Children in the City

Home Neighbourhood and Community

Pia Christensen, Margaret O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134512645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This timely and thought-provoking book explores children's lives in modern cities. At a time of intense debate about the quality of life in cities, this book examines how they can become good places for children to live in. Through contributions from childhood experts in Europe, Australia and America, the book shows the importance of studying children's lives in cities in a comparative and generational perspective. It also contains fascinating accounts of city living from children themselves, and offers practical design solutions.
The authors consider the importance of the city as a social, material and cultural place for children, and explore the connections and boundaries between home, neighbourhood, community and city. Throughout, they stress the importance of engaging with how children see their city in order to reform it within a child-sensitive framework.
This book is invaluable reading for students and academics in the field of anthropology, sociology, social policy and education. It will also be of interest to those working in the field of architecture, urban planning and design.

1 Children in the city

Introducing new perspectives

Pia Christensen and Margaret O’Brien

I don’t want a Childhood City. I want a city where children live in the same world as I do.

(Ward 1978: 204)

The aim of this book is to explore children’s lives in contemporary cities. We are writing at a time of intense international debate about the quality of life in cities, and a central theme in this debate has been how cities can become good enough places for children to live in alongside other generations. Colin Ward, in his important book The Child in the City, from which we have drawn great inspiration, strongly advocates that cities should be places where children and adults can live together. However, as many of the chapters in this book show, the creation and sustaining of cities in such a way involves a complex and difficult process of negotiation. The sites of negotiation are multiple, from struggles over where to kick a football or discussions between parents and children about going out to play to wider debates concerning land use or planning for the future form of cities.

Three key themes permeate this book. Firstly, the issue of extending the principle of inclusivity to children in debates about the city is crucial. We argue that ‘a city for all’ has to include sensitivity to children both as a social group, with all its complexities, and to children as individuals. A key part of this sensitivity involves understanding city life from children’s perspectives. Our second theme is an emphasis on the overlapping connections between home, neighbourhood, community and city. Living in the city is as much about negotiating relationships with other humans as it is about living in material places and spaces: there is continual interactivity between the webs of relationships, places and spaces for children and adults alike. A third theme concerns the importance of promoting sensitivity to children and an engagement of children in the processes of change in cities. We argue that an understanding of how children experience and construct a sense of place is a foundation for engaging children in changing such places. We need to know how they see the city in order to reform the city within a child-sensitive framework. Whilst the successful modern urban child might be expected to be an active navigator through the multiple settings of moderncities, the contributors to this collection show that children occupy both complex and contradictory spaces in contemporary cities.

Studying children in cities

Internationally during the last two decades there has been an upsurge of human and social science research from the perspectives of children (Qvortrup et al. 1994; James and Prout 1990). Studies of children’s lives, circumstances and welfare in contemporary societies have provided empirical evidence for children’s agency, experiences and conceptual understandings in a range of different social contexts. This work has produced so much original insight that children have been acknowledged as active social and cultural actors and, as informants and participants in research. Children have emerged as a key source for understanding the dynamics of their everyday lives (Christensen and James 2000a). The paradigm shift within the human and social sciences, in particular, has had wide influence on theoretical thinking, with an impact also on policy and practice. However, childhood research is also a complex field, signified as it is by the coexistence of new and traditional perspectives, a reality that raises important questions about what working with children’s perspectives entails. Firstly, this question underlines the necessity for researchers to attend to and carefully work through the implications of seeing children as social actors for research practice. Being reflexive and being systematic seem to be important requirements of researchers, when conventional thinking and routine actions may threaten or undermine genuine endeavours to work with children. Secondly, as is strongly pointed out and discussed by several authors in this volume (Chawla and Malone, Chapter 8; O’Brien, Chapter 9; Morrow, Chapter 10; Baraldi, Chapter 11), when it comes to working together with children to improve and plan their neighbourhood, town or city, it is important that children’s insights are carefully considered, interpreted and followed through in action. In their work these authors have been particularly committed to making children’s insights accessible and usable for town planners and politicians and, as they emphasise, there are many important lessons to be drawn. It is stressed, for example, that participation must not become a meaningless token. It is important that all bodies involved in the process are willing to let children’s perspectives be influential in the design process. Part of the task of involving children therefore is to prepare the ground in this way. For, as Roberts has argued with sensitivity and clarity: ‘It is clear that listening to children, hearing children, and acting on what children say are three very different activities, although they are frequently elided as if they were not’ (Roberts 2000: 238) (our emphasis).

