On the margins of citizenship: youth participation and youth exclusion in times of neoliberal urbanism

ABSTRACT

Over the last few decades there has been growing interest in youth participation, at policy level and in research. Generally, this is attributed to growing public concern regarding the ‘youth participatory deficit’ and youth dissatisfaction in European societies. In contemporary discourse young people are positioned as a problem associated with a lack of participation in economic, social and political processes, which in turn is seen as a threat to the very foundation of democracy. Taking into consideration the neoliberal transformation of Western European cities towards increasing socioeconomic and ethno-cultural segregation, the authors argue that there is a pressing need to analyse youth participation as it is shaped by structural order and unequal access to resources, which creates spatial, material and symbolic divisions between different categories of young people. By placing it within a framework of citizenship theory, the authors analyse the enigmatic concept of ‘youth participation’ through the prism of social exclusion, arguing for an understanding of participation as embedded in the social landscape of unequal power relations and life opportunities which are essential characteristics of the neo-liberal city.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth participation
• social exclusion
• citizenship
• segregation
• neoliberal urbanism

Introduction: mapping the field of youth participation

Over the last few decades there has been growing interest in youth participation, at policy level and in research. Generally, this is attributed to growing public concern regarding the ‘youth participatory deficit’ and youth dissatisfaction in European societies (Loncle et al. 2012). In contemporary discourse young people are positioned as a problem associated with a lack of participation in economic, social and political processes, which in turn is seen as a threat to the very foundation of democracy (Walther et al. 2020; Schierup and Ålund 2011). Although the notion that young people are ‘apathetic’ has been seriously contested by scholars over the last decade (Loader 2007), promoting and enhancing youth participation is a priority of EU policy.¹ The interest in young people’s participation should be seen in light of the impact of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which has given rise to a powerful children’s rights agenda, shaping not only policy and practice but also research. The rise of new theoretical approaches within the interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies has also contributed to the ontological primacy of children and young people. Sociological analyses of childhood have played a major part in the conceptualisation of children and young people as active participants in the construction of their life worlds (see James and Prout 2015; James, Jenks, and Prout 1998; Mayall 2013). Taking a wider perspective, the strong focus on the participation of children and young people emanates from progressive movements in Western societies, in which participation is fundamental to the understanding of democracy and citizenship (Taylor and Smith 2009). In this sense, participation is contested ground and part of democratic development where individuals and groups who have been (and in many respects still are) marginalised on the basis of class, gender, ethnicity, race and age struggle for recognition of their rights to participate as full citizens (Fitzgerald et al. 2010).

With regard to definitions of youth participation, it can easily be concluded that there is no single, overarching conceptualisation of the term. Participation is an under-analysed abstraction and, as Theis (2010, 344) writes, an ‘empty vessel which can be filled with almost anything, which is one of the reasons why it has enjoyed such widespread popularity’. As a concept, ‘participation’ is not substantive enough to stand on its own and often requires a ‘scaffolding of ladders, degrees, levels, enabling environments and supporting adjectives, such as meaningful and ethical’ (Theis 2010). Youth participation is most commonly understood as a process in which children and young people engage in activities and decision-making which concern and affect their lives as individuals and as a group (see, for example, Hart 1992; Chawla 2001; Percy-Smith and Thomas 2010). Thomas (2007, 206) makes a distinction between two main conceptions of participation:

/ … / we may distinguish two ways of looking at what goes on when children and young people ‘participate’: one that sees it in terms of social relations and another which sees it in terms of political relations. There is a discourse of children’s participation that is predominantly social – that speaks of networks, of inclusion, of adult-child relations, and of the opportunities for social connection that participatory practice can create. Alongside this there is an alternative discourse that is more or less overtly political – that speaks of power, and challenge, and change.

In short, social participation refers to young people’s involvement in associations, sports, leisure and cultural activities. Here, the focus is directed at everyday practices which young people themselves see as meaningful. Political participation, on the other hand, refers to activities directed at processes of government and the realm of politics and the state (Van Deth 2014; Loader, Vromen, and Xenos 2014). Political participation can take conventional forms, like voting and engaging with party politics, and non-conventional ones, including extra-parliamentary organisation, taking part in protests, and involvement in social movements engaging in politics outside of the formal institutions of representative democracy (Ekman and Amnå 2012; Amnå, Ekström, and Stattin 2016; León Rosales and Ålund 2017). A significant part of the literature on youth participation is concerned with measuring participatory practices, that is trying to figure out degrees of involvement and power sharing in adult-youth relations regarding processes of decision-making (‘ladder’ approaches), and/or analysing modes of participation in terms of social and political relations.

Given the range of different approaches, understandings and typologies informing research and practice², it becomes clear that the research field, on a definitional level, is characterised by uncertainty, or even ‘conceptual confusion’ (Ekman and Amnå 2012, 284). Further, Malone and Hartung (2010, 33) describe it as being ‘under-theorised and over-practicalised’. This means that while it is true that typologies, such as Hart’s ladder of participation (1997),³ have been immensely influential in shaping and challenging policy and practice to be more inclusive of children and young people, there is now a need to evolve theoretical conceptions of participation beyond common models of practice and develop a more profound understanding of participation linking the concept to fundamental questions about democracy and citizenship (Tisdall 2010; Theis 2010; Malone and Hartung 2010).

