<![CDATA[This article examines how young people in a mid-sized Indonesian city participate in producing the meaning of urban space, and how far a participatory communication intervention succeeds in opening dialogue with city stakeholders. Urban communication scholarship has developed primarily around metropolitan cities in the Global North, while participatory communication research often assumes that facilitated dialogue leads to empowerment. This article addresses both gaps through a Photovoice study conducted in Kediri, East Java, involving 37 young people from three social typologies: pelajar (students), santri (Islamic boarding school-affiliated youth), and pekerja/wirausaha (young workers and entrepreneurs). Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial triad and Couldry’s concept of voice, the analysis shows that young people critically and unevenly interpret the city’s materiality, producing readings that diverge from the government’s official branding of Kediri as a harmonious service city. The exhibition that concluded the Photovoice process also fostered a collective youth voice, functioning as a counterpublic space. However, the intervention did not create a dialogic space with city stakeholders. Despite direct invitations, no city official attended, revealing structural conditions—including reliance on an informal invitation channel and a governance culture that treats experiential knowledge as secondary—that constrain participatory communication in practice. These findings extend urban communication scholarship to a mid-sized city in the Global South, reposition youth as producers rather than recipients of urban meaning, and refine the concept of the communicative city by specifying the conditions under which citizen voice translates into influence. Keywords: Youth, Photovoice, participatory communication, Kediri, urban communication]]>
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