Opening up spatial planning to the participation of children and youth: the Swedish experience

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a study examining the pathway to and practices for inclusive participatory planning in Sweden. Recently, the Swedish government has transposed the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child into national law, making it a requirement for Swedish planners to involve children and youth in participatory spatial planning processes. The challenges planners face when needing to open up planning and engage children and youth in more structured ways, have not been discussed very much just yet. This study uses Sweden-centered empirical literature together with interviews with a selected group of respondents to contribute at that debate.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial planning
• participatory processes
• youth
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

The work reported here has been done in the context of the research project ‘PLANNING with YOUTH: a tool and a framework for an engaging, meaningful and forward-looking participation of youngsters in shaping attractive and sustainable living environments’ (project number 2019-01887).We thank all of the respondents for their time and for sharing important insight into current contemporary matters. Project updates can be followed at: https://medium.com/youth-plan

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This project is funded by FORMAS – the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development under the targeted call: National Research Programme for Sustainable Spatial Planning. The qualitative data collection reported in this manuscript has been undertaken as part to the MSc thesis research done by Emma Norss at Södertörn University, thesis paper available for download at: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1574098