The main argument of this article is that participation needs to be understood in relation to citizenship-based rights and the opportunities for individuals and groups to take part in society (see also Theis 2010). By placing it within a framework of citizenship theory, the authors analyse the enigmatic concept of youth participation through the prism of social exclusion, starting with the basic assumption that participation is conditioned by young people’s positioning in social space with regard to the unequal distribution of material and symbolic resources. Access to resources, or lack thereof, in turn has implications for the participatory practices of young people. This analysis, which is based on interviews with professionals who work with young people and participation in various ways, puts the concept of youth participation into dialogue with mechanisms of social exclusion, thus examining the very meaning of (or the state of) young people’s participation in times of neoliberal urbanism. The purpose of the analysis is to problematise the dominant liberal-democratic framework for understanding participatory practice as emanating from ‘free’-floating individuals who choose where, how, with whom and how much to participate. In such a conceptualisation, the neoliberal subjects are detached from the constraining structures of unequal power relations that produce divisions between different categories of young people – demanding completely different prerequisites for participation, a point that is often understated or even ignored. This analysis provides an understanding of participation that recognises a material and symbolic lack of opportunities for certain groups to participate in society as full citizens.

The next section presents the study, the data and the method used to analyse the empirical material. The national and urban context for the analysis is then set by outlining major shifts that have occurred in Swedish welfare policy since the 1980s. This is followed by the conceptual framework used to analyse professionals’ understandings of participation and a presentation of the main findings of the study. The article ends with a concluding discussion.

The study

The article draws on data gathered within the framework of the PARTISPACE project, in which research teams from eight countries and ten universities examined formal, non-formal and informal opportunities for young people’s participation in European cities.⁴ Within the scope of the larger study a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to map and analyse the state of youth participation in different European cities. Research teams in each participating city conducted discourse analyses of key policy documents at the national and local levels, city walks, group discussions, focus group interviews and biographical interviews with young people, in-depth case studies of formalised and non-formalised settings, and action research projects during which young people designed and carried out their own projects (see further Walther et al. 2020). The study was approved by the regional ethics board in Gothenburg.

The analysis in this article is based on 21 semi-structured interviews conducted with professionals broadly within the field of youth work in the city of Gothenburg. The professionals (individuals within the municipal and civil sector) come from heterogenous backgrounds: local politics, city administration, social work, leisure, culture, sports and education. They all work with issues related to young people and participation within their respective fields and areas of expertise. A majority of the interviewees are employed by the city and some are considered key actors in local youth work. Many of the participants composing the sample have considerable experience working with youth-related issues. The participants were sampled based on their occupation, knowledge, working experience and current connection to participatory projects and settings in Gothenburg. The sample was chosen to represent practitioners on the general level (who work within politics, city administration, as municipal officials, directors of youth centres and schools) and practical, day-to-day level (for example social workers and youth workers within leisure, sports and culture). In that way the objective for the sample was to recruit participants from a variety of settings and with different connections to youth participation.⁵

The participants were contacted by e-mail and telephone and asked for interviews within the context of the PARTISPACE project. At the time of interview they were provided with information about the project’s objectives, matters related to ethics, anonymity and future usage of the interview material. All participants gave their written consent to take part in the study. In order to ensure confidentiality, interviewees have been anonymised in the distribution of material from the project in any form (this includes working reports to the EU Commission, books, articles, and conference presentations).

Each interview was conducted on a one-to-one basis by a single researcher and ranged between 1.5 and 2 hours. Most of the interviews were conducted in private at the participant’s place of work. A couple of the interviews were conducted at the University of Gothenburg. A semi-structured interview guide facilitated the thematic framework, which focused on issues such as definitions of participation; views on young people’s living conditions in Gothenburg; settings, forms and styles of participation; and problems and obstacles connected to participation in the city. The interview guide helped establish research consistency while providing space for participants to elaborate on questions they personally identified as being salient. The interviews were grounded in qualitative research practice, which treats empirical material as a result of a dialogue between a researcher and interviewee (Holstein and Gubrium 1995). The interview is not a neutral setting in which the researcher tries to extract the participant’s ‘true’ experience and meaning from them but a social occasion on which meaning and raw data are collected through a linguistic interaction.

All interviews were recorded in full and transcribed in Swedish according to principles and procedures of qualitative research and analysis (Seale et al. 2007). The interview transcripts were uploaded to the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. Working in accordance with an interpretivist framework, the guiding principle of the analysis was sensitivity to the complexity of meaning and avoiding the reduction and explanation of rich data with an all-encompassing theory (Gubrium and Holstein 1997). Coding was initially guided by the process of induction, with much emphasis placed on nuances and variations in the data. Each interview was coded separately. Throughout the process, extensive notes were taken, from which codes were grouped into categories. The interview transcripts have also been cross-analysed and compared, with focus on dominant thematic patterns and deviations from patterns. At this stage of the thematic and inductively oriented analysis, questions on how professionals understand and conceptualise relations between youth participation and the city were asked: How are young people described and referred to? What positions, labels, categories and deficiencies are described? Which dominant perspectives of the city and social relations stand out against the theories of youth participation? What places are referred to, and what is the relation between place and participation?

