From Lived Experience to Collective Power: How Young People are Shaping Southeast Asian Cities
Across Southeast Asia, young people are confronting rapid urban transformation that promises progress but delivers displacement, exclusion, and uncertainty. Dang-Dao Nguyen examines how youth-led networks are reclaiming the Right to the City as a lived, political struggle.
Across Southeast Asia, cities have been developing at a rapid – and often unpredictable – pace. New transport infrastructure, real estate projects, large-scale tourism developments, creative hubs, and climate adaptation initiatives are reshaping urban space and everyday life.
Although these changes are frequently seen as “development” and celebrated as progress, many young people face mounting challenges, including rising housing costs, shrinking public space, longer commutes caused by traffic congestion, and growing uncertainty about whether – and how – they can shape the urban areas where they study, work, and imagine their futures. As a result, gentrification has become a defining urban issue for young people, and the Right to the City is no longer an abstract concept, but a lived question of access, belonging, and the right to remain in urban space.
The Importance of Lived, Everyday Experience
For young urbanists in Southeast Asia, the Right to the City is grounded less in legal frameworks and more in lived, everyday experience. It concerns the ability to live in a liveable city, to access meaningful opportunities, to use public space without exclusion, and to participate substantively in decisions that shape the urban environment.
In contrast to academic or governmental interpretations that often prioritise formal citizenship or service delivery, youth perspectives emphasise affordability, informality, and intergenerational justice. In a region where informal housing and livelihoods remain central to urban life, and where collaboration across sectors and generations is often fragmented, the Right to the City is inseparable from struggles over land, displacement, and recognition.
Interconnected Urban Challenges
Youth-led networks such as the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia (YUSEA) have emerged in direct response to these realities. YUSEA was founded on the belief that Southeast Asia holds a latent urbanist energy, long fragmented by academic silos, professional boundaries, and national borders.
For many young people in the region, there has been no clear or accessible pathway into urbanism as a shared field of practice. Issues such as housing, traffic, and public space are often treated as the exclusive domains of architecture, engineering, or urban policy, rather than as interconnected urban challenges that require collective, cross-disciplinary, and intergenerational approaches.
Transforming Shared Concerns Into Collective Action
I co-founded YUSEA to bridge these divides. The resonance of this idea far exceeded our expectations. More than one hundred core members from three continents joined YUSEA, not as passive participants, but as active collaborators who transformed shared concerns into friendships, joint programmes, and sustained collective action.
Over the past three years of working in urban and youth activism, I have witnessed youth-led initiatives play a critical role in responding to gentrification. Our work often begins by making lived experiences visible through community mapping, participatory research, storytelling, and policy advocacy. These practices expose the social and spatial costs of infrastructure-led development, waterfront projects, heritage-driven tourism, and climate adaptation or land reclamation initiatives that frequently externalise risk and displacement onto already vulnerable communities.
Upholding Youth Agency
We observe how real estate speculation triggered by new transit lines pushes underprivileged or precarious populations further toward the urban periphery; how public spaces are increasingly commercialised, securitised, and privatised; and how opportunities in “revitalised” neighbourhoods or tactical urbanism projects are selectively accessible, often limited to those who fit dominant development agendas and comply with restrictive regulatory frameworks.
Within YUSEA, these shared experiences have informed a deliberate shift toward urban co-creation rooted in lived realities. This approach recognises young people not as a homogeneous group, but as diverse urban actors whose daily encounters with housing, transport, work, and public space generate situated knowledge that is systematically overlooked in formal planning processes. Upholding youth agency, therefore, requires more than tokenistic consultation exercises or youth panels. It demands power-aware, rights-based engagement throughout the entire policy cycle – from agenda-setting and planning to implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.
Challenging Dominant Narratives of Urban Development
Equally important is the transformation of institutional cultures that currently limit who is heard and whose knowledge counts. Young people contribute most effectively when institutions move beyond extractive participation and instead provide safe, accessible, and genuinely inclusive spaces for dialogue and shared decision-making. In such contexts, lived experience is recognised as a form of expertise, enabling youth to challenge dominant narratives of urban development, expose blind spots in technocratic planning, and propose solutions grounded in local, everyday realities rather than abstract models.
A holistic, meaningful youth-centred urban approach is essential. It must cut across policy silos such as housing, transport, nature, and climate, while also operating across multiple scales of governance – from neighbourhoods and municipalities to regional, national, and international arenas.
Beyond Tokenism: Youth Shaping the City
Empowering youth does not mean inviting young people into predefined roles within pre-approved agendas or assigning them short-term tasks. It means redistributing autonomy, resources, and institutional trust, so that young people can define their own priorities, strategies, and theories of change. Through YUSEA, young urbanists are increasingly articulating clear political demands: anti-displacement measures, meaningful participation, and community-centred development. Their message to policymakers is unambiguous: urban development cannot be judged by economic growth alone, but by who benefits, who bears the cost, and who is permitted to stay.
As Southeast Asian cities continue to transform, young people are not passive recipients of urban change. Through networks such as YUSEA, we are actively shaping new urban narratives by centring equity, sustainability, and the Right to the City as practical, lived claims rather than abstract ideals. Supporting youth-led approaches is therefore not an optional gesture of inclusion, but a necessary condition for building cities that are socially just, resilient, and liveable – now and for generations to come.
