ALL FOR IMPACT, IMPACT FOR ALL. Meaningful youth participation in Riga

In the late 2025, an Erasmus+ project named MC-YOU concluded where I was working as an expert for the Riga municipality. It was dedicated to involving youth creating their own visions of Riga in Minecraft Education. Here's our journey on how we managed to switch from "youth participation" to "youth impact" - by providing tools, steps and agreements where participants could experience real change in the city.

Certainly, you have at some point witnessed a process or a project where children and youth are involved. And you have most likely realized that this involvement is most often merely decorative or even manipulative – someone draws something nice, young people comment on processes in which they have no real chance to change anything, or participation is confused with entertainment. As a result, there is no real impact on the artwork, urban environment or content.

On “Resilient Cities with Minecraft: an innovative youth-led policy process for a sustainable Europe (MC-YOU)”, my main goal was to convince project partners that the essence of MC-YOU is not to reach a few dozen students and a couple of teachers in 3 European cities (Riga, Portugal and Bulgaria), so that student teams could “fantasize about something” in Minecraft Education while the municipalities feel good about it.

My main goal was to prove that in Riga we have already done this (Interreg project “UrbCultural” in 2020 or the Riga Building Championship in 2021), but real impact on the urban environment has been missing. Of course, student teams have good memories and the municipality has used modern tools, but the process does not result in real changes in the city environment – but in a contemporary city, it's not even close to enough.

Recreation of Latvian National Opera and Balet in Minecraft Education during the Riga Building Championship. Riga Classical gymnasium, 2021.

In MC-YOU, the fundamental aspect was that involvement must be real – not entertaining and not even consultative, but based on partnership and co-creation. The Block by Block project in Kosovo in 2016 served as inspiration, where children created their vision in Minecraft for a non-existent square and skatepark, and a few years later much of it was built as envisioned. Another excellent example was the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art’s project “The Artist is Present” (2023–2024), where students were equal co-authors of artworks rather than consultants.

Finally, the Homo Novus festival project “The Book of Riga” (2023–2024), in which pupils co-created both content and actual impact in urban space with their own imagined urban object – "a monument to the taste of lemon" (initially located at Andrejs Pumpurs Riga Primary School No. 11, now located at the courtyard of the eS14 Community Centre in Sarkandaugava).

The monument to the taste of lemon. Aivars Ivbulis, 2024.

The minimum Erasmus+ requirements of MC-YOU were based on forming at least 5 teams among schools, creating Minecraft visions for at least 5 public outdoor spaces, and involving 25 participants. In Riga, our goal from the beginning was to find places that are “waiting” – where the municipality is planning something but has not yet done it, so that team members could realistically influence the development sequence; ideally these places would also be interesting for our young participants themselves. Moreover, we encouraged student involvement in a sense where each participant could become an ambassador and guardian of their envisioned place.

There is a saying – what you create yourself, you will not destroy.

As a result, instead of the desired 25, more than 100 pupils (mostly aged 11–17) and at least 12 educators from 10 schools in Riga applied for the initial trainings and workshops.

First, participants had to attend a practical introductory workshop, during which the "Sustainable Resilient Cities Toolkit" we developed at the beginning of MC-YOU was used. Working in groups and discussing together, children and teachers learned about the MC-YOU’s themes relevant for better urban development – who and why plans cities, what sustainability, resilience, circularity and “cities for people” are, why youth participation is important, what gamification is, 15-minute cities, etc. In parallel to the trainings, each team visited their selected location in Riga to get to know it in reality, while teachers received training to refresh or learn new Minecraft skills.

Teams at work during the training. Mārtiņš Eņģelis, 2024.

The most important preparatory part were the special “Dates with the City”, where various experts in landscape architecture, circularity, UNESCO, planning and others, as well as neighborhood association representatives and organizations linked to the selected locations, introduced teams to the actual context – hopes, limitations, opportunities and needs. Many of the presenters later became jury members for evaluating the final submissions.

One might think that the creative wings pupils were slightly “trimmed” – they had to create visions not as their heart desired but within a certain frame. But the essence of these consultations was different – to help teams understand the context early on, the existing constraints, and to listen to residents’ and users’ wishes so that the visions would be prepared as well as possible, making it harder for the municipality to reject them or call them “children’s fantasies”.

Our goal was to create visions that are reliable and have the power to “put a foot in the door” and truly influence development. Essentially, the project employed a bottom-up approach – the municipality sets the framework, but filling it with content and arguments is delegated to the pupils. 

Eventually, ten teams from 7 schools submitted their visions. To defend the ideas in front of the jury and the audience, a special MC-YOU final event was organized – the Children and Youth Participation Conference. There, presentations were given not only by experts of child and youth participation but also by the MC-YOU finalists themselves – Riga Technical Youth Creativity House “Annas 2”, the private school “LATREIA” and Riga Bolderāja Music and Art School (RBMMS). These three were the teams that, in the jury’s opinion, offered the most interesting, well-reasoned and developed visions. One focused on the development of the Briāna/Palīdzības Street square (“Annas 2”) and two on arranging the Bolderāja branch library courtyard (LATREIA and RBMMS).

At the Children and youth participation conference. Andrejs Strokins, 2025.

The MC-YOU vision competition was won by a wide margin by the “Block Busters” team from Annas 2, earning a ticket to the MC-YOU's closing event in Brussels. Their strengths were clearly the visible enthusiasm and heartfelt presentation, but they also demonstrated clear understanding of the project’s themes – sustainability, resilience, human-centered cities, gamification – and an ability to integrate jury recommendations into their vision.

“Block Busters” proved to both the jury and conference attendees (who also voted for the teams and shared half the power of the final result) that students can prepare a creative yet credible, high-quality vision. In the Briāna/Palīdzības Street square, the team “renewed” the sewerage system, installed new smart lighting with solar panels, artificial intelligence security cameras and sorting bins (in which, by collecting points, you can receive a pastry as a reward!). They also significantly increased greenery with shrubs and flower beds, installed birdhouses and a water tap, and restored the historic fountain. A lot of space in the park was devoted to sports infrastructure and creative initiatives – wall murals, a small “healthy” café and, most importantly, they proposed transforming the square into a sculpture park.

Briāna/Palīdzības Street square now.

Of course, in reality there will not be enough space for everything mentioned in the vision. But that is not important – what matters is that each of the innovations, suggestions or ideas can be integrated into the square’s development concept. To achieve this, at the end of the project, the winning team met with municipal institution specialists and representatives of the city council to agree on three real phases over for implementing the team’s Minecraft vision. The result is excellent – already this summer in 2026 the square will undergo its first infrastructure improvements, and it is expected that within the next 3–5 years it will be fully renovated according to the team’s vision.

City council members and specialists meet with the winners do set next steps on renovating the square. Arta Sauleviča, 2025.

Involving children and young people is always a joy. They are still ready to make mistakes, so the ideas born in their minds are more exciting and often provide answers to questions that adults no longer know or dare to answer.

But it is unacceptable to involve them symbolically or decoratively only for better PR.

At Riga City Municipality, we are trying to learn from this, and “participation” – co-creation, partnership and impact – are the right keywords for change. Everyone has the right to become part of the cake, not just serve as the cherry on top. Therefore, if we cannot ensure equal participation of children and youth in creating impact in public space and improving their abilities (so they not only have desire, interest and rights but also skills), then we should think twice – perhaps it is not participation but deception.