During the course of the analysis, free, open thematisation of data gradually became more theoretically driven, evolving in a circular, reflexive process through which data and theoretical concepts informed each other. Conceptual connections were sought between the data from the study and theoretical and other relevant literature. The themes identified in the data were now explicitly related to theoretical concepts, which were used to delimit and further analyse the main thematic patterns. For example, one of the main categories generated through NVivo coding has to do with professional understanding of youth participation in relation to urban space. Many interviewees recurrently made connections between residential, socioeconomic and ethnic segregation and their effect on participation for different categories of youths in a divided urban landscape. This general theme forms the empirical foundation of the article.

This analysis has limitations in size and scope. The findings are based on a small sample of professionals within the broad field of youth work in Gothenburg. Their conceptions are particularly valid in relation to the participatory landscape of the city, which means that the findings can only claim generalisability to a limited extent. However, the theoretical framework proposed could be abstracted and applied to other settings in Europe, thus linking the contextualised findings to urban contexts with patterns of segregation similar to those of Gothenburg. Consequently, the article does not claim to represent the ‘true nature’ of the state of youth participation in Europe today. The analysis should be read as a conceptual elaboration and construction of a theoretical understanding which ties youth participation to the domains of citizenship and exclusion.

Setting the context: participation and neoliberal urbanism

Taking into consideration the neoliberal transformation of Western European cities towards increasing socioeconomic and ethno-cultural segregation (BAVO 2007; Dikeç 2007), the authors argue that there is a pressing need to analyse youth participation as it is shaped by structural order and unequal access to resources, which creates spatial, material and symbolic divisions between different categories of young people. Neoliberalism, most commonly understood as a political and economic doctrine seeking to erode the foundations of the welfare state and install the principles of market logic (Brown 2005), has, like everywhere else, re-shaped Swedish society dramatically. The Swedish welfare model, which was developed in the post-war period, has been gradually influenced by neoliberal rationale (Larsson, Thörn, and Letell 2012). Starting in the late 1980s, principles that had underpinned the Swedish model were challenged and the centralised welfare state presented as an obstacle to individual freedom and active responsibility (Boréus 1994). In line with this logic, the Swedish welfare model has undergone radical transformation. Accordingly, since the early 1990s Swedish welfare policy has been characterised by a shift from equality to freedom of choice, redistribution to activation and collective rights to individual responsibility (Dahlstedt 2015). From post-war welfarism to neoliberal deregulation and the privatisation reforms of the 1980s, Sweden, despite being one of the richest countries in the world, is now the most unequal society amongst the Nordic countries, with the highest concentration of wealth in Western Europe (Therborn 2018).

These transformations in welfare policy have had a range of consequences, increasing social and economic divisions and further intensifying polarisation in Sweden’s urban landscapes (Schierup, Ålund, and Kings 2014) – a pattern that applies to large and small cities around the country (Salonen 2011; Fell and Guziana 2016). In this context, public attention has once more been drawn to the suburban areas previously known as part of the Million programme, a large-scale housing project initiated in the late 1960s as part of broader state-centred policies of the Swedish welfare model, which provided rental flats for the general population. Since their creation, these urban areas have been portrayed as sites of deviance, social problems, tension and conflicts, in the 1970s based on class, and in the 1980s and 1990s on ethno-cultural divisions (cf. Ristilammi 1994).

From the start of the new millennium, these suburban areas and their residents were primarily characterised in terms of their alienation (utanförskap) – portrayed as outcasts on the periphery of Swedish society (Dahlstedt 2015, 2018). The concept of ‘social exclusion’ was already part of Swedish political discourse by the 1990s, informed by contemporary policy discourse in the European Union (cf. Schierup, Krifors, and Slavnic 2015). However, the concept was normalised in the beginning of the new millennium, particularly after the 2006 elections, when the centre-right government succeeded in defining the country’s main political challenge as a choice between work and exclusion, activation and passive welfare benefits (Davidsson 2010).

During the last decade, the suburban areas defined as ‘areas of exclusion’ (utanförskapsområden) have been repeatedly problematised, not least by their association with a particular mentality of welfare dependency, alienation, distrust and political passivity. Although high levels of unemployment are also emphasised as part of the problem of social exclusion, once it has taken shape, the mentality that is generated by socio-economic conditions can be described as having a dynamic of its own (Dahlstedt 2015). Accordingly, the ‘culture of exclusion’ that is used to characterise suburban life separates it from the wider Swedish society. Suburban areas thus appear to be incubators for social problems, becoming a problem in themselves. In such a conception of social exclusion, the urban periphery becomes a threat to the moral core of Swedish society and social cohesion (cf. Schierup and Ålund 2011). In relation to the problematisation of the urban periphery, calls have been made for a wide range of interventions to promote security and inclusion in Swedish urban landscapes.

