The Journal of Public Space

Reclaiming Public Space

Luisa Bravo — 2025-10-11

The compilation of scholarship presented in the following pages represents the culmination of extensive collaborative research emerging from the Safe and Sound Cities Programme (S²Cities), an initiative led by the Global Infrastructure Basel Foundation in partnership with ICLEI and hosted by the Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, with the support of Fondation Botnar. More than two years have elapsed since the initial collaboration was established between the Universidad del Azuay in Ecuador, and City Space Architecture in Italy, seeking opportunities for integrated research participation within the S²Cities programme framework. The subsequent coordination and organisation of research teams across three continents—navigating diverse linguistic contexts and temporal zones—required considerable institutional commitment. The materialisation of this collaborative endeavour in this special issue of The Journal of Public Space represents a significant scholarly achievement. The specail issue encompasses not only the academic research conducted in Ecuador, Colombia, and Indonesia, but also incorporates contributions from teams engaged in programme evaluation, communication strategies, and implementation projects beyond traditional research paradigms. The resulting compendium offers readers diverse methodological approaches, empirical findings, case studies, and experiential narratives, all unified under the thematic framework of youth, public space, and safety within Global South urban contexts.

From Participation to Transformation

Andrea Betancourt — 2025-10-11

This editorial introduces the Safe and Sound Cities (S²Cities) programme, a global initiative that engages young people as active agents in shaping safer, more inclusive urban environments. Through its implementation in the Global South, the programme combines participatory research, youth-led innovation, and placemaking to address urban safety, wellbeing, and social inclusion. Highlighting lessons derived from programme implementation and research initiatives in Bandung, Envigado, and Cuenca, the editorial discusses how youth perspectives reveal the subjective, relational, and socio-spatial dimensions of safety, challenging traditional enforcement-based approaches. Through trust-building, collaborative governance, creative communication and adaptive Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) frameworks, S²Cities demonstrates that youth engagement can transform public spaces, foster participation, and advance systemic change toward equitable and resilient cities.

Urban and Youth Transformations in Envigado

María D. Moreno Álvarez — 2025-10-11

The S²Cities programme implemented in Envigado, Colombia, promotes youth leadership and participation in transforming public space, strengthening social cohesion, and improving security. This case study applies a qualitative methodology to explore the programme’s development and impact, structured across three interconnected levels: individual, relational, and structural.
At the individual level, the analysis focuses on enhancing youth leadership, critical thinking, and decision-making skills, fostering autonomy and self-confidence. The relational level emphasises trust-building among youth, the community, and local institutions, facilitating collaboration and strengthening networks to sustain collective action. The structural level examines how youth participation influences institutional practices and public policies, contributing to long-term social transformation.
Trust emerges as a pivotal factor throughout the analysis — both as an essential foundation for collaboration and as a key outcome, ensuring the sustainability and scalability of youth-led initiatives. The study underscores that empowering young people as active agents of change enables them to influence not only their immediate environment but also broader governance structures, promoting more inclusive and participatory urban spaces.

Between Perception and Reality

Viviana A. Cordero-Vinueza — 2025-10-11

Youth wellbeing and development are strongly influenced by the physical environment and its conditions; thus, it is essential to examine the relationship between young people and public space. This case study analyses youth wellbeing in Cuenca and Ambato through perception surveys and a comparison with official dashboard data on urban wellbeing. The findings reveal discrepancies between young people's perceptions of public space and official data. These differences weaken their connection to the city and reduce public space usage, ultimately affecting their wellbeing. The study also presents the experience of these cities using placemaking as a tool to bridge this gap and improve youth engagement with urban spaces.

