Youth cultures in the new century: Cultural citizenship and cosmopolitanism

It is well known that when youth cultures are debated outside specialised circles, common sentiments tend to prevail, predominantly negative in nature. Youth cultures - above all in the European context - are held to be almost perfectly in line with the logic of the market, and confined within dominant spatial/temporal organization. However, if we look at the experts' views of these issues the picture becomes more nuanced. On one hand the literature underlines the strong temporal pressure that young people are subject to, made tangible by the fast pace of life in cities, together with the tendency of cities to transform historical space into abstract space. Today youth cultures bear the marks of the cult of immediacy, held to be one of the consequences - perhaps one of the most visible - of high-speed society. On the other hand, research highlights direct and indirect youth experimentation in the field of citizenship rights, and 'cultural citizenship' in particular. This chapter focuses on various dimensions that, taken singly or together, help highlight structural elements of the relationship between cultural citizen­ship practices and forms of 'domestication' of the spaces-times of everyday life in cities.