Cool Places

Geographies of Youth Cultures

Tracey Skelton, Gill Valentine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134824700
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Géographie

Cool Places explores the contrasting experiences of contemporary youth. The chapters draw on techno music and ecstasy in Germany, clubbing in London, global backpacking and gangs in Santa Cruz as well as expereinces at home, on the streets and seeking employment. The contributors use these examples to explore representation and resistance and geographical concepts of scale and place in young people's lives within social, cultural and feminist studies to focus upon the complexities of youth cultures and their spatial representations and interactions. Contributors: Shane Blackman, Sophie Bowlby, Myrna Margulies Breitbart, Deborah Chambers, Luke Deforges, Claire Dwyer, Keith Hetherington, Cindi Katz, Heinz-Herman Kruger, Marion Leonard, Sally Lloyd Evans, Tim Lucas, Sara McNamee,Ben Malbon, Doreen Massey, Robina Mohammad, David Oswell, David Parker, Birgit Richard, Susan Ruddick, Tracey Skelton, Fiona Smith, Kevin Stevenson, Gill Valentine and Paul Watt

1
COOL PLACES

an introduction to youth and youth cultures

Gill Valentine, Tracey Skelton and Deborah Chambers

Plates 1.1 and 1.2 portray very contrasting images of contemporary youth. The first captures the stereotypical image of youth as out to have a good time, carefree and perhaps rebellious. The second suggests a very different version of what it means to be young—reflecting work, a concern for others, respect for adults and perhaps a touch of ‘innocence’. It is our intention in bringing this collection together to explore the diversity in young people’s lives in order to place youth on the geographical map and to demonstrate youth’s relevance to a range of geographical debates.

The popular imagining of youth as consumption-oriented, into subcultural styles based on music and drugs, and free to embark on adventurous travel, is considered through chapters which examine: Techno music and Ecstasy in Germany (Chapter 10), clubbing in London (Chapter 16) and backpacking round the world (Chapter 11). But as well as focusing on these ‘public’, and often spectacular, expressions of young people’s lives, we also explore young people’s mundane everyday experiences of: sibling rivalry in the parental home (Chapter 12), finding paid employment (Chapter 14) and hanging around on the streets (Chapter 15). While some of the chapters look at the way youth have been demonised (e.g. Chapter 9 on gangs in Santa Cruz) or stereotyped in different ways by various media (Chapters 3, 4 and 5); others explore the power of young people to resist adult definitions of their lives and to create new spaces and ways of living. For example, through public art on the streets in the USA (Chapter 18), the new age traveller movement in the UK (Chapter 19) and direct forms of political action in former East Germany (Chapter 17).

Before we invite you to explore some of the similarities, differences and even contradictions between these chapters, we begin in this introductory chapter by defining the category ‘youth’ and by considering young peoples’ absence from Geography. We then go on to combine our thoughts as the editors of this book with the work of cultural theorist Deborah Chambers to consider how the discipline of cultural studies has tackled youth cultures.

Plate 1.1 A neglected image of youth: working, concerned for others, ‘innocent’.

Source: Graham Allsopp.

DEFINING YOUTH

In contemporary Western societies the age of our physical body is used to define us and to give meaning to our identity and actions, and yet it has not always been so. The historian Aries (1962) famously observed that in the Middle Ages ‘children’ were missing from medieval icons. He pointed out that this was because beyond the period of infant dependency (i.e. when they had sufficient powers of strength and reason) children were treated as miniature adults, rather than as conceptually different from adults. It was not until the fifteenth century that ‘children’ began to be represented in icons as having a distinct nature and needs, and as separate from the adult world. This conceptualisation of the young was subsequently fostered through the development of formal education and the belief that children required long periods of schooling before they could take on adult roles and responsibilities (Prout and James, 1990). Although, initially it was only the upper classes who had the time and money to provide their offspring with a ‘childhood’, legislation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more critically the introduction of mass schooling, popularised the mythical condition of ‘childhood’ and slowly a universal notion of what it meant to be a child developed (Hendrick, 1990): namely, that a child is temporally set apart from the adult world and that childhood is a time of innocence and freedom from the responsibilities of adulthood (although this is not necessarily the reality experienced by many children). Thus social development (e.g. in terms of a transition from irrationality to rationality; and from simplicity to complexity) is assumed to dovetail with physical development (James and Jenks, forthcoming).

Plate 1.2 The popular imagining of youth: ‘party animals’, carefree, rebellious.

Source: Graham Allsopp.