Building Momentum for Youth-Driven Public Space Programmes

Vanishree Herlekar — 2025-10-11

The Safe and Sound Cities (S²Cities) Programme is a global initiative aimed at improving the safety and well-being of young people in urban environments. Through collaboration with local governments, institutions, the private sector, community actors, and youth, S²Cities adopts a systems-wide approach to creating safer, more inclusive cities.
Phase I of the programme (2021–2024) was implemented in six cities across Colombia, Ecuador, Indonesia, and the Philippines, catalysing 28 youth-led initiatives, addressing each city’s unique challenges and opportunities, and empowering young people to contribute to the transformation of their urban environments.
Communication has been integral to the programme's success, playing a critical role in amplifying its innovative approaches, tangible impact, and transformative potential. Locally, creative communication strategies have engaged young people and mobilized support from decision-makers and communities, facilitating the implementation of on-ground initiatives. Globally, strategic communication has attracted funding, built trust, and forged partnerships, enabling the programme’s expansion to new cities and amplifying its impact.

Developing a Global Programme for Safer Cities, from Design to Implementation

Jens Aerts — 2025-10-11

This viewpoint reflects on the development and evolution of the Safe and Sound Cities (S²Cities) programme, a global programme initiated and funded by Fondation Botnar and implemented in partnership with diverse stakeholders to foster safer, youth-centred urban environments. Initiated in 2020, the programme emerged from the recognition that youth, safety, and cities are intricately linked, yet often addressed through fragmented or traditional paradigms. This paper traces the early conceptualization process—beginning with a two-day learning workshop that integrated insights from academia and field practice—and describes how this informed a system-thinking approach to urban youth safety and wellbeing, based on a Theory of Change.
Central to the programme is the integration of Relational Wellbeing (RWB), a framework that emphasizes the interconnectedness of personal, social, and environmental drivers of youth’s health and well-being, and the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) approach, which links urban form to social cohesion and safety. The fusion of these perspectives revealed the importance of placemaking as a process that empowers youth to shape public spaces and build civic trust.
Pilots in 6 cities highlight how youth-led initiatives - supported through digital and physical tools - can drive innovation, build local capacity, and foster inclusive urban governance. The paper argues that safety in cities must be redefined through the lived experiences of young people, advocating for a shift from reactive, enforcement-led approaches to proactive, participatory strategies rooted in placemaking and relational wellbeing.
Ultimately, the S²Cities programme is positioned as a model for youth-driven systemic change, aiming to scale and adapt solutions across diverse urban contexts. It concludes by underscoring the role of youth as co-creators of safer cities and the importance of nurturing environments where their agency, creativity, and resilience can thrive.

Young People’s Perception of Safety in Parks in an Intermediate Latin American City

Mateo Coello — 2025-10-11

Open public parks are essential for recreation, leisure, social interaction, and the development of physical activities of young people. The perception of personal safety can inhibit or encourage its use. In urban contexts of Latin America this perception can be even more determinant. The purpose of this study was to identify the spatial, physical and social factors that influence safety perception of young people, taking Cuenca, Ecuador, as a case study. To accomplish this objective, a qualitative approach was applied, using three research instruments: physical and spatial outlay of the parks, non-participant observation of flows and activities, and semi-structured interviews. The results show that safety perception is not only affected by urban design, as commonly considered by city decision makers and urban planners, but that there are other factors such as gender, people´s presence, activities and land uses, which enhance, and other times diminish, safety perception in young people. Some findings impose important challenges such as the stigmatization by young people of other vulnerable groups, the pros and cons of vegetation in public spaces, the dominant male use of some areas of the parks, among others. These results provide important information to establish better public policies and guidelines to design, implement and renew urban parks.

Web-Based, Crowdsourced, First-Person Narratives of Young People's Daily Commutes as a New Method for Identifying Situations Impacting Their Subjective Wellbeing

