'Can we Mec the Municipality?' Emerging voices of young people in a segregated urban landscape

This article details the failure and success of an action research project that experiments with foregrounding young people's perspectives in visions of future, sustainable, urban landscapes in Malmö, Sweden. In a range of future-creation workshops, the author, an assistant, and 34 young people aged 15-20 from two low-income neighbourhoods developed analyses, visions, and concrete change proposals for meaningful interventions in Malmö's urban environment. The primary contribution is the young participants' analyses of the subjective experience of a segregated urban landscape, the facilitation and contextualisation offered by the action researcher, and the integrative visions and actions that arose. The open-ended approach allowed participants to accentuate both diverse experiences and gathering points (such as a shared metaphor). The article highlights the discursive limits encountered by participatory processes related to urban landscape planning, as well as the methodological openings offered by critical utopian action research to experiment with overcoming these limits.