryka, collected in 2018 and 2019 in the middle-sized town of Görlitz on the German-Polish border. The findings are part of a larger research project that explored actions redressing spatial injustice at local level in several EU countries (Weck, Kamuf, and Matzke 2020). The idea for a youth and sociocultural centre in Görlitz emerged in 2011, when local youth started demanding more attention from the municipal government (Kamuf, Matzke, and Weck 2019). Since 2013, young people have been experimenting with a variety of activities such as a music and culture festival, a recording studio, support for local refugees and urban gardening on a former industrial site. The name Rabryka stems from the red building bricks of the many vacant factories in town (‘rot’ (Ger., red) + ‘fabryka’ (Pl., factory)). The centre is run by a core team of 25 people (Second Attempt e.V. 2019), some in paid positions (provided through various funding schemes), others as volunteers or on internships. Beyond that, they regularly work with around 100 people, not counting visitors and one-time workshop participants. Rabryka’s main sponsor is the municipality, though it also receives funding from the region, state, federal government and the EU.

We rely on the insights of professionals and youth activists for an analysis of the Rabryka youth initiative and its informal and formal relations with local development processes and institutions in Görlitz. Our analysis draws on a total of 23 semi-structured expert interviews with 31 interview partners (IP) and one focus group with 4 participants. Out of this sample, 12 interviews with 16 IPs and the focus group were identified as particularly relevant for this paper’s research question (Table 1). The IPs and focus group participants were identified through a snowball method and selected on the basis of their function in the town and in relation to the youth initiative. These functions are clustered into the following overarching categories: civic players (including representatives of Rabryka and of other civic youth and sociocultural organizations), public officials, and academics. All three categories were also represented in the focus group. Other factors such as age and gender played no role in IP selection and were not asked.

Table 1. Overview of interview partners included in this paper (own presentation). For further details on the selection of IP and the case study see Kamuf, Matzke, and Weck (2019).

Role of IP	Civil society			Public official	Academic
	Rabryka	Other youth and cultural organisations	Youth welfare organisations	Municipal administration
IP code	3, 4, 6, 7, 22	1, 2, 5, 8	14, 15, 20, 21	16, 17	25
Level of engagement	Local		Regional	Local	Regional

The interviews were structured along two main topics: the perception of spatial (in)justice in Görlitz and the role and organization of the sociocultural centre in relation to local development processes. The questions were slightly adapted to reflect the function of the respective IP. Consequently, the Rabryka representatives were mainly asked about the initiatives’ internal structure and its relationship to local politics, while IPs from other civic organizations provided information on the history of youth participation in Görlitz, local civil society networks, and the role of Rabryka in the wider region around the town. The members of the municipal administration provided insights into their perspective on the youth initiative and its role in local development. Last but not least, a regional academic supported our contextual understanding of participatory processes and civil society in the town. To gain further contextual knowledge on the town, the youth initiative and its history, we conducted desk research on media reports and policy documents, observed public events in Görlitz and internal meetings of the Rabryka team, and engaged in informal talks with young people participating in the initiative.

The IPs presented in Table 1 were identified as those best able to answer our research questions, as they observed and/or participated in the conceptualization and organization of Rabryka and engaged with the issue of youth participation at various territorial and institutional levels. We deliberately chose to give more weight to civil society in the IP distribution, highlighting the perspective of civic organizations in local development. However, we are aware of a bias in our analysis. With our focus on active youth and the procedural workings of and around the Rabryka youth initiative, we were in no position to gain first-hand insights into the perceptions of non-active young Görlitz people. This perspective needs to be provided by further (action) research.