Oscar Perilla — 2025-10-11

Young people aged 15-24 represent approximately 21% of the global population and increasingly inhabit urban environments. Traditional wellbeing assessment tools typically depend on surveys that use predefined indicators failing to capture emergent, context-specific factors affecting youth navigating complex urban landscapes. This study addresses: How can we identify situations that impact the subjective wellbeing of young city dwellers during their daily commutes? We introduce “Youth-Targeted Mapped Crowd Sourced Storytelling for Wellbeing-Impacting Situation Identification” (YT-MCSST-4WISI), a novel methodology that combines Mapped Crowd-Sourced Storytelling (MCSST) for narrative collection, with a youth-targeted open-call recruitment strategy, and an analysis strategy encompassing thematic, narrative, phenomenological, and phenomenographic analyses with a focus on subjective wellbeing. We piloted YT-MCSST-4WISI via a participatory contest in Envigado, Colombia, engaging 34 ethically recruited participants aged 15-24. Using the open-source Ushahidi platform, participants submitted geotagged narratives describing their commute experiences. Narratives underwent multi-method analysis to identify recurring situations and emotional patterns. Results identified 30 wellbeing-impacting situations mostly overlooked by conventional surveys, including structural issues like steep topography (14.7% prevalence), heat exposure (23.5%), and transit unreliability, plus symbolic moments such as nature as refuge and social affirmations. By merging empathetic storytelling with scalable participatory tools, YT-MCSST-4WISI bridges constructivist and positivist paradigms, offering a scalable framework for youth-centred urban planning and policy, with strong potential for global scalability.

Urban Safety Via Digitally Augmented Relationality

Manfredo Manfredini — 2025-10-11

This article addresses urban safety issues, focusing on their relationship with the ongoing effective structural transformation of inborn instrumentalities of progressively vulnerable communities in the Global South. It responds to the United Nations' call for urgent action to reverse the negative trends towards the goals set with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by redefining urban safety as a crucial factor for the affirmation of sociospatial justice, resilience, and wellbeing in alignment with the objectives of the Global Digital Compact framework. We redress the conventional crime prevention approach by formulating a new framework for defining a differential right to digitally augmented urban safety that leverages locally embedded sociocultural practices and relational networks. We conjuncturally articulate this right for underserved communities within informal settlements in Bandung, Java, Republic of Indonesia, concentrating on the Indigenous gotong-royong cultural practice—a system of commoning combining differential forms of collaboration, relational empathy and imaginative re-enchantment. We develop and operationalise this right, to produce a pilot methodology for creating a mixed reality instrument that converts inadequate securitisation methods of surveillance into effective safety practices of relatedness. By combining digital twinning and gaming technologies, this instrument enhances community-centred care and accumulation of social, cultural, and infrastructural capital. We discuss the development of this instrument, focusing on the conception and implementation phases that involved multilevel, multistakeholder engagement, emphasising its supplementary transformative aspects. Our contribution to the urban safety discourse further articulates the Right to the Safety by introducing a novel approach that upholds the core good city principles—participation, relationality, and cosmopolitics—for regenerative and differential urban development in the increasingly mediatised society.

Youth in Placemaking: Barriers and Benefits

Viviana A. Cordero-Vinueza — 2025-10-11

Youth well-being and development are shaped by their physical environments, yet youth presence in public space is declining globally. Placemaking offers a promising strategy for re-engagement, though its benefits have been mostly studied in the Global North. This paper examines youth-led placemaking in Ecuador, Indonesia, and Colombia through interviews, focus groups, and secondary data. Findings reveal barriers related to cumbersome collaboration with other stakeholders, persisting stigma towards youth, and linguistic challenges. Nonetheless, shared benefits emerged across contexts, including increased use of space, skills development, place attachment, safety, connectedness, and youth agency.

From Local Voices to Global Impact

Juan Carlos Muñoz Mora — 2025-10-11

Urban youth-led placemaking programs present unique challenges in monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) due to the diverse socio-political and cultural contexts in which they operate. Standardized evaluation frameworks often struggle to accommodate these variations, making it even more complex when working across multiple countries with distinct youth realities. This article advocates for an adaptive MEL framework, drawing from the S²Cities programme—a cross-country initiative integrating participatory methods with robust evaluation strategies. Key learnings highlight the necessity of real-time adaptation to local youth experiences, the need to balance standardized evaluation with localized indicators, and the critical role of young people as co-creators in MEL processes. These insights underscore the importance of a flexible yet rigorous framework that captures urban dynamics' evolving nature. By embedding adaptability into MEL, policymakers and practitioners can enhance the impact, relevance, and responsiveness of placemaking initiatives tailored to youth engagement.