Conference Agenda

This paper explores the efforts of an interdisciplinary and transnational team to create a transdisciplinary and intersectional framework for analyzing youth from different geopolitical contexts, their practices of using and occupying public spaces, and the impact of digital media technologies on these practices. The central hypothesis is that technology increasingly mediates young people's access to and experience of public spaces, affecting their (dis)information, (dis)mobilisation, and appropriation of these spaces.

Three key research questions guide the study: How do mediation, social media, streaming platforms, and messaging services contribute to shaping young people's engagement with urban public spaces? How do intersecting forms of marginalisation affect their ability to engage in both urban and digital public spaces, considering the need for physical, social, and digital infrastructures? What spatial strategies and digital tactics do young people use to reshape social, cultural, and political routines in public spaces?

Empirical research was conducted in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Vienna (Austria), and Tel Aviv (Israel) with young people aged 18 to 29. The study used various methodological strategies such as interviews, online and offline participant observation, focus groups, and social mapping. In Belo Horizonte, the focus was on comparing elite and peripheral youth, highlighting social inequalities. In Tel Aviv, the study concentrated on youth involved in protests, while in Vienna, it examined changes in geographical mobilities among self-identified female youth.

The findings in all three cities reveal that social inequalities and power structures significantly shape how young people experience and appropriate public spaces. Issues such as (in)security, urban mobility access, police violence, and the dynamics of gender, sexual orientation, social class, and race directly influence young people's ability to fully access and utilise public spaces. Youth adapt strategically to these challenges, either through collective organisation, new protest strategies, or digital security tactics. Patriarchal structures, particularly the vulnerability of women, are also a common theme, with specific forms of exclusion or oppression in both physical and digital spaces.

Despite socioeconomic, cultural, and political obstacles, the findings highlight that socio-technological changes are not hindering young people's pursuit of greater equality and autonomy in public spaces.

This paper takes the 2024 European Parliament elections as an empirical starting point to examine the circulation of extremist discourses in urban space during the elections campaign in and across three European countries and regions: Sweden (northern Europe), Austria (central Europe), and Bulgaria (eastern Europe). As a significant political event, the 2024 EP elections acted as a catalyst of violent discourse and actions, bringing underlying tensions and grievances among European populations to the fore and into the streets.

The research presented in this paper draws on a hybrid ethnography, combining non-participant observations across digital and urban spaces in Europe in the lead-up to election day. Drawing on an extensive and multi-modal data set, we examine how extremist discourse emerged around political campaigning and discussions surrounding the election period across online and offline settings.

During the election period, the cities of Vienna (Austria), Malmö (Sweden) and Sofia (Bulgaria) were turned into deeply politized hybrid spaces that were partly informed by political discussions unfolding online. Our analysis highlights the hybridity and interconnections between interactions in these two spheres, demonstrating how extremist discourse travels back and forth between digital platforms and urban spaces, turning both into arenas of political struggle. Physical artefacts, such as election posters, flyers, and photographs, were often transformed into memes circulating online. Conversely, digital ephemera, including memes and slogans from online conversations, found their way into physical spaces through graffiti, stickers, and other visual manifestations.

We observed how political contestation and resentment towards institutional politics often slid into or merged with extremist and violent discourse in particular around contentious topics such as migration, climate change, and gender identity and expressions, and how such discourse seamlessly flowed between online and offline realms. The findings indicate a troubling normalisation of violent rhetoric in a development towards what we term ”everyday extremism” in which anti-democratic and violent ideas increasingly seep into mundane political discussions and public space.

Public spaces set the frame for encounters between individuals and groups with varying backgrounds, not least in super-diverse cities like Vienna. They are places where different social realities meet and cohabitate while being at the same time not equally accessible and important to everyone. Furthermore, there is a strong connection between public space and social inequality: For lower-income and/or marginalized groups, urban public space is more important as a place to meet and spend leisure time than for better-off city dwellers. Conflicts of use in densely built-up urban areas, which are characterised by ethnic segregation, are on the daily agenda.

Currently, urban public space is coming under increasing pressure due to multiple events and crises: Population growth, the climate crisis, the pandemic and inflation are contributing to the fact that public space in Vienna is demanded by more and more users with different interests and backgrounds. These developments may lead to increasing tensions when it comes to the use of public spaces. Notions of inclusion and exclusion and the question of belonging in the form of “us” versus “them” are increasingly observable.

The paper is based on data collected through the Horizon 2020 project D.Rad – DeRadicalisation in Europe and Beyond – Detect, Resolve, Reintegrate. By means of expert interviews, non-participant observation, focus group interviews with stakeholders as well as young urban residents in a contested urban area, we aim to understand how public space becomes a tool for steering the inclusion and exclusion of marginalized youths and how different actors claim urban space.

Public spaces bear witness to the growth in control policies and socio-spatial inequalities, and at the same time reflect changes in urban practices and the concept of the ‘public’. Embedded in the capitalist, racist and sexist structure of society and fuelled by media discourse, the rhetoric of security weighs all the more heavily on public night-time spaces in southern Europe. It contributes to a ‘colonisation’ of the night, generating spatial micro-segregations and forms of resistance. The analysis focuses on these two aspects, in two fragments of Mediterranean city centres - those of Palermo and Marseilles - confronted with the phenomena of gentrification and touristification and a staging of their popular and Mediterranean public spaces. Moreover, while the night is in fact a more subversive and complex space-time, it is becoming increasingly controlled and integrated into daytime economic and spatial dynamics. Using an ethnographic approach, the study identifies everyday micro-violence linked to the application of policies that reinforce the control and standardisation of night-time rhythms and spaces. This violence takes the form of dictating the times and spaces to be frequented, as well as the behaviour to be adopted. They highlight the fact that public policies do not reflect the complexity of the night-time public spaces studied and the presence of structural inequalities, and therefore reinforce the marginalisation of certain residents. The second aspect of the study concerns the forms of resistance found in the practices observed. On the one hand, the proliferation and unpredictability of meeting places and times makes it more difficult to read and control the streets at night. On the other hand, nocturnal micro-movements, characterised by their spontaneity and complexity, make it possible to create alternative spaces for socialisation and reveal spontaneous moments of attention to the Other, of self-safety in the street. Through other modes and rhythms of communication and consumption, these time-spaces are less subject to the imposition of ‘normality’ in practices, bodies and behaviour. Using rhythm as a starting point allows us to consider the phenomena of resistance to a fixed night, which would like to dictate times and spaces, outside the security logic of exclusion and surveillance. It opens the way to an ontological reflection on public space that moves away from Western-centric logics.