From official blueprint to youth perception: A Q methodology study of the youth-friendly city in Qingdao, China

In China’s state-led urbanization, the youth-friendly city has become a governance apparatus for securing human capital amid demographic pressures. Yet this official blueprint often instrumentalizes youth as productive assets, creating a rupture with their lived aspirations. Using Q methodology in Qingdao, this study maps the counter-imaginaries through which young people contest this narrative. We identify three viewpoints that prioritize institutional fairness, everyday affordability and secure opportunities over spectacular spatial production. Their shared rejection of growth- and spectacle-driven urbanism reveals a struggle over urban meaning. We theorize this misalignment as discursive deprivation: a form of spatial injustice in which the state’s definitional monopoly limits youth’s authority to articulate their needs. Genuine youth-friendliness, we argue, requires a shift from symbolic spatial production to inclusive governance and redistributed discursive power.