Given this brief background, it is easy to conclude that neoliberal politics has been highly influential in solidifying contemporary Sweden as an ‘ethnified class-society’ (Therborn 2018, 33). In such a society, social problems in urban peripheries are usually understood through the prism of cultural deficit, as the inability of the ethnified lower class to adapt to the norms and rules of an otherwise well-functioning society. In political discourse and public debate, culpability for problems connected to social and economic inequality and residential segregation is attributed by default to the urban periphery. This has a negative impact on young people living in these areas with regards to their self-image and sense of (non)belonging but, above all, severely limits their opportunities to take part in society. Being continuously associated with social problems, like unemployment, criminality, underachievement in school and religious radicalism, goes hand in hand with feelings of resentment and mistrust towards the conventional routes to participation offered by society. Current political rhetoric perfectly illustrates the plight of neoliberal urbanism, which posits systemic problems like youth unemployment, underachievement in school, ‘low’ participation rates, and poverty as being at once self-inflicted and a result of migrant youth morality (Schierup and Ålund 2011; Therborn 2018). This understanding of ‘social exclusion’ constitutes a means of governing, in which focus is put on ‘the outside’. This analysis takes a different approach, conceptualising social exclusion as a relational process and an absence of the full rights of citizenship.

Social exclusion and the erosion of citizenship: a conceptual framework

In this analysis the concept of ‘social exclusion’ is used to elaborate on a dominant theme raised in participants’ interviews: the lack of material and symbolic resources, social rights, and opportunities for certain categories of young people to realise those rights (cf. Schierup, Hansen, and Castles 2006; Schierup, Krifors, and Slavnic 2015). Defining exclusion as the omission from substantial citizenship puts focus on a lack of material means as well as circumscribed opportunities to ‘participate effectively in the economic, social, political and cultural life’ (Levitas 1998, 20) of the main societal institutions. It also emphasises the quality of relationships between categories of young people and mainstream society, encompassing symbolic alienation from the normative paths to participation offered by society. The concept is thus used to analyse professionals’ understanding of the living conditions and life opportunities of young people in segregated urban landscapes, and to explore theoretically the implications of social exclusion on youth participation.

The term ‘social exclusion’, which has its modern roots in the French political context of the mid-1970s (Silver 1996; Schierup, Krifors, and Slavnic 2015), generally implies a gradual loss of social, economic, institutional and cultural ties between individuals, groups and society, thus it is configured as a relational process through which certain categories of people are positioned on the margins of citizenship. Citizenship, in turn, is defined here in terms of civil, political and, most notably, social rights and creates opportunities for young people and others to participate in society as equals (cf. Marshall and Bottomore 1992; Schierup, Hansen, and Castles 2006). An important distinction is that between formal and substantial rights (cf. Bottomore 1992), underscoring the difference between, on the one hand, being granted formal rights and, on the other, having substantial access or opportunities to exert them. Different rights are mutually dependent on one another. For example, access to social rights is necessary to exercise civil and political rights. Accordingly, a lack of political participation is directly related to the absence of social rights tied to a weak economy, low education, residential segregation and discrimination (Lister 1990). It is in the relationship between formal rights and substantial opportunities that the mechanisms of social exclusion are most tangible: some sections of the population may have formal rights but nevertheless lack substantial access to participation in society as ‘full’ citizens and are thus subject to mechanisms of social exclusion (Schierup 2008, 2010).

This analysis explores participation as it is embedded within the social landscape of neoliberal cities and conditioned by intersecting processes of exclusion. In this way, ‘participation’ and ‘exclusion’ emerge as two sides of the same coin, exclusion being equated with a lack of social, cultural, political and economic rights, resources and opportunities for participation (Schierup, Krifors, and Slavnic 2015). Besides material dimensions such as housing and income, symbolic representations of reality, individuals and groups as well as geographic areas, not least the urban periphery, are central to the processes of forming both opportunities for and barriers to participation. Of particular importance here is the drawing of boundaries in the social body, territory and population, within which certain categories of people are categorised as normal and belonging, whilst others are deviants, do not belong and are in various ways problematic for society. Through categorisation and ‘territorial stigmatisation’ (Wacquant 1999; Sernhede 2011a, 2011b) people are assigned specific values and characteristics, differentiating them from those of other categories (cf. Bacchi 1999). The process of social exclusion, as defined here, therefore consists of a material and symbolic side, which limit access to citizenship rights and prevent people from participating in society on equal terms.

Neoliberal government stands in direct opposition to the principles of substantial citizenship rights (Brown 2005; Fraser 2019). It advocates for minimum state intervention in the provision and facilitation of welfare for its citizens; neoliberalism is indifferent to poverty, as it is to social, economic and ethno-cultural divisions between different groups of people. In this respect, neoliberalism equates the idea of the free market with that of the ‘free’ citizen, suggesting a general social equality where there is none.

