A Conceptual Model for Youth-Led Urban Utopias: Leveraging Critical Environmental Pedagogies for Sustainable Futures

Neoliberal urban planning often marginalizes youth participation, limiting their potential to shape sustainable urban futures. This study presents a conceptual model and introduces a pedagogically informed process for youth-led urban utopias, proposing a transformative framework to address this gap. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from environmental education, utopia studies, and design, the model emphasizes green city utopias, aligning with calls to integrate critical, creative pedagogies into environmental education. By incorporating place-based and speculative pedagogies, along with prefigurative experimentation, the model introduces four workshops designed to engage youth in transformative learning, positioning them as agents of change. The workshops aim to enable youth to critically examine the systemic forces shaping their environments, foster collective action, and empower them to envision and enact alternative urban futures in the present. This study contributes to a novel pedagogy, integrating prefiguration as a transformative principle and emphasizing youth agency in the creation of sustainable urban futures.