Children’s social geographies are shifting from physical, material to online worlds. And although children seem to treat these spaces as one fluid, interchangeable social space, one wonders whether they equally fulfil their promises for interconnectedness. Changes in young people’s spatial and psycho-social landscapes reflect current socio-political and economic realities whereby public spaces are becoming increasingly corporatised and rural places rapidly urbanised. Since the 1970s, according to a report written for the UK National Trust, the area where children are allowed to roam unsupervised around their homes has shrunk by 90%, redefining their geography of local places and sense of belonging.
Our relationship with and psychological reactions to nature and urban landscapes have produced a large body of work within the fields of environmental psychology and psycho-geography. This work is based on explorations of rural, urban and suburban landscapes by drawing on a longstanding literary tradition which can be found in the work by William Blake and Thomas de Quincey in Britain and in the writings of Henry David Thoreau who wandered in the wild places of America. In France, in the mid-twentieth century, the situationist theorist Guy Debord (1958) introduced the concept of ‘dérive’, translated as drifting in a sense of allowing oneself to be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters one finds there to experience pure chance and authentic memories and feelings generated by landscapes.
Modern psycho-geographers such as Ian Sinclair (e.g., Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London 1997 and London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 2002) talk about explorations of the urban environment through walking or the art of ‘drifting’—walking without a set agenda by putting aside all work and leisure activities and other usual motives for movement—to evoke the memories and histories of different landscapes and how they are experienced by the walker. The subjective influence of a place on emotions, with the voice of the walker being more explicit, is captured in these works. Ian Sinclair wrote in Lights Out for the Territory about walking as ‘the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water …’ (1997). This is walking as a way of embracing everything in the surrounding landscape, merging localities with history and memories and the walker’s lived experiences.
For psycho-geographers, the art of ‘drifting’ is about encountering events that are unscheduled, unpredictable, chance encounters with the urban world outside the boundaries of the home and immediate neighbourhood. In so doing, we are afforded opportunities to interact with a landscape, its histories and myths and open up spaces and possibilities for meaningful social encounters and, most importantly, for interrogations of spaces and histories of social change, of how we change landscapes and how they change us. The desire for meaningful engagement with the physical world, both urban landscapes and nature, has resurfaced in the ‘new nature’ writing. An example of this is The Mountains of the Mind by Robert MacFarlane (2003) where engagement with nature is articulated as a deeply subjective experience in the form of a personal voice-driven narrative. The physical world is seen not as a projection of our needs, nor a means to an end but an end in itself and a place of wonder and solace.
Shifting Geographies and a Sense of Place
As the boundaries between public and private, urban and rural spaces are continuously negotiated, young people walk less and increasingly seek virtual spaces to meet new people and socialise with friends. Although research on the benefits of children’s outdoor play and exploration of their neighbourhoods and local places abounds, we know little about what the diminishing contact of children with nature and other physical landscapes and the reduced chance encounters mean for their socialisation, learning and wellbeing. Young people also have chance social encounters in the virtual world, but they tend to be less contextualised within their own urban or rural landscapes, and the memories and histories virtual places evoke tend to be transient and, possibly, less nuanced and meaningful, especially with helping young people to develop a sense of place.
Young people’s play and peer interactions are inextricably linked to physical and virtual spaces as biophysical entities but also as socio-cultural constructions. Play can function both as a driver for and an expression of changes in young people’s sense of place and their social and emotional experiences that define it. To articulate a sense of place through young people’s cognitive, affective and social experiences, Raymond et al. (2017) coined the phrase ‘embodied ecosystems’ which highlights the dynamic relations between mind, body, culture and physical places (nature and urban landscapes). Mapping the tangible and intangible aspects of a place is crucial to help us understand young people’s experiences of online and offline spaces and their interactions within them. Much research on children’s play has focused on the type of environments (e.g., outdoor, indoor) and degrees of structure and supervision they receive in these environments. And although there are many studies on digital play and peer interactions, mostly from a wellbeing perspective, there is little discussion on young people’s sense of place as a web of interconnected social, cultural, affective experiences in virtual spaces.
In contrast, there is a large body of research on teenage sense of place in their interactions with physical environments that may shed light on their sense of place in nonmaterial spaces. Findings from studies in a variety of fields (Abbott-Chapman and Robertson 2009; Matthews et al. 1998; Owens 1988) portrayed teenagers as ‘active cultural producers’ (Matthews et al. 1998) because of their tendency to mark and create special places that are imbued with meaning generated through memories, the values they placed upon them and the interactions that took place in them. In a study by Owens (1988), based on interviews with 25 white upper–middle-class adolescents aged 14–18 in the USA about their landscape preferences, teenagers reported to value natural spaces; places to be with their friends; places to be alone; places of relative priva...