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Doctoral thesis2025Open access

Engaging with Young People in Shaping Sustainable Futures : relevance and ambivalence in the urban landscape

Aagaard Hagemann, Frederik

Abstract

Young people are subjects of hopes and promises in the adult world’s answers to more sustainable futures. Yet, their participation in shaping their own living environments is a democratically ambiguous matter. This dissertation explores ambiguities and new potentials in young people’s participation through the lens critical utopian action research (CUAR) and landscape democracy. The main approach is a three year-engagement with a group of young people in Malmö, Sweden. Through future-creation workshops (FCWs) we explore the potentials and barriers to envision and shape their own living environments. This is supported by a literature review, and a case-study including interviews with key practitioners in Malmö. The review shows how attention to lifeworld and action (inspired by CUAR) is scarce in existing approaches to young people’s participation. The case-study reveals a lack of stable channels from young people’s everyday lives into the planning and development. The FCWs bring forward a discursive shift grounded in the young people’s everyday life-struggles around segregation, equal opportunities to feel free to be oneself, and to feel joy and community in the city. This contrasts functionalistic discourses around landscape sustainability, and assumes a landscapedemocratic quality with broader, discursive framings of the goals of urban landscape planning that are accessible to young citizens. The dissertation responds to calls in the literature to substantiate participatory ambitions in landscape research. Starting with young people’s lifeworld and actions, the FCWs demonstrate how a discursive openness lead to broader engagements that contrast and complement participatory governance frameworks. The CUAR process provides an exemplary opportunity in participatory urban landscape planning and architecture to engage with pluralistic goals in envisioning and designing urban living environments for future sustainability in collaboration with young citizens.

Keywords

urban landscape; young people; critical utopian action research; sustainable transformation; planning; participation; governance; landscape democracy

Published in

Acta Universitatis Agriculturae Sueciae
2025, number: 2025:19
Publisher: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

SLU Authors

UKÄ Subject classification

Landscape Architecture
Environmental Studies in Social Sciences

Publication identifier

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.54612/a.2d5ar22gon
  • ISBN: 978-91-8046-454-3
  • eISBN: 978-91-8046-504-5

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/132959