In this paper, we ask how an initiative such as Rabryka could emerge in Görlitz. While in other transformation localities, perceived injustices led not to action but to widespread resignation (or outmigration), we need an explanation for why young people in Görlitz were ready to voice their interests? Section 4.1 analyses the conditions for the emergence of Rabryka in the context of the literature on transformation localities. Furthermore, we assess how the initiative involves young people in local development processes (Section 4.2). The focus here is not on what the initiative achieved, but rather on how and how justly the result – Rabryka, the sociocultural centre – came about. We use a set of ‘quality markers’ for the procedural dimension of justice, taken from planning studies and governance literature (Perry and Atherton 2017, 48; Schmitt 2020). We select three ‘markers’ crucial for promoting the capacity of young people to voice their interests: (1) the forms of leadership of identified leading player(s), (2) the opportunities for engagement and exertion of influence by initial non-key players, and, related to it, (3) the transparency in decision-making structures and processes for outsiders (Schmitt 2020).

In Section 4.3, we ask what impact the initiative has in terms of procedural and distributive justice, i.e. the potential of the initiative to redress spatial injustices in the town as perceived by our interview partners. This analysis is framed by Fraser’s discussion of affirmative and transformative justice. Affirmative remedies address injustices without changing the underlying framework (re)producing injustice, while transformative remedies restructure this underlying framework (Fraser 1997, 23). We are thus interested in whether the initiative’s impact goes beyond securing resources for their target group (affirmative justice). Applied to our local case, transformative remedies would destabilize or change the vision of the town and its development among local decision-makers. We analyse the extent to which power relations and governance arrangements in relation to youth participation in Görlitz have been restructured.

4. Having a voice and a place: the Rabryka sociocultural centre

In the following sections, we analyse the emergence (Section 4.1), organization (Section 4.2), and impact (Section 4.3) of the Rabryka youth and sociocultural centre in Görlitz based on empirical insights gained in our field work.

4.1. What were the underlying conditions for the emergence of the youth initiative?

Following German reunification, transformations in East Germany resulted in deindustrialization and outmigration. Against this backdrop, Görlitz invested a lot of effort into making the town more attractive for new residents, with a focus on restoring the picturesque old town (Kamuf, Matzke, and Weck 2019). Alongside tourists, these measures attracted new residents – many of them pensioners – to the town, earning Görlitz the nickname ‘pensionopolis’ in the local and national media (see for instance Kuntz 2017). By contrast, municipal support for young people was for a long time limited to mandatory youth welfare services and activities of institutions such as the municipal theatre (local official, IP 17). Self-organized youth organizations existed, though did not receive much support from the municipality (local civil society player, IP 2).

The 2011 youth protest emerged as a direct reaction to the missing focus on youth politics in Görlitz (local civil society player, IP 3). The protest was organized through Facebook groups, networking events between different local youth initiatives, and meetings with the local official responsible for youth affairs. Several months into the movement, some 120 young activists organized a flash mob in the city council, drawing great attention to their cause (local official, IP 17). While the protest initially focused on increasing attention for youth affairs in the town in general, appeals soon shifted to more concrete demands for greater (financial) support for youth activities and the provision of premises by the local administration with the goal of establishing a self-organized youth and sociocultural centre in the town. In our interviews, one of the Rabryka team members explained that, from his perspective, justice was linked to ‘[being] able to take part in the development of my social space’ (local civil society player, IP 6). This perception reiterates the importance of young people having access to urban space where they can express their interests and acquire a sense of belonging in society (Zimmermann et al. 2018). Another Rabryka team member emphasized that such spaces should be free of regulations or consumption requirements, thereby allowing for inclusive participation (local civil society player, IP 22). The frustration and concrete need that arose from a lack of such spaces motivated the young people in our study to engage with political processes.

