Young Citizen Scientists: Participation Infrastructure for Evidence-Based Urban Governance

Effective urban governance depends on accurate, timely, and locally grounded data -yet the communities most affected by housing inadequacy are the least likely to be meaningfully represented in the evidence that drives policy. This lecture presents youth citizen science as a structural response to this gap: a model in which young residents are trained as data collectors and community researchers, generating robust evidence on housing conditions, neighborhood quality, and service access. Drawing on programmes delivered by Politecnico di Milano and CatalyticAction across multiple cities, it demonstrates that youth citizen science is not a participation exercise but a governance infrastructure -one that makes policy decisions more legitimate, more accurate, and more responsive. The lecture offers a replicable model for cities seeking to embed community-generated evidence into formal decision-making systems.