Precarious Youthspaces of Work and Diverse Economies in the EU South: A Conceptualization Attempt

Abstract

Youth disengagement is widespread in the less developed regions of advanced capitalism, and precarity is constantly (re)produced in the youth labour markets there. In this context, ‘diverse economies’ such as the social economy (SE) and the digital platform-induced sharing economy (DPSE) have emerged as policy solutions to pressing social, economic and environmental challenges, particularly in the south of the EU. However, most relevant studies examine labour in these new economies without considering the socio-spatial and political factors at play. This article proposes a spatially sensitive conceptualization of the relationship between youth disengagement and employment in the SE and DPSE. Drawing on key concepts from critical geography and geographical political economy, as well as recent research on the spatiality of youth, the article suggests that contemporary ‘precarious youthspaces of work’ are created by—and embedded in—‘dismantled techno-spatial fixes’ and discusses the reciprocal relationship between such youthspaces and diverse economies.

Introduction

The successive socio-economic crises of the last two decades have led to a deepening of inequalities and a new mosaic of winners and losers. In this context, youth unemployment and inactivity are rampant in the less developed regions, and precarity is repeatedly (re)produced in certain youth labour markets. Two forms of diverse economies have recently gained prominence as political and academic responses to the labour market crises: the social economy (SE) and digital platform-induced sharing economy (DPSE). These two distinct—though in some cases overlapping—economic practices have been described as opportunities for sustainable employment for youth (Dirgová et al., 2018; Heinrichs, 2013; Kenney & Zysman, 2020). Despite intense debate, there is no framework that explores the relationship between youth disengagement and these economies. Moreover, while diverse economies are deployed as solutions to local and regional problems in youth labour markets, their spatial dimensions remain understudied.

Indeed, most youth studies and EU policy frameworks (e.g. the Youth Guarantee) take a depoliticized, despatialized and abstract approach that lacks connections to broader restructuring trends and the changing economic geography of capitalism at a variety of scales (e.g., Causadias & Umaña-Taylor, 2018; Curran & Wexler, 2017; Sanderson, 2020). Similarly, the new forms of work emerging in diverse economies are often studied without a focus on youth and without critical consideration of the socio-spatial and political context in which such practices take place (e.g., Gómez & Hospido, 2022; Ko & Liu, 2021; Rani & Furrer, 2021; Tykkyläinen & Ritala, 2021).

To address this gap, this conceptual paper draws on concepts from critical geography and geographical political economy to offer a new, spatially sensitive conceptualization of the relationship between youth disengagement and diverse economies. In this context, we show how techno-spatial fixes can be brought together with recent research on the spatiality of youth to provide a new approach to work precarity and the employment alternatives promised by SE and DPSE. To this end, and drawing upon Farrugia (2018), ¹ we introduce the concept of ‘precarious youthspaces of work’ to develop a more nuanced understanding of how, when and where youthspaces become precarious. Specifically, we focus on recent empirically grounded studies on the spatio-temporal expansion of young people Not in Employment, Education or Training (young NEETs), which reflects a range of different social conditions connected to precarity, and analyse the development of SE and DPSE based on the relevant literature. The article argues that what we call ‘dismantled techno-spatial fixes’ contribute to increasing precarity in the youth labour markets of less developed regions, particularly through the reproduction of ‘precarious youthspaces of work’, and that diverse economies do not stop this process, but rather become part of it.

This conceptual paper attempts to offer a new perspective on youth disengagement and precarity by linking previously unconnected or disparate pieces in a novel way (theory synthesis) and integrating existing knowledge into the existing body of literature (Jaakkola, 2020). To this end, we analyse recent work published in peer-reviewed publications between 2017 and 2023, including theoretical and empirical studies on youth disengagement and related spatial factors, as well as evidence-based work on employment conditions in SE and DPSE. Although our methodology does not involve an exhaustive and systematic review of the relevant literature, it does provide a thorough understanding of the issues at hand and recent debates in academia. After a brief overview of these studies, the article attempts a synthesis between the above theoretical concepts and the empirical results of relevant papers in order to develop a theory on previously unexamined relationships. For reasons of space and clarity, the geographical scope is limited to the peripheral and less developed regions of the EU South, particularly in Greece, southern Italy and Spain. These regions provide a significant vantage point for a comparative overview and in-depth understanding of youth precarity and diverse economies and dynamics at play in areas with high unemployment and low-skilled jobs.

