Making the City of the Future: University Students’ Narratives about Public Participation

Cities are undergoing significant transformations that need to be better understood. In university cities, in particular, it is important to better understand the crucial and varied placemaking roles that students play in their transformations. Their role in studentification and gentrification is addressed by numerous studies. However, little is known about how they make sense of their in-place public participation practices - e.g., demonstrations, occupations, performances and other forms of collective action in urban places – and of their place-making implications for the future of the city. This presentation aims at exploring students’ narratives about their in-place public and political participation and their senses of place from a temporal perspective, in relation to the future of the city. Our narrative approach locates sense of place in a temporal perspective, as different narratives interpret and resignify the past, the present and the future in different ways, thus legitimizing certain possible urban futures, and de-legitimizing other. The empirical study includes twenty-seven walking interviews with students, conducted in Bologna (n=15) and Lisbon (n=12). A Narrative Analysis is conducted to understand how participants make sense of participation and place-making by accounting for them with (different) temporal perspectives about self, places, and cities, identifying place-relevant actors and roles, developing (different) rights-claims and types of sense of place, and by using collective or individual voices. Results suggest that a first narrative is based on a confrontational (future-consequential) dynamic between students and institutions, while a second one is focused on social relationships with other social groups.