This paper focusses on spatial practices of every day life (de Certeau,1984) and contrasts the enquiries into Youth Councils in Sweden, Germany and the UK with other forms of (re)appropriation of urban spaces. We explore specifically the staging of youth participation in settings such as youth councils and youth clubs in which the participation is supported and facilitated by youth workers or other pedagogues. The paper then considers the practices through which young people’s participatory practices can turn urban places into meaningful spaces or territories than need to be claimed, managed, (re)negotiated, contested, controlled defended or abandoned. It focuses on the constitution and use of spaces, place making as well as on territoriality on the micro-scale of daily interactions with spatial arrangements including people and the material environment. Applying the concept of territory and place, we understand everyday spatial participation practices as inherently (micro-) political, connected to questions of control, conflict and negotiation, strategy and tactics, as well as to questions of meaning making, domestication and identity. The examples here will be drawn from ethnographies in Eskeshir, Turkey with a focus of a group pf Kurdish street musicians. We consider the ways in which the practices of pedagogues, and the assumptions about young people embedded in those practices, shape and constrain the forms of possible participation. The extent to which these negotiations of relationship turn on a sense of what is visible and what invisible, what is legitimate and illegitimate to acknowledge and to voice, is explored, drawing on and developing Goffman’s account of ‘performance’ and his use of the concepts of ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’. We are concerned with the audiences for these performances of participation, and how youth workers and other pedagogues find themselves called upon to both perform and at the same time tacitly acknowledge the limits of tokenistic and manipulative practices, Equally, we show how young people exercise agency in these spaces, while both knowing and not knowing how youth workers or pedagogues are creating the mise-en-scene. The paper draws a connection and makes a contrast between the ways in which young people and youth workers negotiate spaces and relationships in a youth work setting and the ways in which the group of Kurdish street musicians also negotiate and make sense of their space, considering the way in which conflict is negotiated, addressed or avoided in the tactics at work in each space.

de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley University of California Goffman,E,(1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondworth Penguin