The neoliberal transformation of contemporary urban landscapes calls for an examination of participation as it relates to the tension between urban centres and multi-ethnic residential areas on the outskirts of large cities, characterised by high levels of unemployment and poverty (Sernhede 2011a, 161). It is evident that to understand youth participation, it is insufficient to solely address issues related to youth agency, practice and relations to institutions and adults and so on. The analysis needs to be structurally oriented, focusing on which arrangements are present or absent prior to participatory activities. It is also evident that the concept of ‘social exclusion’ in social sciences is closely intertwined with the political concept, which is why this analysis inevitably implicates a political dimension (see Silver 1996; Levitas 1998; Schierup, Krifors, and Slavnic 2015). As a mode of political and economic governance, neoliberalism sharpens socio-economic and socio-spatial segregation:

Neoliberal strategies deployed in the cities, it has been argued, sharpen socio-economic inequalities and displace certain groups whose presence is deemed undesirable. / … / Urban neo-liberalism is deeply concerned with imposing a certain ‘social landscape’ on the city. (Dikeç 2007, 26)

Departing from the content of the interview material, this article examines and addresses the current state of the neoliberal ‘social landscape’ and its impact on youth participation. Its analytical approach should not be understood as a simplistic split between actor and structure, nor a depiction of young people as actors devoid of agency, manipulated and ‘determined’ by the invisible mechanisms of the structure within which they exist. On the contrary, the assumption that young people are self-determining actors is unequivocal; here it is argued that their decision-making needs to be put in the context of the inequalities embedded in urban landscapes. In other contexts, findings have shown that young people’s embodied subjectivities need to be understood in connection to structural power relations and patterns of inequality (Farrugia 2010). Participation, in this regard, is often conceptualised as intrinsic capability, which emphasises fixed individual traits and dismisses structural inequality. While individuals can exercise autonomy, they always do so in connection to a web of relations that shape the framework within which participatory action evolves. Young people’s experiences are inevitably shaped and differentiated by social divisions (Furlong 2013; Bečević and Rowley 2018). This analysis therefore aims to introduce to the understanding of youth participation the concept of social stratification, which has a profound impact on the shapes and structures of young people’s worlds.

The anatomy of participation in a segregated Gothenburg

One of the dominant themes that emerges from the interviews is ‘youth participation’ being firmly embedded within a city landscape characterised by spatial, economic and ethnic segregation. Divisions in the Swedish urban space have been gradually forming over the last couple of decades and are today most evident in large cities such as Stockholm and Gothenburg (Salonen 2011; Sernhede 2011a, 2011b; Righard, Johansson, and Salonen 2015; Dahlstedt 2018). Depending on material and symbolic positioning in social space, different categories of young people are provided with different conditions under which to participate in society. Forms of spatial, economic and ethnocultural exclusion are directly related to a deficit in substantial opportunities for participation. The following is an excerpt from an interview with Johan, a participant of the study with substantial experience of Swedish and international youth work, in which he talks about living conditions for youths in different parts of Gothenburg:

Firstly, the most important thing is that it looks different depending on which part of the city you live in. The idea that this is a city with equal conditions is far off, way off […] The segregation, and how young people are viewed. […] if you live in Angered or east Gothenburg, those places. I mean it’s a whole different world. It’s not possible to speak about conditions of growing up in Gothenburg. Some are really well-off, for others it is terribly bad. And of course, together with a social climate and a general understanding of society where we view those with a lot of money as successful and the more money you have the more successful you are. We have a society where income differences and differences in wealth are constantly growing. It is against that background you see yourself and understand yourself.

Asked to elaborate on general living conditions for youths in Gothenburg, Johan makes an immediate connection to the vast differences in access to resources, depending on the place of residence in the heavily segregated city. Different city districts are equated with different economic prerequisites, a trend which has been well documented in research and periodic reports published by the city (Andersson 1999, 2009; Lundquist 2017). According to Johan, the participatory city landscape is first and foremost a divided one. People living in certain city districts are materially well off, while others are not. Therefore ‘place’ is directly linked to access (or lack thereof) to economic resources. Another theme from the excerpt is the movement of ‘segregation’ to the urban periphery, more precisely the northeast of Gothenburg and the multi-ethnic district of Angered, where a majority of the population have a foreign background. Of a population of ca 54,000 people, approximately 53% are foreign born and ca 75% have a foreign background (Göteborgsbladet 2019). Young people born in Sweden to foreign-born parents are labelled ‘second’-generation immigrants in official demographic statistics as well as in everyday language. This places this category of young people on the outside of people’s conception of the nation, a form of symbolic exclusion tightly intertwined with the spatial and economic. When speaking about conditions for those growing up in the city, Johan makes a distinction between ‘here’ and ‘there’, between ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, highlighting the marginalisation of Angered and places like it, not only geographically but also in material and symbolic terms. ‘A whole different world’ is a vivid characterisation of the problematic ‘outside’. ‘It’s not possible to speak about conditions of growing up in Gothenburg’, says Johan, meaning that economic inequality is an explicit and naturally evident characteristic of the participatory city landscape; the spatial-economic-ethnocultural divide is depicted as a black and white scenario, without nuance: ‘some are really well off, for others it is terribly bad’. Material living conditions are directly tied to ‘how young people are viewed’ by society, as Johan puts it. Johan is not talking about ‘young people’ in general but specifically those from the urban periphery with foreign backgrounds. Symptomatic of the neoliberal rationale, the abstract ‘society’ views people with money as successful, while those without it are placed at an automatic disadvantage. Their scope of action and chances of future success are limited. In relation to youth participation being contingent upon forms of exclusion in city space, Johan’s outlook on society is not a bright one. For him, this is a society in which ‘income differences and differences in wealth are constantly growing’, meaning that differences in participatory opportunities for different categories of young people are growing as well. In his opinion, material circumstances are directly related to how young people view themselves and their general opportunities for self-realisation.