The SE and the DPSE differ in their structure and history and are not usually analysed comparatively, but they share some common features in terms of their impact on youth employment. The SE, which has recently been promoted by various institutions as a response to inequality and unemployment, has its origins in agricultural cooperatives and non-governmental organizations, which have traditionally acted as providers of social services, in the absence of strong welfare systems in different regions. It constitutes a ‘third sector’ where production is organized in an alternative way and includes collective work experiments that adopt a bottom-up organization and democratic processes. The SE is expected to provide better quality employment for vulnerable populations and a fairer economy in general, balancing (financial) sustainability with social, political or environmental objectives (Gritzas & Kavoulakos, 2016; Moulaert & Ailenei, 2005).

The DPSE, on the other hand, is an emerging socio-economic activity that involves a variety of diverse platform-based transactions between peers or businesses with tangible or intangible assets. Through digital platforms, otherwise idle assets such as ideas, knowledge, experiences, products and services are exchanged within physical and online communities. The diversity of transactions that take place in this context is reflected in the abundance of terms and categorizations of DPSE. Gibson-Graham (2008), for example, highlights the distinction between the ‘transactional’ and ‘transformational’ DPSE. The former is primarily motivated by profit and resource efficiency and is typically represented by large commercial platforms such as Airbnb, Uber and TaskRabbit, while the latter focuses on building social capital and resilience at the community level through collaboration and co-production (Gibson-Graham & Dombroski, 2020). After about a decade of growth, transactional DPSE has become the linchpin for the circulation of venture capital and value creation (Langley & Leyshon, 2017) in the context of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2016).

In what follows, we provide a review of the critical literature on youth, arguing for an advanced theorization of the role of spatiality based on relevant empirical studies. To this end, the second section contextualizes how contemporary youthspaces of work are shaped by the mutually constitutive and often contested relationship between successive ‘techno-spatial fixes’ (Harvey, 1978) and increasing youth precarity. We then, in the third section, examine the ways SE and DPSE are situated within the global organization of capital and labour, as well as their embeddedness in local economic trajectories and precarious regimes. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of our findings, including how uneven socio-spatial development and the spread of diverse economies shape precarious youthspaces of work.

Space, Employment and Youth

Mainstream analyses typically understand youth in terms of a universal developmental temporality that culminates in adulthood and is signified by the achievement of certain milestones. The transition from childhood to adulthood is mainly analysed by focusing on the biographical age at which young people take up full-time employment and leave the parental home. This approach is reflected in prevailing social policies centred around youth development, in which the relationship between youth and adulthood is mediated by labour market participation. This perception of youth transitions has become part of neoliberal approaches to global economic development and ‘underdevelopment’, as these approaches view youth development in terms of the accumulation of abstract human capital that enables both young people and local and national economies to be economically competitive (Farrugia, 2018). The now well-established critique of this concept is that it is based on normative assumptions about the nature of youth and appears to ignore the structural realities faced by young workers that ‘lengthen’ the youth period and make efficient youth transitions more difficult.

In brief, millions of young people around the world can no longer find a job by the age of 18 that offers them financial and housing independence, as was the case in much of the industrialized world in the 1970s (Thomson, 2011). Post-secondary education has gradually become a prerequisite for training young people to become workers (Farrugia, 2021), extending the transition to the labour market and in turn contributing to the late(r)-in-age family formation. Youth labour markets are increasingly competitive, even for well-educated young people and disadvantaged youth face significant barriers to educational participation and labour market entry. In this context, whether, when and how young people reach certain milestones is a highly uneven process that differs across regions of advanced capitalism in terms of local dynamics of disadvantage and the nature of local and regional labour markets.