Our interviews also revealed that the conditions for the emergence of the youth protest were linked to broader perceptions of spatial injustice in the town, intermingled with different aspects of procedural and distributive justice. The town’s peripheral situation in both geographical (e.g. few train connections to larger cities) and political terms (e.g. the image of Görlitz as a ‘provincial town’ (local civil society player, IP 8) and the underrepresentation of East Germans in decision-making positions (local civil society player, IP 4)) played a role. Moreover, interviewees criticized the federal state (Saxony) for pouring money into large cities like Leipzig and Dresden, thereby fostering outmigration, particularly of young, well-educated inhabitants, from middle-sized towns like Görlitz (local civil society player, IP 3). This brain-drain increased pressure on the local labour market and, on a more emotional level, aggravated a negative self-perception and lack of perspective among ‘remainers’ (Bürk 2013; Meyer 2017). One member of the Rabryka team summarized these issues by arguing that spatial injustice in his view occurred ‘when there is a milieu or a group of […] people who […] feel that they cannot change anything’ (local civil society player, IP 6). Such responses reiterate scholarly evidence on East German transformation localities, pointing to deeply anchored feelings of frustration based on the perception of being unable to determine one’s own fate and that of one’s locality (Brachert et al. 2019; Lorenz and Träger 2020). Moreover, they reflect Israel and Frenkel’s argument of a ‘place habitus’ (2017, 655) and an understanding of the interrelationship between individual capability and locality. According to one young player, ‘a person born here probably has less chance to climb the social ladder than in other regions’ (local civil society player, IP 4). He reasoned that when such negative narratives are reproduced through the media or official figures, outmigration and frustration are further fostered: ‘I think a lot is based on teachers in school saying: “If you stay here, you’ve got no prospects in life. You really have to get out”’. This observation shows that, through repeated and shared instances within the local community, perceptions of injustice can become a person’s conscious base of existence (Israel and Frenkel 2017, 655).

Against the backdrop of these issues, the 2011–12 youth protest was a turning point for local youth. They started actively engaging with local authorities rather than opting for ‘leftover spaces’ (Zimmermann et al. 2018, 20). Before that, though they had not been passive (youth organizations and activities existed), they had remained outside local decision-making processes, lacking support and acknowledgement. In exploring how the youth protest eventually achieved recognition of its demands by the municipal administration, we can identify various place-based opportunity structures. Firstly, the town co-hosts a university, including a faculty for cultural management and social work. After the demand for a youth and sociocultural centre emerged, a youth association including many (former) students trained in youth and cultural affairs became involved, supporting the conceptualization of what would later become Rabryka (local official, IP 16). With this backing, the young people successfully applied for funding from a three-year national scheme for self-organized youth organizations in 2013. This provided them with initial financial aid and supralocal backing. Secondly, the many vacant spaces in the Görlitz town centre provided specific opportunities for appropriating space for youth activities (local civil society player, IP 5). Thirdly, the most relevant factor in terms of favourable opportunity structures was that the protest coincided with a political upheaval in the town (local civil society player, IP 5). Representatives of the left and centrist parties in the city council sympathized with the youth groups’ interest and the newly elected crossbench mayor of 2012 supported their cause, unlike his predecessor. Many of our interviewees welcomed the new mayor’s politics, with his focus on such topics as family-friendliness, bottom-up participation, and youth (local civil society players, IP 3, 5, & 6). Similarly, local decision-makers felt that local politics needed to encompass a more integrated, less physically orientated approach for sustainable local development, as recalled by one representative of the municipal administration: ‘And I realised: For about 20 years, we had been investing in the town’s hardware and now we started to invest more in its software’ (local official, IP 17).

In sum, these opportunity structures created favourable conditions for young people’s perceptions of injustice to be heard, establishing the base for municipal support for the youth and sociocultural centre. After the national funding scheme ended in 2016, the municipality took over as the initiative’s main sponsor. Rabryka is now perceived as a joint project of the municipality and the team of young people in charge of organizing the platform (focus group). Without this pooling of resources, one team member argues, the establishment of such a large project would not have been possible (local civil society player, IP 6). At the same time, this constellation makes the initiative accountable to local authorities and thus susceptible to local political changes.

