About the project

Mar­gin­alised youth in Euro­pean urban areas dis­play low lev­els of inclu­sion and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the soci­etal are­nas. At the same time, it is clear that on the pro­fes­sion­al lev­el we are more or less sti­fled com­pared to work­ing with pre­cise­ly the inclu­sion of the most mar­gin­al­ized young peo­ple. This is part­ly due to soci­etal inequal­i­ty struc­tures, but it is also because the pro­fes­sion­als are not yet trained in under­stand­ing the extent of the young people’s sit­u­a­tions, which are par­tic­u­lar­ly com­plex in urban set­tings. In this project by pro­fes­sion­als we refer to all those work­ing pro­fes­sion­al­ly with mar­gin­al­ized youth in urban areas — social work­ers, ped­a­gogues, social edu­ca­tors and teachers.

A cen­tral under­stand­ing in this project is that the lack of pro­fes­sion­al­ism is because until now it is not com­mon prac­tice to under­stand social and edu­ca­tion­al work as a mat­ter of plan­ning indi­vid­ual, social and con­tex­tu­al (includ­ing sociospa­tial) solu­tions con­cern­ing young peo­ple at risk.

The over­all goal of the LEMA project is there­fore to devel­op a sus­tain­able ped­a­gog­i­cal mod­el for work­ing with extreme­ly mar­gin­al­ized youth – a mod­el for Par­tic­i­pa­to­ry Social Plan­ning (PSP), which includes:

• The devel­op­ment of a par­tic­i­pa­to­ry con­text-sen­si­tive social ped­a­gogy for inno­v­a­tive solu­tions (cross-nation­al)
• A wider knowl­edge on the con­nec­tion between an urban set­ting and the mar­gin­al­iza­tion process­es of young people
• Reper­toires of prac­tice for pro­fes­sion­als, wel­fare offi­cials, NGOs, pol­i­cy mak­ers, edu­ca­tors and researchers in rela­tion to under­stand­ing, rec­og­niz­ing and respond­ing to the com­plex social prob­lems that mar­gin­al­ized young peo­ple have to face.

In this project it is sig­nif­i­cant that the mar­gin­al­ized young peo­ple are key part­ners in the devel­op­ment of new inno­v­a­tive solu­tions. They are the real experts, and learn­ing from their mar­gin­al­ized posi­tion is essen­tial to the inno­v­a­tive solu­tions of this project. The tar­get groups of the project are thus both youth at risk in urban areas and the pro­fes­sion­als and edu­ca­tors work­ing with them.

The project part­ners are high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions and orga­ni­za­tions work­ing with mar­gin­al­ized youth in three dif­fer­ent urban con­texts: Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Copen­hagen and 3B Hous­ing Asso­ci­a­tion in Copen­hagen, Den­mark; Malmö Uni­ver­si­ty and Malmö City in Swe­den; Uni­ver­si­ty of Mála­ga and the NGO Aso­ciación Mar­ro­quí in Mála­ga, Spain (see fur­ther under part­ner pre­sen­ta­tion).

Methodological approach

The method­olog­i­cal approach of the LEMA project is thus par­tic­i­pa­to­ry strate­gies that cre­ate space for involv­ing both young peo­ple and the pro­fes­sion­als. Devel­op­ing the knowl­edge and skills of the pro­fes­sion­als are impor­tant parts of inno­vat­ing the field of social inclu­sion of high­ly mar­gin­al­ized young peo­ple. Devel­op­ing a set of tools based on the analy­ses done by pro­fes­sion­als, researchers and mar­gin­al­ized young peo­ple will strength­en the reper­toires of prac­tice of the pro­fes­sion­als and cre­ate new ways of being a pro­fes­sion­al by learn­ing from the margins.