There is a wealth of empirical evidence on how youth biographies are intertwined with spatial restructuring and processes of economic change at different geographical scales (Avagianou et al., 2022b, 2022c; Crisp & Powell, 2017; Emmanouil et al., 2019, 2023; Gialis & Kapitsinis, 2020; Kapitsinis et al., 2022). Many of these studies show that certain regional characteristics, such as economic growth rates and productive overspecialization, are key determinants of youth disengagement (Demidova et al., 2013; Kapitsinis et al., 2022; Liotti, 2020). For example, less affluent EU regions, such as those in the south of Italy and the peripheral areas of Greece, have the highest NEET rates. The predominance of the agricultural sector in many peripheral regions in the south of the EU is a factor contributing to the poor employment opportunities and socio-economically and culturally deprived youthspaces in these regions. In addition, regions with a less diversified or underdeveloped tertiary sector tend to have higher youth unemployment rates (Avagianou et al., 2022c). Overall, spatially distributed resources and local labour market structures, which change in the course of global capital flows, are central to understanding the dissimilar (life and work) paths of youth (Avagianou et al., 2022b; Farrugia, 2018; Katz, 2004).

The explicit reworking of these changes has led to calls for a re-theorization of youth that goes beyond abstract notions of development and human capital, and an emerging ontological and epistemological shift has gradually located youth as a spatially heterogeneous phenomenon that is intertwined with the production of space (Farrugia, 2018). This approach has developed through interdisciplinary dialogue between youth studies, sociology and critical geography and considers youth as part of the spatialities of labour markets and education systems, highlighting the cultural distinctions between youth and adulthood as they are enacted locally. In what follows, our article develops this emerging framework in new directions by considering the way that ‘techno-spatial fixes’ contribute to the production of precarious spaces of youth.

Techno-Spatial Fixes and the Production of Precarious Youthspaces of Work

As indicated earlier, many relevant studies decouple youth inactivity from the deeper forces driving labour market restructuring and tend to analyse youth unemployment from the perspective of simplistic mismatches between supply and demand. In this way, these analyses neglect the ambivalent relationship of young workers to capitalist restructuring in space (McDonald et al., 2010). In contrast, contributions from critical geography and geographical political economy can better explain how capital ‘opens up’ new markets through geographical expansion and by restructuring firms and sectors that are not profitable. In this way, employers often address labour shortages by shifting surpluses created in previous rounds of accumulation to regions of cheap and non-unionized (young) labour (Harvey, 2001). A surplus of wage labour in places with capital shortages, on the other hand, leads to strong waves of persistent (youth) migration to places with labour shortages and capital surpluses.

This dynamic process of spatio-temporal accumulation is well captured by Harvey’s ‘spatial fix’, a concept that has not yet had an impact on youth studies. Spatial fixes are inherently contradictory, reflecting both the tendency of capital to overcome overaccumulation through the production of new profitable spaces, and at the same time, the fixation of capital to particular places through the production of immobile assets (e.g., buildings) and the built environment. The new ‘fixed capital formations’ created by the ‘capital switching’ from the primary to the secondary circuit provide a profitable temporary solution while contributing to the emergence of future recessions. In other words, spatial fixes create landscapes and spaces for capital to produce surpluses and flows, only to subsequently destroy them (Harvey, 1978), and therefore embody both the production of space and the creation of crises in local and regional labour markets as part of capitalist accumulation.

More recent contributions have attempted to expand the conceptual depth and scope of spatial fix in order to capture new tendencies in the escalating ‘annihilation of space by time’ (Massey, 2005). In this framework, ‘techno-spatial’ fixes (Wang et al., 2022) are new physical, technological and digital infrastructures that accelerate the mobility of goods, people, information and ideas across space and are thus used to ‘fix’ overaccumulation by reshaping not only physical but also digital landscapes. For example, large transactional DPSE firms have increased their profits by employing certain groups of young workers that reside in the less developed regions of advance capitalism. These techno-spatial fixes produce new spaces, such as the co-working spaces inhabited by young IT entrepreneurs in metropolitan Athens or Naples or even in smaller cities like Murcia and Nicosia. The latter entrepreneurs may be employed by platform giants headquartered on the US West Coast, revealing the uneven spatial distribution of value creation across the two edges of the IT industry value chain (Kenney & Zysman, 2020). The successive rounds of techno-spatial fixes result in constantly redrawn segmentation lines between the ‘developed’ and the ‘less developed’ regions as part of the broader neoliberal restructuring (Wang et al., 2022).

