Local Matters

Where young people grow up makes a decisive difference to their life chances. Drawing on case studies from ten European cities, this book looks at how the local environment and the services available for young people affect their socialization. What comes to the fore are the local matters. On the one hand, there are experiences of discrimination and marginalization due to distance and isolation, decay and neglect but also related to piecemeal and top-down approaches to youth and social services. On the other, we find signs of positive transformation and drivers of social innovation: community building projects, the revitalization of abandoned places, appreciative approaches to servicing and a whole array of tactics that young people deploy to overcome their daily struggles.

Simon Güntner is a Professor of Spatial Sociology at the Department of Spatial Planning at Technische Universität Wien. Louis Henri Seukwa is a Professor of Educational Science at the Department of Social Work at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Anne-Marie Gehrke is a research fellow at the Department of Social Work at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Jill Robinson is a practitioner fellow at the Centre for Critical Inquiry into Society and Culture at Aston University in Birmingham.