Children, Nature, Cities

Ann Marie F. Murnaghan, Laura J. Shillington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317167679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why does the way we think about urban children and urban nature matter? This volume explores how dichotomies between nature/culture, rural/urban, and child/adult have structured our understandings about the place of children and nature in the city. By placing children and youth at the center of re-theorising the city as a socio-natural space, the book illustrates how children and youth's relations to and with nature can change adultist perspectives and help create more ecologically and socially just cities. As a key contribution to children's studies, the book engages and enlivens debates in urban political ecology and urban theory, which have not yet treated age as an important axis of difference. With examples from ten localities, the chapters in this volume ask how we can subvert both romanticized and modernist conceptualizations of nature and childhood that conflate innocence and purity with children and nature; the volume asks what happens when we re-invent urban natures with children's needs and perspectives in mind.

Chapter 1
Children, Nature, and the City

Laura J. Shillington and Ann Marie F. Murnaghan

Across the globe, urban childhoods appear in crisis. Children’s physical public spaces are shrinking as new technologies fill their leisure time with screens. The “obesity epidemic” is endangering children’s health, and parents are to blame for both under- and over-parenting. Underlying these moral panics, which occur and re-occur consistently throughout history, is the idea that there is a normal, natural childhood at risk in our modern society. Children and nature often share space in the urban landscape, thus they are often unproblematically, naturally, linked. Rural natures are further romanticized, and urban natures, the organic and non-organic stuff of life, are excluded from consideration as important parts of global ecologies. This book challenges the dangerous assumptions of anti-urban lenses that view nature as external to the city. By looking at the relationship between urban nature and children from an ontologically different perspective, Children, Nature, Cities seeks to shed light on the actually existing urban natures that children live with in order to shift attention towards this important part of their lives, and improve future planning for children and nature alike.

Our research situated within children’s geographies, now a well-established and vibrant subdiscipline in geography (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2011). In the 1990s when children’s geographies emerged as a serious subdiscipline and began to contribute to the new social studies of childhood, the main concern was that children were marginalized and largely absent in geographic research. Children are no longer absent in geography. Indeed, research in children’s geographies covers a large range of topics. For example, geographers now attend to children’s perceptions and use of different spaces, identity politics, youth cultures, work, globalization and neoliberalism, migration, gender and race, politics, and research methodologies. Since the 1990s, children’s geographies have focused on three propositions (after James, Jenks, and Prout, 1998). The first is that childhood is a social construct. Geographers thus examine the discursive co-construction of space and childhood, and argue that the term young person highlights the constructed nature of “childhood” as a life stage (Aitken, 1994). The second proposition is that “childhood” is dynamic, and changes across time and space (Lynch, 1977). The third proposition argues that children are social actors, agentic and embodied in a social world (Skelton, 2010).

Despite the wide variety of research on children in geography as well as in sociology and anthropology, one concern seems to still resonate among all fields that incorporate research on children: how the lessons learned in research with children can inform “mainstream” (adult) approaches. The research in children’s geographies on children and nature has not been brought into the extensive body of work on re-theorizing cities as socio-natural processes, in particular in the field of urban political ecology. Critical urban theory has also left the study of children and cities to children’s geographies, paying little attention to the role of children in the material production of city landscapes. While there is considerable research on theorizing children, nature and space in children’s geographies, re-thinking nature–society–urban relations and social-ecological justice in urban political ecology, and a re-theorization of the city in critical urban studies, the links between all three are minimal despite their overlapping political perspectives.

Children, Nature, Cities attempts to redress this concern by engaging the literatures in children’s geographies with the broader debates on nature and the city, especially in political ecology and urban theory. This book brings together research that focuses on the diversity of children’s relationship with multiple natures in cities, with the aim of highlighting how both nature and children are materially and discursively constructed in the city. Children and nature are complex concepts that have precarious places in urban landscapes. Simultaneously excluded and revered, their material and symbolic presence often reminds urban adults of loss (of childhood and wilderness) and regulation (of “wild” nature and “wild” children). Indeed, as numerous scholars have noted, crises around both children and nature stand in for moral panics about the decline of modern urban life. In the global north, there remains a romantic idealization of nature and childhood. Such representations and idealizations of nature and childhood depend on the binary logic of the nature/culture divide. Our representations of children and nature have very material consequences; they are always embodied and embedded.

Contemporary social movements that aim to bring urban children “back to nature” are based to a large extent on an assumption that the urban is void of meaningful, therapeutic (wild) nature. These movements either seek to bring children out to wild, restorative, non-urban nature or to construct simulacra of rural natures in cities. While attempts to bring more “nature” into the city are important to help rethink cities and human–nature relations, we are concerned in this book that the continued reproduction of nature and children/childhood based on modernist assumptions of what constitutes urban nature and childhood have limiting and deleterious effects on our living in the world. Urban planning, and other processes that organize and construct space for children in cities, continues to reproduce modernist nature/society dichotomies, creating rationalized landscapes, ordered or wild, but rarely foregrounding the agency of nature. In urban studies and planning, children tend to be an afterthought. Playgrounds—the quintessential children’s space in cities—and other play spaces for children are often viewed as “token spaces” and add-ons in urban planning (McKendrick, 1999). While playgrounds are considered necessary in suburban developments, schoolyards, and some urban parks, the production of diverse of play spaces is low on the professional planning agenda. Investments in children are a temporal fix where childhood is viewed as a temporary, incomplete stage. In this regard children are managed as waste, commodity, and as ornament (Katz, 2011). However, ethically children should not be managed as waste, commodity or ornament in cities, particularly when they constitute a large proportion of the population.