4.2. How does the youth initiative engage young people?

In the view of the young people who set up Rabryka, democratic engagement starts with everyday aspects of social life (local civil society players, IP 3 & 6). One interviewee explained how important it was for the Rabryka team to broaden their understanding of democratic engagement: ‘When talking about democracy, people always think about political representatives. But they never get the idea that democracy starts on your doorstep, doing something together with your neighbours, creating something cool’ (local civil society player, IP 3). This quote coincides with the literature on youth participation that calls for acknowledgement of existing, informal forms of youth engagement (Batsleer et al. 2017; Zimmermann et al. 2018). But how can this be translated into practice? In the case of Rabryka, ‘doing something together’ and engaging youth in local development are reflected in the way the initiative is set up in terms of leadership and management. We view this as the first marker of just processes (see Section 3). Regular team meetings, open plenary sessions, and conceptual workshop weekends allow all participants to engage in decision-making, with no difference made between those with formal positions, volunteers, and interested outsiders. This transparent, non-hierarchical mode of leadership goes hand in hand with the well-defined roles of team members. As its main representative, the current project leader plays an important role in navigating the initiative through the local institutional context (regional academic, IP 25). Informal talks and observations reveal that this situation is not perceived negatively by other team members. Quite the contrary, it allows them to develop their projects relatively free from external pressure. This internal division of tasks also leads to a balanced mix of more formalized projects (that provide funding and jobs) and informal activities.

These open, more informal activities are crucial for the second marker of just processes, namely the way young people are involved in the initiative. Right from the beginning, Rabryka was designed as a modular platform allowing the largely autonomous development of various small-scale projects under the umbrella of a core team responsible for most of the ‘red tape’ (local civil society player, IP 6). The members of this team understand themselves as ‘facilitators’ rather than ‘doers’. Consequently, individuals (initial non-key players) wanting to start a project and experiment with their ideas can count on a secure financial and structural basis: ‘It [Rabryka] is really somehow the mother ship’ (local civil society player, IP 8). One concrete measure of empowerment for such project developers is the ‘impulse project fund’, an ESF-sponsored fund managed by Rabryka to provide small-scale projects with unbureaucratic initial aid. On an even more informal level, the centre offers young people the opportunity to skateboard on self-made halfpipes or to practice spraying on designated graffiti walls. The initiative thereby creates protected zones of experimentation (Forkby and Batsleer 2020): young people can concentrate on their activities in a mode of trial and error, without the pressure of having to deliver successful results. This provides for a supportive, non-paternalistic atmosphere important for young people sceptical of formalized institutions (Andersson et al. 2019). Moreover, these activities constitute starting points for political involvement, enabling young people to come together, to explore their interests and their relationship with the town, and to engage in collective decision-making (local civil society player, IP 6; Butler 2015; Young 1990).

Nevertheless, interviewees report that not all young people in Görlitz have been mobilized by Rabryka (local civil society players, IP 5 & 6). People who seldom experience recognition for their activities (or even find them criminalized) have difficulties setting up projects in socially recognized ways (Andersson et al. 2019). In some cases, Rabryka has managed to mobilize young people whom traditional youth welfare services were unable to reach. As one official explained: ‘It certainly does not always work, but often they are the last resort […] and often able to trigger a change in people’ (local official, IP 16). This success is largely due to the establishment of social work projects where the initiative approaches and involves young people from different parts of the town who would not come to Rabryka by themselves (local civil society player, IP 22). However, most of the young people involved in Rabryka are students, former students and/or already interested in social, cultural and/or political involvement (local civil society player, IP 6). According to Batsleer et al. (2017), this division between disadvantaged youth and the student community is a common problem of university towns (33). Acknowledging this, Rabryka team members explain that they are constantly trying to further develop their offers to reach different youth groups (local civil society player, IP 6). Among others, they are now engaged in a neighbourhood rehabilitation scheme aimed at involving in particular young adults from difficult socioeconomic backgrounds (local civil society player, IP 22). This approach illustrates the initiative’s aim to have an impact on Görlitz beyond securing resources for a limited group of young people, even if this is not always successful in practice. Nevertheless, this aspiration also comes with further requirements to secure funding and expectations with regard to its role as an urban development player, possibly threatening Rabryka’s open, non-hierarchical and dynamic set-up (focus group).

