Call for Participants: Training Course on Radical Spatial Sustainability
When: 31 March – 4 April 2025
Where: Galatina, Lecce, Italy
Organised in the context of: YEP! (Citizens and EU Values-2024-CHILD-Project Number: 101190098)
Deadline to apply: 10 February 2025
Are you interested in alternatives to mainstream narratives of sustainability and wish to engage in transformative discussions about radical spatial sustainability? Are you a teacher, youth worker, urban planner, architect, youth activist, and/or policy-maker, committed to participatory democracy and sustainable spatial transformations? Are you living in Romania?
Join us for a 5-day training course in Galatina, Lecce, Italy, and be part of a larger process to rethink and reshape the future of our spatial environments, the rural and the urban, even challenging the division between these two.
Why Radical Sustainability?
In recent years, sustainability has become a widely used term—often reduced to an empty word. Instead of fostering meaningful change, mainstream interpretations of sustainability have reinforced socio-ecological problems. Approaches of mainstream sustainability and green growth often shift the costs of ecological impacts to marginalised communities and exacerbate inequalities in the name of economic growth.
This training course seeks to adopt a radical and critical approach to sustainability through degrowth spatial politics. It will involve non-formal learning methodologies, including teamwork, peer learning, and experiential learning. Participants will reflect on local sustainability challenges, co-create solutions, and contribute actively to the course’s content.
This training course is the first step of the YEP! (Citizens and EU Values-2024-CHILD) project which focuses on children’s rights to participate in shaping their environments as inclusive, healthy, and just for everyone.
YEP! will further involve a series of interconnected activities. Participants of the training course will have the opportunity to be actively involved in these activities implementing them with and for the children and youth. Specifically, they will have priority to join – if they wish – the below next activities:
- A Training Course on Youth Participatory Spatial Planning methodologies in Bacău, Romania (31 May – 4 June 2025)
- A hands-on training program designed to equip you with methodologies for engaging young people in participatory spatial planning. Participants will learn tools to involve youth in shaping their socio-spatial environments.
- Local implementation of the Youth Participatory Spatial Planning Processes (September 2025 – February 2026)
- A practical phase where young people (aged 12-18) actively engage in planning activities and decision-making processes within their communities.
- Child-Led Campaigns on spatial rights and radical sustainability. (January 2026 – March 2026)
- Youth-driven awareness campaigns advocating for children’s rights to inclusive, safe, and sustainable spaces. These campaigns will challenge traditional spatial planning perspectives and promote radical sustainability ideas.
- Local Youth-Led Unconferences (March 2026 – June 2026)
- Open and flexible spaces where young people set the agenda, share experiences, their campaigns, and propose solutions for youth-friendly and sustainable socio-spatial environments.
What is covered
Accommodation, travel expenses and subsistence costs up to a certain limit.
How to Apply
Fill in the form available at this link , send your CV, and write a brief description of your motivation, background, and professional experience related to the subject.