In the same way that childhood has been ‘discovered’, so too adolescence has been invented to create a breathing space between the golden age of ‘innocent’ childhood and the realities of adulthood. According to Aries (1962), the emergence of what he termed this ‘quarantine’ period began in the early eighteenth century. Following the development of industrial capitalism the middle classes began to expand the length of their off spring’s schooling in order to provide them with a better education. This period was considered a time of ‘maturation’ when a young person would learn the ways of the world, emerging from their ‘quarantine’ transformed into an adult and ready to take on adult responsibilities (Boethius, 1995). Throughout the nineteenth century this transitional stage became prolonged and young people became more separated from the adult world, as the middle classes became increasingly preoccupied with the need to control ‘working class’ youth as well as their own offspring (by the early twentieth century psychologists had labelled this phase ‘adolescence’; see for example, Stanley Hall’s book of the same title, published in 1904). Indeed, this anxiety about the undisciplinary and unruly nature of young people (especially working class youth) has been repeatedly mobilised in definitions of youth and youth cultures for over 150 years (Pearson, 1983), framed at various moments in moral panics about ‘gangs’, juvenile crime, violence and so on. This is a definition of ‘youth as trouble’ (a point we will return to later in this chapter).

In the 1950s—a period of relative affluence—the emphasis on consumption, style and leisure led to the development of a range of goods and services (magazines, record shops, clothing, dances and so on) aimed at a new market niche—the young. Thus ‘the teenager’ was invented (Hebdige, 1988). In contrast to the parallel construction of ‘youth as trouble’, this imagining of what it means to be young was a definition of ‘youth-as-fun’—although as Hebdige (1988:30) goes on to argue ‘the two image clusters, the bleak portrayal of juvenile offenders and the exuberant cameos of teenage life reverberate, alternate and sometimes they get crossed’.

Thus the multiple and fluid ways that youth (embracing adolescence and the teenager) has gradually been identified and constructed over a period of several centuries serves to highlight what a complex and slippery concept it is. As Sibley argues, youth—despite all the attempts to define it —is ambiguously wedged between childhood and adulthood. He writes:

[The] child/adult illustrates a…contested boundary. The limits of the category ‘child’ vary between cultures and have changed considerably through history within Western, capitalist societies. The boundary separating child and adult is a decidedly fuzzy one. Adolescence is an ambiguous zone within which the child/adult boundary can be variously located according to who is doing the categorising. Thus, adolescents are denied access to the adult world, but they attempt to distance themselves from the world of the child. At the same time they retain some links with childhood. Adolescents may appear threatening to adults because they transgress the adult/child boundary and appear discrepant in ‘adult’ spaces…. These problems encountered by teenagers demonstrate that the act of drawing the line in the construction of discrete categories interrupts what is naturally continuous. It is by definition an arbitrary act and thus may be seen as unjust by those who suffer the consequences of the division.

(Sibley, 1995a: 34–5)

James (1986) has also focused on the liminial positioning of youth, pointing out that the only boundaries which define the teenage years are boundaries of exclusion which define what young people are not, cannot do or cannot be. She cites a number of legal classifications, for example the age at which young people can drink alcohol, earn money, join the armed forces or consent to sexual intercourse, to demonstrate how variable, context-specific and gendered these definitions of where childhood ends and adulthood begins are (not to mention the fact that many of these boundaries are of course also highly contested and resisted by young people). Indeed the term ‘youth’ is popularly used to refer to people aged 16–25 which bears no correlation with any of the diverse legal classifications of childhood or adulthood. Thus James argues that while ‘The age of the physical body is used to define, control and order the actions of the social body…such precise accounting is relatively ineffective, representing merely unsuccessful attempts to tame time by chopping it up into manageable slices’ (James, 1986:157).

Here, notions of ‘performativity’ are also useful in understanding the ambiguity of the term ‘youth’. Solberg (1990:12) for example has argued that ‘Conceptually children may “grow” or “shrink” in age as negotiations [with parents about what they are deemed responsible enough to do around the home] take place.’ Similarly, some young people may be legally defined as adults yet may resist this definition by performing their identity in a way which is read as younger than they actually are; whereas others may actually perform their identity such that they can ‘pass’ as being older than the actual age of their physical body. Indeed Frankenberg (1992) argues that the whole concept of adolescence is patronising or negative because it suggests that young people do not have value in their own right (i.e. in their own ‘being’), rather they are valued only to the extent to which they are in the process of ‘becoming’ an adult. Under this logic he claims the equivalent term for adults should be ‘mortescents’. ‘Consequently, for those classified as “adolescent” the very formlessness of the category which contains them is problematic: neither child nor adult the adolescent is lost in between, belonging nowhere, being no one’ (James, 1986:155).