So far, the way Rabryka is internally organized has been supported by the municipality. As the initiative’s main sponsor, it gives young people a lot of autonomy in shaping the sociocultural centre (focus group; see also Section 4.3). Geared to a specific section of the population (young people) and with an influence over the use of urban space (in the form of the former industrial area), this constellation of municipal support for a civil society initiative was new to the town and raised critical voices about the legitimacy of Rabryka as an urban development player (regional academic, IP 25). Consequently, the Rabryka team started an extensive dialogue with the public aimed at explaining the project’s function and workings. An external observer argued that their decisive and clear position on being transparent helped calm an emotionalized debate and gained wider acceptance for Rabryka from the general public (regional academic, IP 25). Hence, with regards to the third marker, the transparency of decision-making processes for outsiders, we see evidence of Rabryka’s genuine efforts to make its decisions, motives and actions open, understandable and flexible for feedback from external players.

Summing up on the basis of our three assessment criteria, we see clear evidence that the non-hierarchical, self-organized and transparent set-up and management of the initiative support empowerment, participation and recognition of young people in local development; with outcomes directly related to the way the initiative is set up. This supports the argument from spatial (in)justice literature on the interlinkages between procedural and distributional aspects of spatial justice (Davoudi and Brooks 2014, 2686; Israel and Frenkel 2017).

4.3. What is the initiative’s impact on Görlitz?

In order to both create space for young people and enable wider youth involvement in development processes, the Rabryka team had to enter into multiple, collaborative arrangements, specifically with the town’s administration. This involved a mutual learning process for all involved. Administrative procedures differ greatly from those of youth organizations (local official, IP 17), with the former mostly geared towards specific sectors and results, while the Rabryka team are interested in experimenting with different formats in a flexible and non-hierarchic environment always open for new input (local civil society player, IP 6).

To foster mutual understanding between the Rabryka team and the municipal administration, several factors were essential: firstly, as shown in Section 4.2, the Rabryka team itself had to build a bridge between formal and informal processes. This allowed for diverse and informal engagement on the one hand and a certain professionalism with regards to funding applications and communication with politicians and sponsors on the other hand. Secondly, there was a continuous flow of information between stakeholders and hands-on collaboration in the decision-making on where and how the sociocultural centre was to be established, as recalled by a municipal official: ‘We sat down together and wrote a concept to collect all ideas. […] And the more I read it and talked about it, the more I thought that this could actually work’ (local official, IP 16). Moreover, intermediaries played an important role: ‘If you don’t have anyone who is able to mediate, who is in a relatively neutral position […], you don’t have a chance’ (local official, IP 16). In the case of Görlitz, a municipal official was able to ‘translate’ between the different modes of organization of those involved, creating a sustainable impact on the interaction between the Rabryka team and the municipal administration. Our interviewees from Rabryka perceived communication to be on a par (local civil society player, IP 22), deeming that their voice counted in political decision-making processes (local civil society player, IP 6), while one official summarized the effect of this cooperation as follows: ‘[Rabryka] has changed local politics. It has changed the whole youth scene. It has changed the relationship between civil society, in particular young citizens, and the municipal administration’ (local official, IP 17). This process is an example of how acknowledging and discussing different practices and expectations in the use of space can be a ‘means of learning democracy’ (Walther 2018, 11). Hence, the youth initiative has had an impact in both distributive (channelling funds and securing space for the centre) and procedural terms (setting of a collaborative process between officials and civil society).

Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of transformative justice (1997), we see these incidences and statements as a restructuring of the way in which urban development is carried out. On the part of the local administration, there is evidence of officials listening to the voices of youth groups and enhancing the as yet narrow understanding of (youth) participation (local official, IP 17). These processes likewise have an impact on other civil society and youth initiatives (local civil society player, IP 5). Young people are empowered to set up their own projects – and also allowed to fail –, to shape concrete spaces (such as former industrial premises), and to diversify the town’s creative scene. Consequently, Rabryka not only secures resources for young people (affirmative justice), but also participates more broadly in shaping the town, enhancing quality of life in Görlitz, and creating a reason for young people to stay there: ‘There are several civil society players who then said: “I’m only here because of Rabryka”’ (local civil society player, IP 2). The hands-on work of the youth initiative and the repeated instances of young people appropriating space, experimenting, and ‘doing’ politics have created a feeling of value among local youth that is intrinsically linked to a specific (social and physical) space acting as a laboratory for accumulating and reproducing this capital (Israel and Frenkel 2017, 655). Furthermore, the blossoming sociocultural scene is fostering positive narratives around Görlitz, both among the local population and in a supralocal context (local civil society player, IP 15). Political decision-makers at local and regional level have recognized this potential and are now supporting it: ‘at state […] level, Görlitz is regarded as a laboratory and space for experimentation, because so many sociocultural stakeholders have emerged in relation to the town’s size’ (local civil society player, IP 6). Based on the impact of Rabryka, several interviewees argued that the future development of Görlitz, including its economic development, will be shaped by decision-makers’ ability to acknowledge and support local youth interests and promote the town’s sociocultural landscape, its democratic and civil society engagement (local civil society players, IP 5 & 6; regional academic, IP 25).

These changes in youth politics and power relations in local decision-making processes have been taking place against the backdrop of a highly polarized political landscape in Görlitz, in which a right-wing populist party was able to gain a high share of votes. The young people behind Rabryka never situated their protest in this context, instead focusing on establishing an open space for youth (local civil society player, IP 6). It is clear, however, that the Rabryka activities help strengthen progressive youth voices in the town, including those of immigrants and refugees (local civil society player, IP 8). This potential has been recognized by the administration, with Rabryka showing that pluralistic and democratic values have a space and belong to Görlitz (local official, IP 16). At the same time, opponents, including the AfD and local media, tend to frame the initiative as a ‘leftist’ project with a political agenda only serving specific population groups (local civil society player, IP 6). This creates a dilemma for the young players: on the one hand, they deliberately aim to take part in shaping the future of their town – a thoroughly political process (Butler 2015; Young 1990) –, while on the other hand they remain independent of local party politics, repeatedly affirming their political neutrality and inviting critics to engage in a dialogue with them (local civil society player, IP 6). By refusing to be exploited politically, they thus seek to preserve the centre’s open and informal character and its most relevant impact on spatial injustices in the town: creating stories of empowerment, rebuilding trust in local development, and providing a retention function for local youth.

5. Young people as active drivers of local development and socio-political engagement

Perceptions of injustice, as argued above, become highly visible in transformation towns (Brachert et al. 2019). Located on Germany’s border with Poland, middle-sized Görlitz is such a town, having experienced the collapse of the GDR, the downside of German reunification, and structural change related to the demise of coal mining. In addition to economic decline, the transformations in Görlitz and its surrounding region produced historic insecurities among the population and negative narratives about the town (Lorenz and Träger 2020). We see the emergence of an initiative like Rabryka in such a context as young people’s response to perceived spatial injustices. Coinciding with the interests of the newly elected mayor and (parts of) the city council in halting the outmigration of young people, the initiative was well received, as it fostered wider participation of the population in local development processes and led to new and positive narratives on Görlitz. With regard to our first research question, we thus see the context-dependency of factors influencing the initiative in Görlitz, in terms of promoting its role and workings. While social structures and institutional contexts vary (naturally limiting the transferability of these experiences to other towns), we argue that a number of wider lessons can be drawn from an analysis of the case. Most importantly, by bringing together scholarship on spatial justice and youth participation, the study argues in favour of a broader recognition of the interests of local communities, specifically young people, in towns facing socioeconomic and political challenges.