Based on the above, we argue that techno-spatial fixes can steer research on youthspaces in a new direction. In particular, successive rounds of such fixes create the fertile ground on which new youthspaces of work flourish. These youthspaces are in turn, inheriting the internal qualities of the various techno-spatial fixes in which they are embedded and within which they emerge (Smith, 2010). For example, youthspaces that emerge through the robust spatial fixes reshaping the landscapes of core cities and metropolitan regions of advanced capitalism are relatively more resilient and can recover more easily from multiple shocks than the youthspaces produced by dismantled fixes in peripheral and left-behind localities or regions (Gialis & Leontidou, 2016; Gourzis & Gialis, 2019; Lang & Török, 2017). Examples of the latter type of youthspaces, which we refer to as precarious youthspaces of work, are found in the suburban ghettos, rural places or geographically fragmented, remote areas of both the Global North and South. Precarious youthspaces of work are, thus, spaces of dense overconcentrations of precariously employed young people and are largely characterized by poor working conditions due to the ‘dismantled techno-spatial fixes’ in which they emerged.

Precarious youthspaces of work typically flourish in areas of (a) poor infrastructure and inadequate social services, including transport, health, education, culture, leisure and technological infrastructure; (b) backward production structures, various informalities and economic (over)specialization in labour-intensive industries and (c) insufficient availability of highly skilled jobs combined with a lack of good employment opportunities (Meyer & Leibert, 2021).

An exemplary case of how successive techno-spatial fixes have gradually shaped productive peculiarities and ‘negative idiosyncrasies’ can be found in the study of southern EU regions. These regions have been lagging behind for decades, and since the introduction of the single currency, their situation has worsened (Gourzis & Gialis, 2019). Instead of leading to regional convergence, free market mechanisms have exacerbated the inequality of value flows and further weakened markets and workers in the regions of the ‘periphery’. The redistribution of capital from the underperforming primary circuit to the secondary circuit led to prolonged stagnation and significant productivity losses, especially during the Great Recession. As a result, the economies of the south became even more dependent on construction activities and massive tourism (Gourzis & Gialis, 2019; Hadjimichalis & Hudson, 2014). At the same time, poor spatial planning and sub-protective social benefits contributed to the deterioration of youth labour markets in those economies (Gourzis & Gialis, 2019).

As a result, the lack of robust techno-spatial fixes reshaping the landscapes of Greece, (southern) Italy, Spain or Portugal has led to a proliferation of precarious youthspaces of work in these regions. High unemployment rates increasingly went hand in hand with exploitative, short-term, low-paid or atypical employment opportunities and a ‘low road’ pathway to post-Fordist flexibilization, deepening wage inequality and leading to increasing social polarization (Gialis & Taylor, 2016; Hadjimichalis, 2011). The COVID-19 pandemic emerged when several youthspaces of work in the south of the EU faced high levels of youth disengagement due to the ‘Great Recession’ and the effects of the refugee crisis (Avagianou et al., 2022c; Papadakis et al., 2020), resulting in some of the highest NEET rates in the EU. ² Youthspaces in rural areas were and still are even more marginalized and underdeveloped, as young people there are exposed to the greater work-related precarity of seasonal harvesting and agro-tourism activities. The migration of young people to the North (i.e., brain drain) has led to a demographic shrinkage of the southern youthspaces (Lang, 2013), exacerbating the vicious cycle of socio-economic inequalities (Naumann & Reichert-Schick, 2013). In this way, youthspaces of work are stigmatized as underperforming or ‘negative’ spaces that are full of barriers and offer few opportunities to the young citizens of the EU south (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005; Meyer & Leibert, 2021; Thrift, 2008; Willett & Lang, 2018).

Precarious Youthspaces of Work and Diverse Economies

After documenting the interrelationship between techno-spatial fixes and youthspaces of work, we argue that techno-spatial fixes are inevitably linked, either directly or indirectly, to the development of diverse economies, and that the youthspaces of SE and DPSE work provide a lens through which the dynamic interrelationship between techno-spatial fixes and precarity can be thoroughly examined.

To start with, there are certain antinomies that characterize contemporary youthspaces of work in SE and DPSE. These arise from the different production, exchange and governance processes (Gibson-Graham & Dombroski, 2020; Jonas, 2013) of these two types of economies, but also from the multiple factors that contribute to their expansion. SE and DPSE are promoted by both state and civil society actors, and the context in which these economies take place has a decisive influence on their development. For example, transnational institutions, neoliberal markets and states actively promote SE and DPSE as forms of social and technological innovation (see the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) that supposedly offer viable solutions to pressing economic, social and environmental problems (Díaz-Foncea & Marcuello, 2012; Dirgová et al., 2018; Gros & Alcidi, 2013; McDowell & Christopherson, 2009). Also, young people and grassroots movements are turning to diverse economic practices and alternative livelihood strategies to resist austerity and counterbalance the ineffectiveness of capitalist socio-economic processes. The implications of the above are below studied first for SE and then for DPSE.

