Space, Scale and the Governance of Youth Trajectories and Transitions in Europe

In this chapter we focus on the relationship between space and the governing of youth transitions in Europe. We will be examining the ways in which spatial processes and relations are both a mechanism and an outcome of strategies of governing education trajectories, and that this has important consequences for youth concerning both access to, and the relevance of education (Soja, 1996, p. 71; Massey, 2005, p. 62). We also highlight the coping strategies of these youth, spread across 24 cities and eight countries of Europe. We begin by pointing out that space and scale were not explicit concepts in GOETE’s research design and empirical enquiry, though they are implicit in the idea of governance. Yet it became clear through the research that changing governance regimes were both spatially selective, and constitutive of new social relations. This raised the question for us of how best to bring the spatial into our analysis of governance so as to reveal spatially-organised social relations? One way is to focus on scale – which is a particular spatial idea which we have ourselves been developing in other research projects (Robertson et al., 2002; Kazepov, 2010). However, this would also limit the insights a more comprehensive spatial approach would offer. We therefore take up Jessop et al. (2008) socio-spatial categories; of ‘territory’, ‘place’, ‘scale’, ‘network’ and ‘positionality’, and extend it with the idea of ‘lived space’ (Lefebvre, 1984). The substantive focus of this chapter will be to apply these analytical elements to the empirical findings of the GOETE project to highlight the increasing complexity that governance arrangements addressing educational transitions face, and which contribute new spatial arrangements and social out-comes, on the other.