Child research is a wide interdisciplinary field with many different approaches to the study of children. At present a split between qualitative and quantitative approaches tends to mark the area. In this volume, however, we have brought these different approaches together to show how a rich account of children’s lives in contemporary cities can be gained only through drawing on different sources. Much work has to be done to integrate knowledge that is produced in intensive research, such as qualitative and ethnographic investigations, with knowledge produced in extensive research, such as surveys and longitudinal studies. Neither qualitative nor quantitative methods are sufficient in themselves when seeking to understand the complexity of children’s lives in the contemporary city. It seems, however, that there is much scope for using a mixed-methods approach, which can draw on the strength of each perspective and at the same time can combine these with more in-depth and sensitive analysis of what life in the city means to children.

In the studies reported in this book a wide range of methods have been employed. These can be grouped around the distinction between children ‘seeing’ the city and children’s use of or ‘doing’ the city (cf. Augé 1995). To illuminate children’s observations, perceptions and views many authors have used children’s photographs, drawings and maps. A narrative approach, such as the use of life stories, recollections, and children writing stories and keeping diaries, is favoured by several contributors to this volume because they facilitate children’s, and indeed older people’s, reflexivity on the immediate and distant past, but also as a way to explore with children their imagined futures. Together with more commonly used methods such as interviews, focus and peer group discussions, participant observation and surveys this book establishes a broad range of methods to study children in cities.

For all contributors, eliciting children’s perspectives has been a central commitment. Baraldi (Chapter 11), for example, advocates the necessity for researchers to be imaginative and sensitive in their approach to working with children. It is important to develop ways of involving children that build on their own communicative practices (Clarke and Moss 2001) and engage with their ‘cultures of communication’ (Christensen and James 2000a) through paying attention to the social actions of children, their use of language and the meanings they put into words, notions and actions.

Children at home in the city

During the nineteenth century in Europe and North America the gradual separation of the work place from the home led to the emergence of the ‘home’ as a prime physical and spatial location for people’s social and emotional lives. The home became a key context for the family, which came to represent ‘the modern domestic ideal’ of parents and children living together forming a nuclear family (Allan and Crow 1989). This process centres children within the family, nested in bonds of love and care, with the parents responsible for their health and socialisation.

From a contemporary European and North American perspective therefore, children are placed in the family home and this location has become a prominent site for establishing a sense of belonging (Brannen and O’Brien 1996). The family and the home are sites within which togetherness become articulated and established regardless of material, ideological and emotional conditions (Douglas 1991). Douglas argues that homes structure time and memory through their capacity to order the activities of family members spatially, for example through such practices as communal eating, the division of labour, moral obligations and the distribution of resources. Human interactions take place within the physical space of the house, which is, in and through time, transformed into a ‘home’, the place where identities are worked on (see for example Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zúniga 1999).

In addition, as Bachelard’s (1958 (1994) ) classic account suggests, houses can contain and shape the memories and dreams of their inhabitants as a shelter from an ever-changing outside. In this sense then the home can be seen to form an important base for children. However, the home is often thought of in static terms (Sibley 1995). In contrast it has been suggested that ‘home’ must also be seen as constituted by the movements – in and out of the house – by family members: ‘Children’s understanding of themselves and of their family is achieved through the movement in, out and around the home of different family members as much as it is through the “home” as a material space and a fixed locality’ (Christensen et al. 2000: 143). We suggest that children’s understanding of the house and their ‘border work’ around the inside and the outside forms part of the foundation for children to develop social skills and competencies as navigators and negotiators in the public realm of the neighbourhood and the city.