Social Economy

Local path dependencies, involving social, cultural, productive, political and religious patterns, as well as broader socio-spatial dynamics, are crucial to the geographically uneven growth of the SE (Avagianou et al., 2022a; Lang, 2008, p. 36; Westlund, 2003). The paternalistic economic practices and weak welfare systems in the EU South have contributed to the development of a long tradition of collective and collaborative ventures that address local needs that were otherwise unmet (van Twuijver et al., 2020). Despite recent and robust support for various SE incentives, relevant studies show that the sector’s contribution to stable youth employment remains low in most EU economies (Avagianou et al., 2022a). This contribution is even lower in the local economies of the least prosperous peripheral regions (Kerlin, 2009). Indeed, the highest shares of employment in SE over total paid employment are in Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands, while some of the lowest shares are in southern and eastern EU Member States (Dachs, 2018). The different ways through which SE is perceived and regulated are, then, crucial for its development across and within countries.

Government support for SE in countries like Greece, Cyprus and Italy is usually ineffective and often not realized. In its absence, social enterprises turn to private funding and market-oriented practices to ensure their survival, thereby prioritizing commercial outcomes over social goals and values (Avagianou et al., 2022a). In this context, the embeddedness of social enterprises in capitalist circuits turns them into hybrid firms that are neither ‘alternative/radical’ nor ‘mainstream/dominant’ (Avagianou et al., 2022a; Hall & Wilton, 2011; Nicholls & Teasdale, 2017). The hybridization of SE has raised concerns that contact with markets and the ‘adoption’ of local market characteristics are affecting the governance of social enterprises and are associated with a devaluation of labour and the reproduction of precarious employment (Avagianou et al., 2022a; Doherty et al., 2014). At the same time, social enterprises that disregard market mechanisms and pursue their social aims through volunteers also create relatively poor-quality jobs and do not contribute to the social inclusion of young people with disabilities (Hall & Wilton, 2011). Short-term, insecure employment, low-skilled internships and other semi-informal jobs are indeed often the only jobs offered to young people by different types of social enterprises. Social enterprises operating in the peripheral regions of the EU South adopt the specificities of their local economies and techno-spatial fixes (van Twuijver et al., 2020).

Although many SE firms have for decades now sought to include different groups of workers who were normally excluded from the labour market, such as the low-skilled or long-term unemployed who are able to work (Davister et al., 2004), the quality of work for these workers in the SE remains low. For example, despite of that participation, especially of young women, in SE enterprises is increasing over time (Vidal, 2005), disadvantaged groups of young people (including NEETs) are less likely to (re)enter the labour market after their first contract or internship in a social enterprise has expired. Recent studies have found that a large proportion of SE entrepreneurs and employees are individuals with high skills, meaning that the vast majority of vulnerable young people do not find a job in SE (Avagianou et al., 2022a). As a result, SE has not become, at least so far, a true and large-scale alternative for those that need it more than anyone (i.e. the vulnerable youth of marginalized areas).

On this basis, we argue that the dismantled techno-spatial fixes in the southern EU have a decisive impact on the extent and quality of SE, which in turn leads to the reproduction of precarity in youthspaces of work. The latter youthspaces are defined by short-term, precarious employment or fragile internships offered to young people by different types of social enterprises. Young people engaged in SE experience precarity either as entrepreneurs (trying to reconcile social goals with financial sustainability) or as precariously employed workers of a social enterprise. The integration of ‘vulnerable’ groups of young people—through employment—is a legal obligation for certain types of social enterprises. However, the usually short-term employment offered within the SE does not provide workers with the opportunity to acquire and develop skills and does not adequately support the operation of the social enterprise itself. As a result, social enterprises fail to integrate young people in less developed regions and often become spaces where precarity is reproduced.

