This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature on youth engagement in policy advocacy in the context of municipal youth councils. First, the organizational structure, membership, and activities of youth councils are presented. Then, the prevalence and trends of youth councils in the US and internationally are discussed. A case exemplar of the Boston Mayor’s Youth Council and its youth-led participatory budgeting process is presented to illuminate key principles and practices of municipal youth councils, including the benefits and barriers of youth engagement on youth and communities. Then, the literature pertaining to power and empowerment processes in youth policy advocacy is reviewed, including key features of youth councils that can facilitate or impede psychological empowerment and community power. The chapter concludes with a review of implications for practitioners, leaders, policymakers, funders, and other stakeholders, as well as areas for future research.

This chapter compares the ways that two similarly sized cities, Chicago and Amsterdam, have chosen to govern their streets. Chicago sold a seventy-five-year concession to manage street parking to a consortium of private investors, whereas Amsterdam’s government maintains the ability to directly govern its streets. In turn, Chicago is an illustration of how privatization of a common good according to money-lending logics, far from allowing for flexibility and efficient governance, completely prevents a city from changing with the times. Chicago has lost control over its own streets and can no longer decide what their best use is without paying an extortionate price. Any governing of a shared communal space that has a broader concern than generating profit for a private corporation is here effectively undermined by allowing marketized parking. For the purposes of this book, the Chicago/Amsterdam comparison illustrates the limitations of using privatized business actors to efficiently govern shared city space. It also serves as a counterexample to the neoliberal dogma that government should abstain from planning, because their attempts at doing so cannot outperform the market.