Different social positions – different participatory routes

The theme of unequal living conditions (meaning scarce economic recourses, opportunities in the labour market, differences in quality of education, low housing standard and poor health) marking out very different participatory routes for different categories of young people depending on their social position, is further elaborated on by Anders, a municipal official with more than two decades of experience of youth work in the city:

I mean, we have really many facts and reports that show that Gothenburg is one of the most divided cities, in Sweden / … / perhaps even in Western Europe. We know all of this, we know that health gaps, economic gaps, those are enormous differences that create some kind of primary conditions, so to say. Again, there are numerous examples of children and young people growing up in the toughest of environments and still becoming lawyers and teachers and all of that, there are examples, and many succeed. But when it comes to external conditions there are enormous differences when you compare different parts of the city, you can’t escape that. You have life expectancy, I mean if a boy is born in Långedrag today, and a boy in Bergsjön, the boy in Bergsjön will live 7–8 years shorter. Based only on him being born there, and that’s what it looks like, it’s almost as if you compare Sweden as a nation with nations in the third world, that’s the kind of differences we have in the city. Of course this affects young people’s possibilities, of course this affects the understandings young people have about various things, perceptions of being wrongly treated, discriminated, offended / … / You have cramped housing which is an enormous problem, youth who want to focus on homework for example, where are they going to find a quiet place to study? I don’t think I know one youth in Angered for example who has an own room, I’m not talking about those living in houses but if we take those living in the high-rise areas / … / I don’t think there are many. If you ask the same question in Western Gothenburg, everyone has an own room. / … / So, already there starts some kind of a sorting out or what to say, that affects everything, eventually.

Just like Johan, Anders describes Gothenburg as an extremely divided city, not only relative to Sweden but ‘perhaps even in Western Europe’, as he says. Differences in ‘primary conditions’ (health and economic gaps) are ‘enormous’ and form the underlying conditions for young people’s upbringing. In his account not all is misery, there are ‘numerous examples’ of children growing up in tough environments who still ‘succeed’. However, in the context of the interview this insight stands out as merely an exception, which instead of refuting it only confirms the dominant picture of the divided city landscape and its impact on youth participation. These ‘external conditions’ (material conditions) are well known and hard to ignore when different parts of the city are compared. Anders literally places the divisions on the map: a boy born in Bergsjön (east Gothenburg, a district associated with high unemployment and a high proportion of people with foreign backgrounds) will live 7–8 years less than one born in Långedrag (western Gothenburg, one of the richest parts of the city, with a high employment rate and a low proportion of people with a foreign background)⁶, ‘based only on him being born there’. The comparison is quite dramatic: ‘it’s almost as if you compare Sweden as a nation with nations in the third world, that’s the kind of differences we have in the city’. Anders continues: ‘I don’t think I know one youth in Angered for example who has an own room … If you ask the same question in Western Gothenburg, everyone has an own room’. Cramped accommodation and an absence of study environments is, according to him, a common problem in poorer districts, with negative implications for children and young people in the long term. The material living standards that parents are able to provide for their children are of course related to their status on the labour market and location in the production chain: primary, class-based division starts at a young age, which, as Anders puts it, ‘affects everything eventually’. Just like in Johan’s narrative, the negative consequences of exclusion occur in the urban periphery, in areas on the ‘outside’. What is seen here is that young people’s opportunities to take part in society are talked about in terms of a general absence or lack of substantial social rights. Deficiencies related to residential segregation, housing, and a weak economy lead to a circumscribed citizenship and restricted opportunities to participate in social life. In that way, participation is directly tied to the implications and effects of social exclusion (Schierup 2008, 2010).

For some of the participants of the study, social rights are essential prerequisites to becoming a participating citizen in a qualified sense. Marco, a well-known youth worker and sports leader in one of the segregated multi-ethnic neighbourhoods, talks about the importance of ‘basic conditions’:

I know youth who have told me that they cannot sleep because they are lying in the bed, staring at the ceiling, and they don’t know what will become of them. Their home situation is poor, they say they have a mother who perhaps is sick or single, and they do not have money for what they would like to have. / … / For you to be free, for you to be able to make choices, like the politicians say, ‘free choice’ and all of that. For you to be free, there must be some basic conditions for you to feel good, and for that you need somewhere to live, food on the table, a foundation, economic. If you don’t have that you are not free to choose, that’s the problem.

Just like Johan and Anders, Marco connects material poverty to a widespread disillusion amongst young people in these areas. Not having money means not being able to fully participate in economic life. The effects of economic conditions are not limited to existential security of a material kind. In youth culture, consumption is a powerful identity marker. Not being able to afford coveted products means being cut off from not only economic but also symbolic participation. Marco talks about social inequalities and societal expectations that young people from the urban periphery fail to live up to. What comes through is once again the direct link between abstract categories such as ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ (which are usually tied to the equally abstract concept of ‘participation’), and the need for a basic economic foundation which marginalised young people usually lack. By ignoring the impact of context-based opportunities, the neoliberal rationale is very successful in concealing this relation; the responsibility for failure and success is placed by default in the hands of the individual and actions are decoupled from the social circumstances which constrain them (Brown 2005).

