This paper discusses the variety of ways in which youth workers in five Flemish municipalities engage in strategic relational and narrative work with young people and actors in their institutional environment to develop alternative perspectives on young people in public space. Drawing on qualitative case studies, we identify critical youth workers’ successful and less successful strategies. Our study reveals how the possibilities for critical youth work to develop ‘counternarratives’ and ‘loosen up’ public spaces in favour of young people are circumscribed by the particular institutional embeddedness of youth workers, as well as by the depth and dimensionality of conflicts.