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Youth City Fora Solo: Cultivating Youth Voices for The City

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Surakarta (Solo), 2 August 2025 – Kota Kita is hosting Youth City Fora in Solo: Cultivating Youth Voices for The City, aimed at amplifying the voices and ideas of young people in achieving inclusive urban governance through digital approaches. The forum aimed to be a shared space for disseminating the findings of YUP research conducted throughout 2024, while celebrating the role of young people as an important part of the city co-production process. This event was conducted in Lokananta, Solo, opened for the public, and more than 90 youth engaged as the participants. In this event, two main activities take centre stage: the Bincang Partisipasi talkshow session and the Research Exhibition.

Talkshow: How do young people and city actors collaborate in the digital sphere?

The talkshow titled “Questioning the ‘Digital City’: It’s Time for Young People and City Actors to Collaborate Together,” featured Surakarta Mayor Respati Achmad Ardianto, Hasanatun Nisa Thamrin from Kota Kita as a representative of the YUP research team, and young representatives such as Barcelona Bryan, as social media influencers and Communication Manager of PERSIS Solo, and Septiana Dwi Rosita from the Solo Women’s Study Centre (PUKAPS). The discussion explored young people’s participation in the city, how digital channels are used in their daily lives, and the potential for more meaningful collaboration between young people and the city government.

Surakarta mayor points youth-related programmes during the talkshow

During the session, Surakarta Mayor Respati Achmad Ardianto expressed his appreciation for the space provided by Youth City Fora and emphasised the Surakarta City Government’s commitment to collaborating with residents, including young people, in the city’s decision making processes. According to Respati, one area that requires more active participation from young people is budget allocation. ‘The government budget is your right. If the budget is not criticised, it will continue to be allocated for the same things,’ said Respati.

Additionally, Respati mentioned five government priority programmes: 1) Rumah Siap Kerja, targets young people from poor households to receive training and be linked to job opportunities; 2) UMKM Centre, supports individuals who have “graduated” from poverty to remain economically self-sufficient. Provides business training, mentoring, and access to government e-catalogues so their goods and services can be procured for public needs, thereby circulating the economy locally; 3) Posyandu Plus: Expanded role beyond health services to act as a community counseling centre; 4) Fiscal sustainability, framed as a collective responsibility; and 5) “Serakahnomics” Policy: Discourages excessive profit-making to counteract exploitative capitalist cycles and promote equitable economic growth.

Bryan Barcelona, a representative of Solo football supporters, highlighted important points regarding the challenges of participating in creative expressions. ‘We want to be recognised as a community that represents a more progressive Surakarta. But there’s a lack of spaces to showcase cultural expressions other than traditional ones.’

Another youth representative, Septiana Dwi Rosita from the Solo Women’s Study Centre (PUKAPS), linked youth participation with a specific barrier for women, particularly in regards to the collaboration with the local government.

Will the digital platform be safe for women? How can it make advocacy for women easier? Women’s issues are very difficult to bring into government sectors because of bureaucracy, so communities will always keep doing insurgent movements.

Research exhibition: Cultivating youth voices for the city

Meanwhile, the results of the YUP programme’s research was presented in the form of an interactive exhibition throughout the event. Located at Pendopo Lokananta, this exhibition presents research findings on the challenges, opportunities, and preferences of young people’s participation in urban spaces, particularly in the use of digital platforms. Visitors were not only invited to understand the research content but also to participate directly through the interactive panels available. As the event was opened to the public, the research findings were curated and written in a simple way, to ensure that general audiences (with no prior knowledge of the related context) could understand and participate.

This exhibition serves as a space for reflection and an open invitation to the public and government to hear the voices of young people—not as an afterthought, but as drivers of change.

said Hasanatun Nisa Thamrin, Programme Manager for Urban Governance at Kota Kita and also part of the YUP programme research team.

The exhibition mainly focuses on the digital platform and co-production, considering the topic of priority domains and initiatives already discussed in the previous workshops. However these contents were still displayed. The exhibition was divided into several section:

Introduction of the exhibition

  • Upon entering the exhibition gate, participants were greeted by a three-meter exhibition title, a curatorial text, and vibrant YUP ornaments. The curatorial text introduced the exhibition context – how cities continuously grow along with citizens, with youth playing a crucial role in shaping the future of the city. Youth are not only heirs to the city but also its planners, with their initiatives extending into the digital sphere. This curatorial also explained how the YUP project involved young people throughout the research process.
Three Youth City Fora participants enter the exhibition gate
Youth City Fora participants enter the exhibition gate
  • The exhibition context also delivered through an illustrative video displayed in tablet, accompanied with both audio and text to ensure the accessibility for participants with hearing and visual impairments. This video, titled “Planting seeds in the air”, invites the participants to imagine how they could collectively build a digital platform to escalate their initiatives.
Visitors listen the opening video displayed in tablets using headphones
Visitors listen the opening video displayed in tablets

Section 1: What issues in the city are you concerned about?

  • In this section, priority domains in both Solo and Denpasar: education, health, environment, jobs and economic opportunities, arts and culture, safety and security are displayed, along with the detailed problems that were chosen in the prioritisation workshops. The explanation about problems that were prioritised by youth in each domain were also presented, to give a broader context for audiences. we also invited the audiences to share their thoughts and opinions about what issues in the city that they are concerned about by writing them in sticky notes and sticking them into a board. Their inputs were varied, including issues that correlate to the workshop results such as smokers’ behaviour, poor waste management, green open space, to other issues such as lack of public spaces and poor condition of pedestrian lanes.
(Left) Youth read the issues panel, (Center) A male visitor places a sticky note about his concerned issue, (Right) Aspirations from the visitors about concerned issues in the city

Section 2: How do you respond to issues in the city?

