Children, Youth and the City

Kathrin Horschelmann, Lorraine van Blerk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415376938
• eBook ISBN: 9781134184132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

More than half of the global and around eighty per cent of the western population grow up in cities. Here, Horschelmann and van Blerk provide a vivid picture of children and youths in the city, how they make sense of it and how they appropriate it through their social actions.

Considering the causes and forms of social inequalities in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, ability and geographical location, this book discusses specific issues such as poverty, homelessness and work. Each chapter draws on examples and cases from both the developed and developing world, and throughout the chapters, it:

• contrasts experiences of growing up in the city
• focuses on urban youth culture, consumption and globalization
• considers contemporary movements towards the role of children and youths in planning processes.

Horschelmann and van Blerk argue that youths must be recognised as urban social agents in their own right. Their informative book, though dealing with complex theoretical arguments, relates key ideas to this topical subject in a clear and coherent manner, making this book an excellent resource for students of human geography, urban studies and childhood studies.

1  Introduction

In this chapter we will:

• outline the key themes and rationales of the book
• sketch the main conceptual ideas that inform our approach to children, youth and the city
• summarise the main chapters of the book.

More than half of the world's children live in cities today. It is here that they learn, play, work and contribute in a multitude of ways to the making of places. Far from being just a ‘context’ for these young people's lives, cities are significantly shaped by their activities and by the need to reflect their presence in the social organisation of life. Cities are of children and of youth in many ways. At the same time, what it means to be young is significantly shaped by the diverse ways in which cities and urban spaces are constructed and lived in the contemporary world. In order to understand how children, youth and the city relate, therefore, we need to consider both the manifold ways in which children and youth partake in the making of urban spaces, and the extent to which their experiences and practices correspond to wider social relations and the particular social and spatial construction of cities. In this book, we explore both sides of this relationship in order to show how and why young people's urban lives play out differently in diverse cities around the world, while being connected through global power relations and age-related hierarchies. We aim to show both how children and youth contribute to the making of urban spaces and how the particular structures, textures and materialities of cities inform how they live their diverse lives.

Children and youth play a key role in the making of urban spaces, both through their own activities and as a result of the adult-led management and disciplining of their needs and practices. In this book, we show how, even as children and youth are ‘designed out’ of many urban spaces, located in age-specific institutions and excluded from adult-dominated spaces, cities are intricately shaped by the presence and practices of young people. At the same time as the socio-spatial design and material texturing of cities limit the scope and shape of young people's actions, they provide resources that young people appropriate and (re) use in everyday life. Depending on their particular geographical location, they walk, cycle, travel by public transport or are driven to places of learning, work and play. They meet with friends on street corners, in urban squares or parks, go shopping, explore urban night-lives, volunteer, or simply ‘hang out’. In many cities around the world, they run errands and work in the city to contribute to the household income. Some sell their own bodies on the street, beg, busk, deal or seek other legal and illegal ways of earning an income for their own survival and that of friends and family members. Others participate in urban life through subcultural activities that pose direct or indirect challenges to dominant and exclusionary uses of urban space.

Key approaches to children, youth and the city

There is now a rich body of work in geography and across the social sciences that explores and seeks to better understand these manifold contributions of young people to urban life (cf. McKendrick et al. 2000; Horton and Kraftl 2006). Scholars such as Colin Ward, David Lynch and Roger Hart produced nuanced and insightful accounts of children's experiences of urban space as early as the 1970s, critiquing the assumption that the city exits only ‘for one particular kind of citizen: the adult, male, white collar, out of town car-user’ (Ward 1978/1990: 25). Just over a decade later, critical commentaries by James (1990), Winchester (1991) and Sibley (1991) highlighted the continued absence of children from geographical research and paved the way for more sustained and critical engagements with young people's geographies that drew much of their inspiration from the so-called ‘new social studies of childhood’. This new approach to the study of childhood questioned the universality of contemporary, Western definitions of age by demonstrating the extent to which generational categories such as childhood and youth are socially constructed and historically and culturally variable (James et al. 2001; Jenks 2005). It has drawn attention to the power relations and social hierarchies entailed in age categorisations (Qvortrup 2005; James and James 2004; Aitken 2001; Holloway and Valentine 2000), as well as examining how age intersects with other forms of social difference in a variety of global contexts. Moving away from essentialist understandings of age as defined by chronological and developmental stages, the new social studies of childhood and the emerging sub-discipline of children's geographies have adopted more relational approaches to age that recognise cultural and historical variability and the need to examine carefully the contexts in which age is defined and lived (Hopkins and Pain 2007). More recently, relational approaches to the geographies of children and youth have also begun to address questions of intergenerational exchange, recognising that definitions of age are related to how we understand generational positioning and that young people's lives are tightly linked to those of parents, grandparents, siblings and others (Evans and Becker 2009).