The politics of (non)belonging

Lastly, spatial and economic dimensions are put to one side and the analytical lens turned towards the symbolic questions of identity and belonging. ‘Youth participation’, as it is presented in the interview material, has to do with being recognised as a full member of society in terms of an emotional sense of belonging or non-belonging to the Swedish nation. A sense of identification (or lack of such) with wider society establishes territorial and symbolic boundaries and shapes opportunities for participation. The ethnic segregation which is characteristic of Gothenburg is ascribed central importance. When talking about ‘problems’ connected to youth participation, interview participants repeatedly (explicitly and implicitly) made references to young people living in neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city, who are seen as being ‘cut-off’ and ‘disadvantaged’ in relation to the (presumably) well-functioning city centre. This division is both spatial and economic, as was shown in the previous section, but also founded on perceptions which cast marginalised young people outside the imagined nation:

If you would go to Angered and say like this, you gather hundred fifteen-year-olds, just randomly and ask them ‘How many of you are Swedish?’, what do you think the result would be? I think two, five perhaps. But not more. And those are young people who live, who are born in some cases [in Sweden], they came here as small children anyhow, and that says something. Because if you don’t feel as something in relation to where you are, then we have an uphill in front of us. We had a visit here from [a city] couple of months ago, in Angered amongst other places, and they were shocked over this, because there it’s the other way around, no matter how bad off you are and how poor you are, you are still a part of that nation. (Anders)

Marco also reflects upon the problem of non-belonging. The spatial and ethnic segregation that affects children and young people creates distance and a lack of identification with mainstream society, thus negatively impacting participation. Another form of community and solidarity needs to take shape, one which emphasises ‘inclusion’:

Today most of these young people that grow up in the suburbs don’t identify with this country. And we need to create a new identity, of which both black and white are a part, to say it roughly.

Lana, a social worker and a well-known figure in her community, with roots in the Middle East, reflects on the problem of identification and the negative experience of being positioned on the periphery of belonging:

I live in the suburbs, and many social workers working there act very colonially. They think very colonially in their work. […] They depart from a colonial framework, simply. They think like this, I live in Askim and now I have come here because I can, you cannot. I know, you do not. I will help you. That means you are making yourself into a subject and turning us into objects, you passivate us, activate yourself. And we even become your leisure time activity. […] You work with a supersensitive target group, you work with children and youth in the suburbs. That is people that already from an early age have inherited thousands of traumas. […] When I was a child our teacher told us, he said it just to tease us like ten times during one class, because he saw that we reacted negatively. ‘You are actually Swedish, yes you are Swedish! Your mothers and fathers are from a different country, but you are Swedish’. And we were like ‘no we are not Swedish’, you know, got really angry, I don’t know why. We got angry, then with time, ‘oh well, perhaps we are Swedish. We are Swedish’. Then someone comes and asks, ‘well where do you come from’? ‘I am Swedish’. ‘No, where do you really come from?’

The feeling of not being part of the Swedish nation is central to understanding participatory practices amongst groups of young people in the suburbs who in most cases are born and raised in Sweden. Feelings of widespread alienation and resentment towards a nation which they perceive to be resentful of them is a crisis of citizenship with negative implications for participation. The notion of ‘inside-outside’ is also evoked in an excerpt from Lana’s interview, in which she reflects upon aspects of social work practice in suburbs that are popularly identified as being ‘marginalised’, ‘resource-poor’, or ‘disadvantaged’. In her view, social workers depart from a ‘colonial framework’, they ‘think’ and ‘act very colonially’. Just like other interviewees, Lana explains the asymmetric dynamics between the centre and periphery by evoking the obvious divisions between different parts of the city. Even if the intentions of the normative ‘centre’ are good, the outcomes, in Lana’s experience, are counterproductive: ‘the helper’ is elevated and legitimatised, ‘the helped’ objectified and passivated. In the long run, these types of interventions and interactions do not address the root causes of social inequality and subordination (Lindström 2019). By not being able to address young people’s ‘exclusion’ in a qualified, long-term sense, they are, regardless of intention, actively perpetuating the status quo. What comes through in Lana’s narrative is a dimension of inequality that is interpersonal and grounded in feelings of inferiority and frustration. Recollecting her school experiences, Lana recounts fruitless attempts by teachers to instil in her a sense of belonging to the Swedish nation. The attempt to bring her and children like her ‘inside’ is saturated with irony and depicted as a great illusion which loses its shimmer as young people, continuously positioned as ‘outsiders’, interact with mainstream society.

Concluding discussion

The purpose of the analysis has been to move beyond common conceptions of youth participation to interrogate structural inequalities that create general frameworks of opportunity for different categories of young people in a spatially, economically and ethnically divided urban landscape. The analysis has aimed to problematise the idea of youth participation as conditioned by a structural, economic and symbolic order that is experienced differently in different parts of Gothenburg. Interviews with professionals operating within the broad sphere of youth work have been used to bring to the fore a critical discussion about the impact of divisions in city spaces on young people’s opportunities to participate in society as full citizens. Acts of participation are always conditioned, frameworks of participation being neither ‘free’ nor accessible to all young people universally. Understanding young people’s participation in relation to the wider social context means acknowledging and critically examining political and economic circumstances which shape their lives on a fundamental level. Neither ‘youth’ nor ‘participation’ exists in a socio-political vacuum. ‘Youth participation’, as a multifaceted term and an empty category in search of analysis, has here been made explicit and tangible in relation to dimensions of exclusion that fix it at the structural level.