Digital Platform-Induced Sharing Economy

Expanding DPSE creates new employment conditions, both in digital and physical youthspaces of work. Platform workers, responding to prompts on digital apps, are dispersed across geographical areas, and yet participate in a digital labour market that is ‘both fixed in a particular digital place and simultaneously accessible from anywhere’. This ‘illusion’ of being a member of a planetary workforce (Johnston, 2020) is very attractive to young people, especially those living in peripheral regions where employment opportunities in local labour markets are limited. Indeed, several studies show that younger people are more likely to participate in DPSE than older groups (Farrell et al., 2018; Nielsen et al., 2022). However, this digital workspace is poorly regulated, and workers operate within an unclear or complicated framework that transcends national boundaries (Johnston, 2020). The inadequate regulation of DPSE platforms has raised significant concerns in regards to the quality of work and the limited bargaining power of young platform workers (Graham et al., 2017). Just-in-place DPSE labour, on the other hand, is platform-based but geographically bound (e.g., the food delivery platforms). The specificities of the local labour markets in which the different types of platform companies choose to operate have a significant impact on platform work. Platform workers must reconcile the abstract or absent framework of online work with the existing legal framework of the places where they work. As a result, platform work in different places is subject to the dynamic interaction between digital platforms, the state and workers’ struggles.

Although there are tangible and intangible benefits for a range of workers (Langley & Leyshon, 2017), overall, there are a plethora of risks and costs faced by young platform workers, such as precarity and technological control through algorithms (Graham et al., 2017). The recent study by Schor et al. (2020) on the satisfaction, autonomy and earnings of workers on and within platforms is revealing: Workers for whom platform work is complementary to other sources of work or income are more satisfied and have higher earnings than those who rely solely on platform work for their livelihood. According to the same study, platforms are realizing a new kind of opportunity hoarding by the more privileged segments of the middle class. Highly skilled workers are increasingly turning to DPSE to earn extra income due to increasing market destabilization and precarity (Schor, 2020). However, the ‘privileged young platform workers’ are also affected by precarity and the exploitative pressure to work longer hours. Young rideshare drivers and food delivery workers at the lower end of on-demand platforms are affected by precarity because they lack the employment benefits and entitlements (e.g., health insurance, annual leave and pensions) that permanent employees enjoy. In fact, many of these platforms operate as providers of casual labour without classifying young workers as employees. These are most likely to be young and low-skilled workers from the lowest income quartile (Ilsøe et al., 2021). As platforms lower wages and increase control (Langley & Leyshon, 2017; Schor et al., 2020), a growing number of young workers of all levels face precarity, isolation and disempowerment (Wells et al., 2021). In this context, platforms are participating in a ‘race to the bottom’ that increases worker exploitation and misery (Schor et al., 2020).

Precarity is high in both the digital and physical youthspaces of work in DPSE, especially those created by transactional sharing firms. In the absence of an adequate legal framework, DPSE is unable to address the constraints faced by young people in the least developed regions. The extended and highly-flexible working hours and constant surveillance that prevail in the digital workspaces of platforms blur the boundaries between the working and non-working lives of young workers. In addition to the precariousness that arises in digital youthspaces, young platform workers are also exposed to weather conditions and have a high risk of accidents and health problems (e.g., from pandemics). In this way, the negative externalities of dismantled techno-spatial fixes are amplified by DPSE, leading to further precarity and socio-spatial imbalances. As a result, both the digital and physical youthspaces (e.g., the city streets and squares in the peripheral areas where young drivers, couriers and delivery workers earn their living) are materialized as manifestations of precarious youthspaces of work.

Discussing the Reciprocal Relationship Between Precarious Youthspaces of Work and Diverse Economies

In this conceptual paper, we have presented a spatially sensitive conceptualization of the relationship between youth disengagement and employment opportunities in the SE and DPSE. Drawing on key concepts from critical geography and geographical political economy, as well as recent research on the spatiality of youth, we have argued that contemporary ‘precarious youthspaces of work’ are created by—and embedded in—the ‘dismantled techno-spatial fixes’ of the less developed regions. We also argued that diverse economies do not necessarily contribute to the formation of more inclusive youthspaces of work, but rather are part of the widening precarity. In doing so, we have considered broader theories of youth and the interplay between local labour market conditions and spatial restructuring in accumulation processes to develop a critique of the mainstream understanding of youth disengagement as an abstract, depoliticized and spatially insensitive phenomenon. Our potential contribution, then, goes beyond highlighting the already well-documented high levels of youth disengagement in the southern EU or summarizing the evidence on the reproduction of precarity through SE and DPSE. We rather aimed to offer a new conceptual framework for youth work and workers in less developed regions of advanced capitalism.