The value of the ‘geographies of discontent’ concept (Rodríguez-Pose 2018) lies in drawing attention to the fact that redistributive measures alone are not enough to change perceptions of marginalized population groups living in such areas: more place-sensitive development policies are needed. While we agree with the diagnosis of certain internal institutional problems in these areas (Rodríguez-Pose 2018, 204) and the failure of space-blind governance, based on the case of local youth in Görlitz we argue for more attention to be paid to procedural justice in this debate. Hence, the nexus between spatially sensitive development, local capacity-building, and enabling participatory and transparent collective decision-making processes needs to be strengthened. The story of Rabryka has shown how young people, through small-scale actions, have become empowered to shape their local environment. The opportunity to develop projects in a mode of trial and error enables young people to acquire a sense of belonging and self-determination in relation to their locality. With little attention paid to such inclusive processes, there is a risk that funding programmes not only fail to change the situation of marginalized population groups in transformation localities, but even produce further frustration and anger, and discontent with the opportunities to gain recognition in established political structures (Davoudi and Brooks 2014, 2688). Furthermore, as the concept of ‘geographies of discontent’ becomes popular beyond the academic world and enters political discourse, we need to be careful how the discontent of people in marginalized places, or transformation localities, is framed, specifically from outside. There is a danger of over-simplifying local inhabitants’ response to perceived injustices through a focus on election results. A more integrative perspective on spatial injustices allows recognition of already existing local capacities for change – in our case, the young people active in the self-organization of Rabryka – rather than painting the local population as passive recipients of financial support.

Following the spatial justice literature (Israel and Frenkel 2017), both the promotion of individual capabilities and a change in a locality’s ‘habitus’ are needed to achieve arrangements remedying injustice. In the case of Rabryka, we relate these arrangements to how governance has changed in the town, upholding their transformative impact on the local governance structure (Fraser 1997). Responding to our second research question, we thus see the initiative’s potential to redress spatial injustices. It mobilizes progressive forces in Görlitz by embracing inclusive democratic processes, experimentation, and self-organization. This involvement of young people helps counter anti-democratic tendencies and provides young people who might otherwise have moved away with a place and a voice in their town.

There are, however, limitations to the success. As the initiative itself acknowledges, it is not necessarily able to reach all young locals. While trying to reach out, they are limited in their impact. It would be unfair to blame the initiative for not being more ‘successful’ in this field, as it is up against deeply engrained patterns of distrust. As a second limitation, its success engenders a dilemma: the more Rabryka becomes a relevant urban development player in Görlitz, the more it is drawn into the realm of local politics. On top of the requirements set down by financial sponsors, it has to navigate between expectations and attributions from different political players and parties. It has to do this without losing sight of its main objective, i.e. providing young locals with opportunity structures to shape their future and that of their town. This problem highlights one of the challenges that comes with the negotiation of differences in the use of space (Lees 2003). So far, the youth initiative has navigated this issue through a combination of transparent communication, maintenance of party-political neutrality, and a modular internal organization that bridges formal and informal processes. This approach can serve as an inspiration to other youth initiatives facing a similar dilemma. Moreover, it addresses financial sponsors of civil society initiatives, highlighting the importance of ensuring self-determination rather than overwhelming initiatives with too many expectations.

Ultimately, the story of Rabryka upholds the value of ‘quieter, steady transformations’ (Perry and Atherton 2017, 47) in the search for ‘actually existing justice in the city’ (Williams 2017, 2217). Seen this way, Rabryka is a hopeful story for similar localities. In terms of lessons learned, it is specifically the mundane ways of conducting youth politics and creating an impact on one’s surroundings that need to be encouraged in transformation localities.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank our interview partners in Görlitz for participating in the research, and the Rabryka team for granting us insights into the internal workings of their initiative. We are also grateful to Heike Hanhörster, Ali Madanipour, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on early drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020  research and innovation programme [grant number 727097], project RELOCAL (Resituating the local in cohesion and territorial development), 2016–2021.

Notes

1 All quotations from German texts and case study interviews have been translated into English by the authors.