Young people may live in the same city while at the same time living in a ‘whole different world’, as one participant put it. The intersection of spatial, economic and ethnic exclusion influences the circumstances of their upbringing as well as their perspectives, opportunities, ambitions and future participatory directions. The substance and quality of participatory acts are shaped by primary circumstances, which create a framework within which participation is acted out. Simply put, coming from a certain place and having a certain background does matter. Growing up on the right side of the spatial-economic-ethnic divide automatically brings about a set of privileges tied to geography and family background, which tend to affect the general course of someone’s life. The problem of participation is thus posited as one of exclusion – a contrast between young people who have and those who do not.

‘Social exclusion’, just like participation, is a multifaceted and intrinsically problematic term in that it presents an oversimplified understanding of society divided between an ‘included’ majority and an ‘excluded’ minority (Levitas 1998). Hierarchies and questions of privilege and power amongst ‘the included’ are evened out, as are the nuances of exclusion amongst ‘the excluded’. This is evident in the interview excerpts presented in this article, which besides actualising a fundamental discussion on the relation between social inequality and participation, simultaneously, and as discursive representations of reality, inevitably reproduce and promote a general view of ‘the periphery’ and ‘immigrant youth’ as a problem.

Nonetheless the authors have found the concept fruitful in their ambition to unravel and problematise forms of exclusion, which in a fundamental sense structure experience and opportunity. The aim has been to contribute to the critique of structural inequality inherent in urban participatory scenes. This is relevant in several respects. In current debate and discourse on youth participation the general tendency is to over-emphasise personal traits such as self-responsibility, entrepreneurship and motivation, in line with the dominant discourse on individual ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’. Youth participation is seen as an unquestionable norm in relation to non-participation and tends to be decoupled from discussions about redistribution of power and material and symbolic resources, which frame participation in the first place. Systemic problems such as poverty, youth criminality, low educational attainment and unemployment are addressed mainly through the projects and interventions of an active welfare state. Pressure is put on social workers, youth workers and pedagogues to address and remedy systemic inequalities as if they were individual shortcomings. In this light it is crucial that questions regarding how youth do or do not participate in society are talked about in relation to a broader societal context and the level of politics because the infrastructure of participation is either created or circumscribed by the governing politics. If mechanisms which create divisions between categories of young people remain uninterrogated, it is hard to act upon the root causes of exclusion, which is what fundamentally leads to disengagement with society, and what the adult world so often understands as the self-inflicted ‘apathy’, ‘aversion’ or ‘inability’ of young people to participate as functioning citizens. Neoliberal rationale is not particularly interested in acknowledging participation as a matter of substantial citizenship, which is acted out with considerable difference across a divided city landscape. Instead of remedying inequalities, the current political order will continue to reproduce a participatory status quo and consolidate spatial, class and ethnic boundaries, thus distributing living conditions and life opportunities in a highly unequal way.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Susanne Liljeholm Hansson who conducted couple of the interviews used in the analysis. Thanks also to Frida Petersson, Tobias Jansson and Björn Andersson for valuable comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewers for providing consistent feedback which undoubtedly helped to sharpen the text.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The article is based on data from the research project 'Styles and Spaces of Participation. Formal, non-formal and informal possibilities of young people's participation in European cities'. The project was funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 649416.

Notes

1 For example, see European Commission White Paper on Youth (2001), An EU Strategy for Youth – Investing and Empowering (2009), EU Youth Report (2015); and the new youth strategy for 2019–2027 formulated by the European Commission titled Engaging, Connecting and Empowering young people: a new EU Youth Strategy, which amongst other target areas will focus on ‘fostering young people’s participation in civic and democratic life’ (https://ec.europa.eu/youth/news/eu-youth-strategy-adopted_en).

2 For a typology of theories informing participation see Malone and Hartung (2010). See also Francis and Lorenzo’s (2002) ‘seven realms of children’s participation’ as a useful classification tool for projects concerning children and youth.

3 See also Treseder (1997) and Shier (2001).

4 The acronym PARTISPACE stands for Spaces and Styles of Participation – Formal, non-formal and informal possibilities of young people’s participation in European cities. Eight cities took part in the project: Frankfurt, Gothenburg, Plovdiv, Eskisehir, Rennes, Bologna, Manchester and Zurich. The project was financed by the European Union’s Horizon2020 programme and ran from 2015 to 2018.

5 Gothenburg has a population of approximately 600,000 and is administratively divided into 10 district boards with different demographic and socioeconomic profiles.

6 Western Bergsjön: Unemployment rate 11.6%, foreign background: 73.3%. East Bergsjön: Unemployment rate 14.9%, foreign background: 87.2%. Långedrag: Unemployment rate: 1.7%, foreign background 12.7% (Source: Göteborgsbladet 2019).