Kota Kita- A Participatory Urban Arts Youth with disabilities in many Indonesian cities often still face barriers in expressing a strong voice in the decision-making processes of their cities, notably due to limited awareness for accommodations to ensure their full and effective political participation such as the use of sign languages. Kota Kita’s research study in Surakarta (Solo), Central Java, Indonesia (2017) found that eventhough the participation of citizens with disabilities in local and national elections are relatively high at 60.1%, participation in neighbourhood meetings and in local budgeting meetings are low at 27% and 2.2%, respectively. This data indicates that citizens with disabilities are not yet involved meaningfully in expressing their needs and advocating for policies that directly affect them.

While Solo has strong history of inclusion over the decades, as noted in a report by Global Disability Innovation Hub and Kota Kita(2022), improvements are necessary to enhance the participation of people with disabilities in community dialogue in both formal and informal mechanisms. In fostering a more socially-just space for more meaningful participation, there is a need to deepen the way citizens interact as a collective, build shared awareness and solidarity, and explorethe tension between spatial and social to influence change within the acknowledged existing power that currently shapes the city. For Solo, urban arts, particularly murals, have been a tool for citizens to express their needs of urgent issues in the city,and there is great potential in using urban art to deepen the participation of citizens who will enjoy the spaces—in contrast to the conventional method of commissioning artists.

The participatory urban art project proposes a series of activities foryouth with disabilities in Solo to collectively build their position in the contested urban narrative through creative placemaking. Our project aims to converge the voice of youth with disabilities—particularly those who are deaf and have hearing impairments—and connect those voices with visual arts as a means of expression, awareness-raising, and reclaiming of spaces. Through this participatory urban art project, piloting in the City of Solo, Indonesia, we hope to celebrate and leverage the diverse, intersectional aspirations of the youth in the city, build solidarity, and mainstream discourses about urban inclusivity.

The project will incorporate a participatory creative placemaking approach through activities such as photovoice workshop, co-design,andparticipatory mural as primary tools to manifest the collective aspirations of youths who are deaf and hard of hearing. We will engage 10 - 15 youth participants to produce participatory mural artworks in three [3] public spacesin Solo, utilising the process as an exercise to enhance their agency and capacity to advocate for rights in the city and raise public awareness on urban inclusivity. The project will activate targeted public spaces by painting the mural together and sharing the learnings to otherstakeholders in the city. The main objective is to use murals and art installations as a shared learning process and not merely as an end product—a process to make the invisible more visible.

Ultimately, we hope to see more people aware of powerinequality in citizen participation and understand the implication of this situation for people with disabilities. The initiative might not target structural change initially, but we expect to see the collective awareness rise and lead to more collaborative efforts to enhance the quality of citizen participation by integrating initiatives in both spaces to bring changes within the complexity of our cities today.