This article investigates the relationship between youth cultural practices and young people’s spatial appropriation. For this purpose, we analyse case studies into groups of young people involved in two forms of practices that are marked by particular perceptions of the (urban) space: two Parkour groups and a Scouts group. The questions we are dealing with concern the way to which young members of these groups are appropriating ‘free space’ through participating in activities like the Scouts or Parkour. Furthermore, this article also explores important questions concerning processes of how young people’s participation in urban areas should be understood and what consequences this understanding has for youth policy.

Existing understandings of youth participation often imply clear distinctions from non-participation and thus boundaries between “recognized” and “non-recognized” practices of engagement. This article aims at questioning these boundaries. It analyzes young people’s practices in the public sphere that are characterized by both recognition as participation and misrecognition or stigmatization as deviant and it is suggested to conceptualize such practices as “liminal participation.” The concept of liminality has been developed to describe transitory situations “in-between”—between defined and recognized status positions—and seems helpful for better understanding the blurring boundaries of youth participation. Drawing on qualitative case studies conducted within a European research project, the analysis focuses on how young people whose practices evolve at the margins of the respective societies position themselves with regard to the challenges of liminality and on the potential of this for democratic innovation and change.

Drawing on research in progress in the Partispace project we make a case for the recognition of the importance of non-formal spaces in response to young refugees across three different national contexts: Frankfurt in Germany; Gothenburg in Sweden; and Manchester in the UK. It is argued that recognition of local regulation and national controls of immigration which support climates of hostility makes it important to recognise and affirm the significance of non-formal spaces and ‘small spaces close to home’ which are often developed in the ‘third space’ of civil society and arise from the impulses driven by the solidarity of volunteers. In these contexts it is important that practices of hospitality can develop which symbolically reconstitute refugees as hosts and subjects of a democratic conversation, without which there is no possible administrative solution to the refugee crisis. It is essential that educational spaces such as schools, colleges and universities forge strong bonds with such emergent spaces.

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