YouthMove15 joins symposium

Luana Silveri will speak at the symposium with the title Rethinking freedom in a car-centred city: Challenging assumptions about the 15-minute city, held on 7 October 2026 in Amsterdam.
She will present “Whose Fifteen Minutes? How the 15-Minute City plans children out, and What YouthMove15 Proposes Instead” (co-authored with Lucy Avraamidou) to share the first findings of the YouthMove15 project.
After the review of 74 studies on proximity, mobility and participation among children (8-16) it is clear that the concept of 15-min rebuilds the adult city at a smaller scale: adult walking speeds, adults needs and desires, adult planners. 

Children and young people are left out. 

Three problems are evident in the literature. Standard proximity metrics overstate what children can actually reach. Children themselves judge nearness by route familiarity, peer geography and permission, none of which existing indicators capture. Moreover, participation remains extractive, with children's knowledge gathered and then set aside, because municipalities rarely decide in advance what they intend to do with it and this is what YouthMove15 wants to address as the starting point for envisioning more sustainable, equal and just cities. During the symposium Luana will discuss how these findings are now being utilised to the project's next phase as design requirements, so that the Living Labs become a real opportunity to make young people's voices count.

About the project. YouthMove15 (Youth-centric Mobility and Activity in the
15-minute City, 2026–2028) is funded under theDriving Urban Transitions partnership.
The project works towards cities that move at a child's steps, giving young people a voice in the planning phase and closing the gap between children's visions about future cities and the opportunities cities currently offer them. Five Urban Living Labs; in Brussels, Lisbon, Oxford, Groningen and Budapest; translate this research into a co-created set of tools, programmes and policy guidance.
The consortium brings together 26 organisations across five countries and is coordinated by Vrije Universiteit Brussel. From the Netherlands, Lucy Avraamidou and Luana Silveri (CLT) are part of the consortium, working in collaboration with Wijkcentrum Trefpunt in Groningen.