  • This section covered the initiatives in the city, as well as enablers and barriers to participation. The initiatives included both focus and initiator of movements in Solo and Denpasar (from the case study databases), while the enabler and barrier factors were displayed in three-dimensional format using secondhand pipes.
Young people pay attention to the exhibition panel

Section 3: Young people in Digital Space

  • This section began with a narration about Gen Z being the majority of Indonesian population that use the internet on a daily basis. Then the audiences were invited to participate in the interactive panel about factors that they like and limit them from using digital media. Overall, the result amplified our survey findings, and interestingly, the fear of private information being stolen was chosen by a lot of people, exceeding the designated space that was provided.
A visitor votes for ‘fear of personal information being stolen’ as a factor that limit the digital media usage

Section 4: Let’s build your dream digital platform!

  • After giving the digital media context, this section specifically asked people to imagine a digital platform that could help them in participating in the city. The questions were the features and types of platform, two crucial points that will help the digital platform ideation. We provided options that could be chosen freely in this section, which were compiled based on youth inputs during our focus group discussion and workshop sessions. The consideration of providing choices was to ease the audiences in imagining the context, as a ‘digital platform for participation’ might be difficult to imagine, especially because this exhibition was not facilitated.
The results on the digital platform types and features
  • The most frequent options chosen about platform type were integration of community initiatives (chosen by 6), giving information about policies/public agendas (chosen by 4), filing a complaint (chosen by 4). The other choices: volunteering, calendar of city events, provide information, collaboration, training/certification, database, and consultation service received three or less votes. In regard to features, the most chosen choice was voting feature for any ideas/opinions, chosen by 4. The other choices received two and one vote.

Section 5: Digital platform co-production

  • This section began with a brief explanation about co-production. Similar to the previous section, this panel also aims to explore youth ideas in the co-production process and understand how they foresee the role of multiple actors in the city. This panel ideation was also driven by the discussions during our previous workshops, where some participants proposed that we could engage other stakeholders (other than the government) in the digital platform production process.
Interactive panel of city actors’ roles in the digital platform co-production, displayed through city miniatures
  • In this part, the participants were invited to engage in how they think about how actors in the city might collaborate in the co-production process, through a game called ‘If I Were The Mayor’. We presented a miniature of Solo using Solo map and lego – that was divided into 5 areas (to divide the city actors): young people, citizens, governments, communities/organisations, and private sectors using the prompt of ‘If you were a city mayor, which actors do you think need to be involved in building a platform that could encourage young people to participate in the city?’.
Visitors engage with the interactive panel of digital platform co-production
  • The roles of the actors were provided as mini flags. This was done, again, to help the participants imagine the context of co-production itself. Majority of the participants assign the ‘flags’ in both government and youth areas, indicating their perceptions of how these actors could contribute the most. The roles of youth were more on deciding the digital platform goals and key features (such as proposing the ideas, key features, type of platforms, visuals, testing); raising the awareness of digital ethics and rights; building collaborative forums with city actors; and bridging the dialogue between youth and policymakers. On the other hand, the government roles were more varied, covering the aspects of technical, regulation, accessibility of vulnerable people, privacy of the data, evaluation mechanism, involving citizens in the process, facilitating a space for intersector discussions, and many more. The citizens, communities, and private sectors received less roles in this panel.

Closing: about the project

  • At the end of the exhibition, a brief explanation about the program was displayed. The program timeline and activities, along with its documentation were also attached.

Community Expo

In addition to these two main activities, the forum was enlivened by a Community Expo featuring interactive booths, community discussions, and art performances from various youth groups. We invited six youth communities representing prioritised domains in Solo (literacy, health, circular economy, waste management, disability and social inclusion, and urban mobility) to promote their initiatives, invite other participants to join their communities, and broaden young people’s perspective in understanding the various ways in which young people play a role in the city.

In cities unfamiliar with collective reading, this activity is sometimes seen as ‘illegal.’ In some places, book stalls were approached by authorities due to fears of spreading new ideologies.

said a representative of the Solo Book Party community.

Community activities: (Top-left) Community mini-talkshow, (Top-center) Pleasant environment in the booth, (Top-right) Traditional dance performance by a local community, (Bottom) A visitor learns sign language from a Deaf community member

In addition, we also invited youth representatives to perform traditional dances and stand-up comedy, celebrating youth creative expressions towards their city. All collaborators were encouraged to share their initiatives, campaigns, and projects through short talkshow sessions in between performances. ‘Disability is still not inclusively involved in city development,’ an advisor of PPRBM Solo shared, ‘In Solo, it has started, but discrimination is still very visible in the surrounding regencies.’

Performance lecture: a creative exploration in presenting the research

A participatory theatre performance entitled ‘Solo = bukan sendiri’ (Solo = not alone) by Tilik Sarira, Kota Kita, Luwarta, and Kelompok Bermain Bakat, which interprets the research results, particularly regarding barriers to young people’s participation in the city, in the form of a performance. Audiences were encouraged to participate in this performance by giving reactions and emojis.

Performance lecture: (Top-left) Audiences engage with the performance, (Top-center) The research results presented by the Tilik Sarira dancers, (Top-right) The YUP team, Aci and Alma share a short speech on youth activism dynamics in the city, (Bottom left and right) CSs Afnan and Yustika perform a rap reflecting youth activism in the city

We hope that Youth City Fora in Solo will not only serve as a space for sharing information, but also encourage collaboration and shared commitment to strengthening citizen participation in envisioning and shaping the city. Moving forward, we aim to involve these communities in the digital co-production process, through a platform designed to uphold and promote their right to influence the city’s future.

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