While there appears to be a consensus on the importance of engaging youth and many initiatives attempt to engage them, these initiatives reveal highly differentiated approaches. Moreover, while young people in disadvantaged neighbourhoods often stray from existing participatory structures, they are also commonly the target of injunctions to participate. This article looks at how engagement of these youth is constructed in a structured participation scheme, by means of a project aimed at setting up a Youth Council with them. It highlights three logics of youth participation: a functional logic, a critical logic and an emancipatory logic. It also shows how these logics were mobilized to implement the project. An analysis of the four main phases of the project illustrates the processes at work, highlights the youth engagement movement and suggests some avenues for interventions that aim at engaging youth.