This ambiguity of the term ‘youth’ is therefore mirrored in this collection of chapters. Rather than attempt to use a notional classification of biological age to construct boundaries of inclusion and exclusion around the category youth we have attempted to include a wide range of ‘takes’ on what it means to be young. Thus some of the authors in this book are writing about teenagers who are legally defined in a range of contexts as children (for example Sara McNamee’s chapter on the home or Shane Blackman’s discussion of the New Wave Girls at school); whereas others are about the lives of those who are legally—in voting terms anyway— young adults (for example, Ben Malbon’s exploration of clubbing or Luke Desforges’ chapter on international travel), with many chapters (such as those by Myrna Breitbart, Tim Lucas and Marion Leonard) straddling this division. Throughout the collection we also try to highlight the importance of understanding ‘youth’ in relation to the way age intersects with other important identities such as gender, ethnicity and disability (see for example Ruth Butler’s chapter on disabled youth or David Parker’s discussion of Chinese young people); rather than viewing it as a uni-dimensional category.

GEOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH

This heading, ‘Geographies of youth’, is rather a misnomer because although there is a significant body of work within Geography (which also straddles environmental psychology) on children’s environments, including studies of children’s cognition, competence, behaviour, attachment to place and access to/use of space (see for example Blaut et al., 1970; Blaut, 1971; Blaut and Stea, 1971; Anderson and Tindal, 1972; Blaut and Stea, 1974; Bunge and Bordessa, 1975; G.T. Moore, 1976; Hart, 1979; Downs, 1985; R. Moore, 1986; Downs and Liben, 1987; Spencer et al., 1989; Ward, 1990; Katz, 1991, 1993, 1995; Aitken and Wingate, 1993; Aitken, 1994; Sibley, 1995a, 1995b; Valentine, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c), geographers have been criticised for ignoring children in other areas of their work (James, 1990; Sibley, 1991; Philo, 1992) and have largely excluded the experiences of youth altogether (a notable exception being the work of Myrna Breitbart).

In a recent review of Colin Ward’s book The Child in the Country Chris Philo (1992) argues that Ward’s emphasis on young people’s experiences of space has resonance with the emerging sensitivity of social-cultural geography to what he terms ‘other’ human groupings. Philo states that: ‘social life is…fractured along numerous lines of difference constitutive of overlapping and multiple forms of otherness, all of which are surely deserving of careful study by geographers’ (Philo, 1992:201). Employing examples of children’s agency from Ward’s book, Philo uses his review to call for geographers to turn a relative neglect of children—and we might also add youth—into a positive engagement. In particular, there is a danger that geographical work on young people’s lives and experiences may be corralled into an enclosure marked ‘youth geographies’ rather than being an integral part of all areas of mainstream geographical research and debate. While it is important to recognise the unique experiences of young people and the spaces they carve out for themselves, it is equally important to recognise the role which they play in all our geographies.

To date there is a small but growing body of work by Geographers (i.e. with a capital G) and academics from related disciplines who are interested in spatiality (geographies with a small g), which has highlighted the way that public space is produced as an adult space. Studies on teenagers suggest that the space of the street is often the only autonomous space that young people are able to carve out for themselves and that hanging around, and larking about, on the streets, in parks and in shopping malls, is one form of youth resistance (conscious and unconscious) to adult power (Corrigan, 1979). However, other work has shown that teenagers on the street are considered by adults to be a polluting presence—a potential threat to public order (Baumgartner, 1988; Cahill, 1990)—and thus that they are often subject to various adult regulatory regimes including various forms of surveillance and temporal and spatial curfews (Valentine, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a). In particular, efforts to revitalise or aestheticise public space as part of initiatives to revive (symbolically and economically) North American and West European cities have been identified as contributing to the privatisation (Berman, 1986; Fyfe and Bannister, 1996) or what Mitchell (1996) has termed the ‘annihilation’ of public space, by using private security forces and close circuit television to squeeze undesirable ‘others’—notably youth—out of these locations. In a study of urban fringe woodland in the UK, Burgess et al. (1988) describe participants’ anxieties about teenage delinquency, vandalism and glue-sniffing in open space, highlighting the desires of their respondents for park keepers and wardens to regulate open areas. Such processes of exclusion are captured in Pressdee’s description of the way that an Australian shopping mall is policed:

Groups of young people are continually evicted from this opulent and warm environment, fights appear, drugs seem plentiful, alcohol is brought in, in various guises and packages. The police close in on a group of young women, their drink is tested. Satisfied that it is only Coca-Cola they are moved on and out. Not wanted. Shopkeepers and shoppers complain.

(Pressdee, 1986:14)

There is often a strong element of racism to such informal policing tactics. In City of Quartz Mike Davis (1990) documents numerous examples of curfews and policing tactics being selectively deployed against black and Chicano youth to support his a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Plates
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Cool Places
• One Representations
• Two Matters of Scale
• Three Place: Geographies of Youth Cultures
• Four Sites of Resistance
• List of Contributors