A further shift in geographical thinking that affects how we understand the urban lives of young people has been the call for greater attentiveness to the wide range of seemingly mundane, everyday practices and the materiality of urban lives (Horton and Kraftl 2006; Amin and Thrift 2002). This shift in thinking not only allows us to re-evaluate the frequently marginalised practices of children and youth, but also to broaden our understanding of the rhythms and textures of their lives, paying greater attention to the intersections between materiality, the body, memory, feelings, affects and practices, as well as those many minutiae that are an essential part of daily life but are difficult to capture in words. Such work challenges us to consider more carefully how different young people, through their bodies, encounter, engage with and produce urban space. In particular, it raises attention to some of the ruptures between urban spaces designed for particular uses and the bodies that (re)make them through diverse spatial practices.

In this book, we draw on these recent approaches to produce a relational account of the diverse ways in which childhood and youth are lived, experienced and imagined in different cities around the globe. We show the connections between social constructions of childhood, youth and the city, and the material performances, structures and textures of urban space. We consider the social, cultural and economic processes through which young people become marginalised residents in cities, how these age-related processes of marginalisation intersect with other forms of social and cultural difference, and how children and youth nonetheless use, produce and appropriate urban space. To understand young people's urban lives we need to consider all of these aspects as interrelated, and as culturally and historically contingent, as we seek to demonstrate throughout this book.

Outline of chapters

How children and youth live in cities and how cities are constructed in response to their presence is tightly connected to social constructions and imaginations of age and urban space. We start in Chapter 2 with a discussion of the relations between cultural constructions of childhood, youth and the city, showing the extent to which understandings of the city as an adult space rely on particular constructions of age. The chapter relates insights from the new sociology of childhood to geographical critiques of dominant constructions of the city and moves towards a relational understanding of both. While recognising the significant symbolic and material consequences of those constructions for young people, we also look towards ways of imagining the urban lives of children and youth differently, since such efforts to imagine alternative engagements with the city are crucial for creating more inclusive, participatory spaces.

The book then moves on to consider causes and forms of social inequalities that affect young people's place in the city, both in relation to adults and between different groups of children and youth. In Chapter 3, we ask why families with children are over-represented amongst the urban poor in most countries of the world, how different welfare regimes affect this uneven distribution of wealth, and to what extent class, ethnicity, gender and geographical location affect young people's well-being in the city. Finally, the diverse situations of young people living in poverty are also acknowledged, and we highlight the particular conditions of migrant, homeless and working children and youth in the city as exemplars of the distinct experiences of how inequalities are reproduced.

While the first part of the book focuses on unequal power relations that shape young people's differentiated access to and use of urban space, the second part is particularly concerned with illustrating their creative spatial practices. In Chapter 4, we focus in greater depth on this issue and discuss young people's differentiated uses of the urban environment. We start by offering some contextual background to growing up in the city through an analysis of the particular changes that occurred during periods of modernisation and urbanisation in Europe and North America. Then, taking the experiences of ‘living’ and ‘playing’ in the city, we consider the ways in which young people, differentiated by age, gender, sexuality, class and disability, engage with the urban environment in a plethora of ways that are spatial, temporal and relational.

In Chapter 5, we look in depth at the embodied, cultural practices through which children and youth contest exclusionary structures and appropriate the city, making global urban spaces at least partially their own and challenging adult domination through tactical uses of space. We examine how young people engage with transnational cultural flows, respond to the restructuring of leisure time and space, and claim a stake in urban space through subcultural activities.

Chapter 6 leads on from this to consider how urban space can be made more inclusive and responsive to young people's needs by promoting the active participation of children and youth in the planning process. We discuss the advantages and pitfalls of different modes of participation and draw on the expanding international literature on this issue to present a wide range of examples from around the world that are intended to inspire as well as to give cause for further reflection. Finally, the conclusion outlines how current and future changes, such as the emergence of the growth and shrinking of cities, can impact on young people's urban lives.