Throughout this volume the authors demonstrate how what goes on in the domestic life of homes, and what happens in neighbourhoods including the city at large, are closely connected. In their everyday life children regularly move in and between the spaces of the home, street, neighbourhood, town and city. Norms and practices governing space and time in one arena have their impact on the other. For example, changes in the perceived safety of public spaces, generated by concerns about traffic or strangers, re-structure family practices, and in turn affect children’s participation in civic life. Also as O’Brien (Chapter 9) argues, the increases in time spent indoors at home by many children in contemporary cities question the aptness of traditional layouts and space standards of conventional social housing. She points to the need for city planners to rethink indoor as well as outdoor space requirements in the move towards child-friendly neighbourhoods.

Children can be seen to share parents’ constructions of the world outside the home as a place of risk and danger (Halldén, Chapter 3; O’Brien, Chapter 9; Morrow, Chapter 10) and they hold sometimes strongly ambivalent views about the safety of their city space. Children fear, like their parents, the risk of traffic, stranger danger, risk of drugs or they fear encounters with older teens and young people in the streets (Scott et al. 1998; Matthews et al. 1999; 2000). The latter exposes, of course, how the morals of the external world prey on the ‘innocence’ of children as older children are seen as causing trouble and danger for others ( James and Jenks 1996).

By contrast, the physical structure of the house shelters the inside from the outside. The home can become a haven where parents can ensure their children’s upbringing. They can make sure that they are safe and protected, provided with comfort and care, and safeguarded in their health and well-being. Yet, to some extent, these images are untrue when, for example, risk from the outside world can be recognised as exaggerated and the home is revealed as the primary context for the abuse to children.

The importance of the house as shelter for children and their families is explored through the practical engagement of children in creating their own house. Halldén (Chapter 3) examines the location of the home itself and the negotiation of inside and outside boundaries from children’s perspectives.

Through their stories of their prospective futures, which she gathered from them, the children also explore their present positions. Halldén carefully discusses through her case examples how, for children, ‘the family is created in a house that becomes a home through the caring routines’ of family members. In the children’s accounts thresholds link the inside with the outside and as such form part of the constitution of home and family. Everyday domestic routines are especially important in children’s accounts for creating a sense of place. In contrast, Olwig’s oral histories of older people in St Thomas, part of the Danish West Indian islands (Chapter 4), shows how they remember the street as a place that allowed them as children to be ‘at home’. As children they had been moved from the island of St John to St Thomas to work as servants. It was through their movements out of the city homes where they worked and into the street that the children were able to maintain a sense of home through meetings and contacts with their family and kin relations. The street allowed the children to be ‘at home’ with their family and kin and thus sustain a sense of belonging although they did not share the physical surroundings of a house with them. The children were only ‘out of place’, and in a vulnerable position, when they lost contact with this larger network community and became incorporated as isolated dependants into a city of strangers. Olwig’s chapter throws light on the ways in which the city is constructed as place, and as a social and cultural site, in the lives of children. This socio-spatial perspective, she suggests, is important whether researchers are concerned with children ‘confined’ to urban institutions in Europe or North America, or with children living a life in the street in the developing world.

The street as passageway to neighbourhood and adulthood

In Olwig’s account the street appears as an important site and vehicle for children’s construction of social and cultural identity. This topic is also central to Matthews’s argument (Chapter 7), which draws on data from children and young people in an English town. Matthews suggests that any decline in the use of ‘the street’ reduces children’s opportunities for identity construction as ‘the street’ is often a site where children can ‘separate or engage in the processes of separation’ away from the adult gaze. In the street children and young people spend time with their peers. It is through their different uses and occupation of street space, including their encounters with adults, that young and older children, girls and boys, explore and come to understand their own present and prospective social relations and positions. In this way, Matthews argues that the street is important for understanding how children engage with their own growing up, suggesting that experiencing being in the street is a central pa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Children in the city
• 2 Place, space and knowledge
• 3 Children’s views of family, home and house
• 4 ‘Displaced’ children?
• 5 Shaping daily life in urban environments
• 6 Children in the neighbourhood
• 7 The street as a liminal space
• 8 Neighbourhood quality in children’s eyes
• 9 Regenerating children’s neighbourhoods
• 10 Improving the neighbourhood for children
• 11 Planning childhood