As documented above, there is a strong link between youth disengagement (e.g. high NEET rates) and the socio-economic and structural characteristics of certain regions. This is the case in several regions in the south of the EU, which are characterized by economic backwardness, overspecialization and insufficient access to education (Avagianou et al., 2022c; Demidova et al., 2013; Kapitsinis et al., 2022; Liotti, 2020). This link illustrates the importance of peripherality (and its structural, institutional and infrastructural deficiencies) for youth unemployment and inactivity as well as for the (re)production of work precarity. It became evident that different types of youthspaces are linked to the changing position of their hosting regions within the global organization of capital and labour. In the EU context, the dismantled techno-spatial fixes that shape the landscapes of the southern regions contribute to the production of precarious youthspaces of work. Given the interrelationship between youth and space described in the previous sections, the impact of increasing precarity on the young population is not only economic, social, political and occupational, but also psychological. The negative stereotypes associated with peripheral regions and the sense of powerlessness to influence regional development further contribute to precarity (Galani-Moutafi, 2013; Willett & Lang, 2018). This positions young people as a cheap and easily exploitable labour force, which Marx referred to as the reserve army of labour (Herod et al., 2021). The interaction between regional labour dynamics and techno-spatial fixes is therefore constitutive of the youth labour force and the regional inequalities that shape young people’s biographies.

Against this background, youth is an integral part of specific spatially grounded but geographically differentiated socio-economic processes. Young people’s life trajectories are not only determined by local characteristics or barriers, but are also linked to the emerging digital landscapes created by techno-economic innovations that traditional territorial boundaries (Thomson, 2011). Youthspaces place the dialectic of time and space at the centre of contemporary youth studies (Farrugia, 2018; Thomson, 2011) and highlight how different spaces shape the opportunities or constraints young people face and the agency they develop.

The development of diverse economies is varied and geographically uneven, but it does not seem to be succeeding in restoring sustainable employment growth for young people in peripheral areas. The proliferation of SE and DPSE is linked to the contradictory dynamics (top-down and bottom-up) that favour their promotion, as well as to the different social, economic, political and spatial contexts in which these practices take place and which are directly or indirectly linked to techno-spatial fixes. Indeed, the expansion of diverse economies has benefited from the deteriorating social conditions and labour surplus exacerbated by 30 years of neoliberal policies, successive economic recessions and the concomitant deregulation of forms of employment in the less developed areas of advanced capitalism, such as the southern regions of the EU. Long-term unemployment/underemployment and the increase of migrant workers (with temporary status and no citizenship) in peripheral labour markets form a workforce with limited labour market power that is willing to accept low-quality, flexible or informal employment.

In this context, a vicious circle of precarity becomes evident. On the one hand, unemployed or inactive young people turn to diverse economic practices to combat the precarity that prevails in today’s dismantled labour markets in peripheral regions. On the other hand, employment in the SE and the transactional DPSE is intertwined with precarity and can lead young people into unemployment and inactivity for short or even long periods of time. In this sense, the relationship between being NEET and participating as a worker in diverse economies is dynamic and reciprocal, but still subject to the antinomies of youthspaces produced by techno-spatial fixes. In other words, former NEETs or precariously employed young people ‘feed’ (the labour force of) diverse economies, which ultimately contribute to the reproduction of precarious youthspaces of work and in turn lead to the expansion of youth disengagement in the least developed regions. From this interrelationship, we understand that much of the SE is instrumentalized by capitalist mechanisms to combat crises, while the transactional part of the DPSE is a further mutation of capitalism.

Overall, today’s diverse economies are far away from being a ‘space of opportunity’ for vulnerable youth as they seem to reproduce the deficits of peripheral(ized) areas. The proliferation of hybrid practices, by SE and DPSE, in already fragile and highly flexible labour markets promotes the irregular transformation of market structures and the endangerment of labour relations and basic labour rights. Our use of concepts from critical geography in youth studies could provide an efficient analytical tool in the study of such transformations and suggests a future research agenda that is more sensitive to the relationship between youth precarity, the specificities of local economies and spatial and technological transformations in accumulation processes, as well as a renewed emphasis on the work-related experiences of young people living in less developed regions.