It is beyond the scope of this book to answer all of the questions that it raises. Instead, we have sought to include a number of examples and case studies from across the world that not only illustrate key arguments but can also be used as a starting point for further discussion. At the end of each chapter, we have included sample essay questions and brief lists of recommended reading, both of which we hope will be useful for engaging further with the key themes of this book.

2 Imagining children
and youth in the city

In this chapter we will:

• explore different understandings of age, childhood and youth
• show how these understandings relate to perceptions of rights to the city
• discuss how age and the city are co-constructed and which alternative representations may be constructed.

Introduction

The design, construction and use of cities are influenced strongly by representations of people and place that reflect historically and culturally diverse understandings of age, the human body and the nature of urban space. These representations are related, as McDowell argues (1999), to constructions of citizenship and rights to the city. They create discursive conditions through which access to the city is negotiated, denied or claimed, a sense of belonging forged, and exclusions enforced or contested. In this chapter, we show the relevance of ‘imaginary geographies’ and discursive constructions of age for the design and use of cities. We focus primarily on the ways in which understandings of age influence urban design and vice versa. The relational approach advocated in the introduction also includes recognising, however, that young people can and do partake in the production of discourses about childhood, youth and the city. We give some examples of this at the end of the chapter.

One way to approach this is through the concept of discourse (see Box 2.1). For the French historian Michel Foucault (1972, 1980), discourses are what make the world meaningful to us. They are constructions of both power and knowledge which ‘provide a language for talking about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a particular historical moment’ (Hall 1992: 291). Discourses are not mental constructions detached from the ‘real world’, but part and parcel of material forms, social relations and spatial practices, which shape them and through which they manifest themselves. Through the concept of discourse, we can thus understand how ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ emerge in particular times and places in very specific ways to produce subjects which carry meaningful identities tied to age. We can explore how the emergence of discourses of childhood and youth was intricately connected to institutions, scientific knowledge and state policies which produced and continue to produce subjects such as children, teenagers, adolescents or youths in particular ways and which, in turn, appear to confirm the reality of these categories by making the links between material and discursive structures concrete. Further, we can think about the extent to which our interactions as social beings are shaped by conventionalised ways of understanding and performing identities, considering which types of action are ‘intelligible’, or legitimate, and which seem ‘unintelligible’, inappropriate or illegitimate (Butler 1989, 1993).

Box 2.1 Discourse

The use of the term ‘discourse’ in linguistics, the humanities and the social sciences exceeds the conventional understanding of ‘a conversation’. While it emphasises the fact that language is a social practice, ‘discourse’ describes how, through linguistic norms and conventions, phenomena are described, understood and even linguistically ‘brought into being’ in relatively regular ways in particular social settings, arenas and groups. Thus, we may talk of ‘academic discourse’, ‘medical discourse’, ‘legal discourse’ or ‘media discourse’ – arenas which have characteristic linguistic features through which their particular subject matters are conventionally discussed and made ‘intelligible’ to members of that group or forum, without any necessary link to an underlying, definite ‘reality’. Discourses change historically and include, for authors influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, material structures and specific social relations. Discourses, like the social groups which communicate through them, do of course overlap in practice, so that certain discursive structures are shared more widely, as well as being open to contestation by ‘outsiders’ of the group.

In relation to childhood and youth in the city, this means not only that there are historically variable understandings of childhood and youth that connect to changing political situations and imperatives, but also that different groups speak differently (i.e. construct socially) what childhood and youth are, and where children and youth should be placed geographically (i.e. in the family home, in childcare, in educational settings …). Medical experts might, for instance, use terms such as ‘infancy’, ‘developmental stage, ‘physique’, ‘paediatrics’ and ‘im/maturity’ to communicate shared understandings of children's physical features and their own practice that enable medical research and treatment, but are interpreted differently and sometimes critiqued by social scientists, lawyers, parents or teachers, who also encounter children in very different settings. While rarely considered in debates by such adult, professionalised groups, children themselves are also part of the construction ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Children, Youth and the City
• Routledge critical introductions to urbanism and the city
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Imagining children and youth in the city
• Chapter 3 The causes and effects of social inequalities on children and youth in the city
• Chapter 4 Growing up in the city
• Chapter 5 Globalisation and youth culture
• Chapter 6 Participation and active citizenship in the city
• Chapter 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index