Young people’s participation in urban design is usually either highly restricted or excluded altogether. This paper reflects on a pilot project that explored how communication technologies can be used to support young people to shape the development of their city. A research team at Western Sydney University developed an emotionmapping platform (invisiblecity.org.au) and offered creative media workshops to young people in Western Sydney’s City of Parramatta to support them to explore different ways of expressing emotion through text and image. The study found that emotion mapping provides opportunities to open up discussions about affective experiences of the city that can be integrated into urban planning. However, we argue that such initiatives must overcome the challenges associated with tapping into, making sense of, and amplifying complex, dispersed and always changing everyday media practices if they are to be embraced by young people in ways that ensure they are inclusive and representative. Further, it is critical that initiatives work out how to encourage urban developers to hear and value young people’s perspectives on urban environments and how they use them.

Introduction

Everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972. To imagine a generic city is to bring forth images of uniform highrises, frenetic highways and crowds of workers in identical suits. To read a city’s map is to follow roads and intersections and locate landmarks and places of interest. Yet cities are also spaces we experience and feel. Inhabitants hold cities in their imaginations, in their aspirations and in their memories. In this way, intangible aspects of a city can contribute to the creation of what Ben Anderson has called ‘affective atmospheres’: that is, ‘dynamic qualities of feeling’ that ‘animate or dampen’ a sense of ongoing life in a place (2014: 140). In 2015, the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University was invited by the Parramatta City Council to play a role in generating conversations about Parramatta’s future development. The City of Parramatta is located in Western Sydney, which has been home to the Darug people for over 60,000 years and has significance for other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations. It is a linguistically diverse, historic urban centre, approximately 25 km west of Sydney’s Central Business District (CBD). The local population has a median age of 35, a figure that sits below the national average (Parramatta City Council, 2017). Paramatta has a highly diverse population: more than half its residents speak English as well as another language, and one third were born overseas. The city occupies a vital role in Australia’s history as the first seat of government and is home to historic sites of national and global significance. The Greater Sydney Commission calls Parramatta ‘Australia’s next great city’, and a ‘۱۴ billion-dollar tiger economy’ whose population is growing at 2.5 per cent a year: twice the rate of the State of New South Wales (City of Parramatta, 2016).