Understanding Barriers, Enablers and Diversity of Young People Participation in Urban Governance through Digital Platforms: Findings from Lebanon and Indonesia.
The research has focused on four cities in Lebanon and Indonesia, included an extensive survey of more than 4000 young people, interviews, focus groups, and the use of young citizen scientists. The research explored the role of inclusion through the lens of diversity, looking at young people as a very diverse group, and analysing the role of individual and collective identities and how they intersect with each other.
The project found that there is an increased interest in the creation of digital spaces to include young people in urban governance. It is often assumed that many young people do not participate through other approaches because they are a generation of digital natives and that digital spaces will suffice to generate their participation. However, digital spaces present strong exclusionary patterns and can shift online other forms of exclusion. These spaces are often deployed without sufficient thinking to issues of diversity and unequal power relations amongst young people and between young people and other actors. The paper analyses these relations and calls for an intersectional and co-produced approach to digital participation in urban governance.