Youthhood is approached as a relational age category which varies according to the social, political and cultural context which is reflected also in the geopolitical scope of the urban contexts analysed spanning from protest public spaces in Tel Aviv, peripheral corner café and cultural resistance in the urbanized region of Belo Horizonte towards diverse sets of gendered and socio-economically diverse public spaces in Vienna. The urban studies based research project YOUTH funded by TU Wien’s Centre for Society and Technology (CTS) aimed at understanding youthhood both as a relational age category, and a social reality including embodied, symbolic, and material dimensions. The YOUTH consortium consisted of five higher education institutions – PUC Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv (Israel) and the Technische Universität Wien, FH Campus Wien and FH Technikum Wien in Vienna (Austria),  – which, together with associated NGOs, have embarked upon a collaborative journey through Vienna’s and other public spaces to develop a transdisciplinary and intersectional methodological framework to intersectionally analyse the crossroads of multiple axes of inequalities and discrimination as regards the changes and challenges taking place around young people’s access to public space due to socio-technical innovations. 

YOUTH emphasizes as ‘(non)digital access to public space’ has become part of multiple articulations of youthhood as it basically affects how young people spend their youthhood, informed by both digital ways to approach urban public space, yet also by more traditional and analogous forms: in fact young people do not distinguish any more between analogous and virtual access to public space, but their reality is vi-real, a fusion of both. With this shift in basic spatial perception, also the way how young people move individually and in groups through the city’s public spaces basically expands which puts a challenge to neighbourhood based forms of social youth work and youth-oriented community planning. The project has taken an explicitly gender-mixed approach and has invited young people pertaining to different socio-economic realities to identify their spaces in the city, and their ways to access these spaces.

In that sense,  understanding youthhood has shifted from referring to a quantificable age cohort towards a much more qualitative take to consider youthhood as a relational age category (Gabauer, Knierbein and Lindinger 2024) in constant transition. Young people take to public space, develop autonomy and learn about encounters with others, other worlds and other opinions not just in the materially build urban public space, but also in its digital representation. As for young people, both the virtual and material worlds are genuinely combined, their idea and perception of space has basically become vireal. a spatially practised socio-digital, socio-technical and sociomaterial ‘reality’ that is increasingly intertwined with the use of  social media platforms and deeply affected by (non)digital forms of social inequality.

These insights are very relevant for Technical Universities as it invites these higher education institutions to integrate a theorizing of spaces that spans from code and algorithmic conceptions of space to the material spaces designed and built by architects and planners as to also include social sciences and humanities conceptions of social inequality, intersectional research methodology, and digital and vireal literacy to navigate the social world around us. Such an appraoch involves deep democratic questions and opens the possibility to develo VIREAL PUBLIC SPACES in which democratic values can be acquired, which stand in stark contrast to the closed and radicalised algorithmic world of social media which rather service as closed clubs and echo chambers of polarization. VIREAL PUBLIC SPACE points to the opposite, to allow for both digital-virtual but also embodied-material access to public space as a space open for exchange, learning, and tactful behavour towards others as a genuine part of urban democracies.