Children’s Geographies: Nature, Children and Space

“[Y]oung people,” Aitken argued over a decade ago, “are still thought to be naturally closer to nature with little thought to how childhood is constructed closer to nature” (2001: 26). While relationships between childhood and nature have been considered since then, they have been largely uncritical of the constructions of nature that are at play (Taylor, 2013). Children remain unproblematically linked to nature in discourse and practice; their “innocence is reproduced through their closeness with and to nature” (Holloway and Valentine, 2000: 17).

The relation between nature and children has emerged in two distinct but related ways in childhood studies. The first is the naturalness of childhood, whether childhood is a “natural” and discrete stage in the human life course. “Child” as a category has been attached to a particular stage in human development; the child is in the process of developing, that is, not quite developed. Childhood has been understood as a biological category defined by biophysical (often related to sexual or reproductive maturity) and developmental stages. The “child” is not fully human (adult), but on the way to becoming human. In this sense, children are lacking and adults are complete (see Aitken, 2001 for a detailed discussion on theories of development and childhood). The “natural” development of children is complete when they reach adulthood. New social studies of childhood have challenged the taken for granted naturalization of “child” as a biological category (James, Jenks, and Prout, 1998). As Taylor (2013: xvi) explains:

… clear delineations have been drawn between the state of human biological immaturity and the cultural interpretations of a social responses to this biology—which we call childhood. It is commonly conceded [in new childhood studies] that while biology might be natural, there is nothing natural about our interpretations of and responses to this biology.

Accordingly, childhood is now viewed as social construct, set in social, political, and economic discourses. Childhood differs across the globe. In this respect, the “naturalness” of the child as a biological stage (nature in the sense of human biology [Castree, 2008]) has been interrogated critically in new childhood studies.

External nature and the essential quality of the child constitute the second and third ways that nature emerges in the social studies of childhood. These two natures tend to be examined in tandem and are the source of contemporary moral panics over the loss of both childhood innocence and wild “nature” through the presumed absence of nature in contemporary childhood. The basic argument is that children no longer interact with “nature” and as a result are losing their own innocent, wild inner natures (Louv, 2005). The proffered solution is to reconnect urban children with their own natures in produced wilderness. While childhood may no longer be viewed as a natural developmental stage (rather, it is socially defined), in mainstream childhood studies children tend to remain linked unproblematically to innocence, purity, curiosity, and wildness. More critically, there is a propensity in childhood studies to still make a distinction between “natural” (wild) nature and constructed nature (Hörschelmann and van Blerk, 2012; King and Stefanovic, 2011; Kong, 2000; Taylor, 2013). Indeed, the New Nature Movement seeks to reconnect children, particularly urban children, with “nature.” By privileging certain types of nature, such as wild or “natural” nature, the movement reifies the nature/culture, rural/urban divides.¹ Nature deficit disorder (NDD) is now a commonly used term among proponents of nature-based education (Louv, 2005; Nabhan and Trimble, 1994; Driessnack, 2009). NDD is of particular concern for children growing up in cities where immediate access to any sort of “natural” nature is limited, although it is this “natural” nature that is required to tackle NDD. The discourses in the New Nature Novement and of NDD have not seriously questioned the problematic binaries of nature and urban, or nature and humans that have underpinned the social and material construction of city and rural areas. While the New Nature Movement aims to improve society, it seeks to do so by falling back on the nature/culture divide. Such a move fails to seriously address any sort of “nature” deficit (if indeed we can argue that such a disorder exists!) in children, and it also makes any move to produce alternative urban or rural spaces difficult. However, the New Nature Movement is not alone in reinforcing the nature/culture and rural/urban binaries. How the conception of “natural” children and natures appear in urban planning and the production of just, urban spaces is addressed in the next section.

In some urban areas and among certain population groups, children and youth comprise the majority population (UNICEF, 2012). Thus how space is produced for children and youth has profound material, social, economic, and ecological repercussions for the city at large (Chawla, 2002). Political ecologists emphasize that the city is always produced through socio-natural processes, thus the spaces that are produced for children have particular socio-natural metabolisms. Societal productions of spaces for children have intensified the (formal) spatial separation of nature and humans, as well as adults and children.

Contemporary children’s geographies have dealt with rural and urban natures. In this literature, nature is seen as both something that is cared for and will provide care or benefit (Linzmayer and Halpenny, 2013). Nature is seen as a static thing that can be seen, touched, and felt, that is an external nature. In rural geographies nature is a part of everyday life, especially when examining children’s relation to familial livelihoods in the global south (Jones, 1999; Punch, 2000; Katz, 2004) or farm life in the global north (Cummins, 2009; Giddings and Yarwood, 2005). Urban children and youth’s relationships with nature are mostly investigated through parks, through connections with pets, and wilderness outside the city (Kong, 2000; Wake, 2008; Dunkley, 2004). Children, then, have been complicated and de-naturalized in children’s geographies. And while geographers have pointed out that children are unproblematically linked to an idealized external nature, few venture to critically explore and politicize those natures (Aitkens, 2001; Jones, 2002; Holloway and Valentine, 2000). External and material nature have not been called into question in social studies of childhood as critically as nature in political ecology (see Demerritt, 2002).

Just as the new social studies of childhood began thinking about childhood as social construct and children as active agents of social change, human-environment geographers (especially within political ecology) saw nature (or Nature) as a social construct and an active “actant” (Braun and Castree, 1998; Haraway, 1997; Latour, 2005; Smith, 1996; Whatmore, 2002). We now turn to examine how the urban political ecology literature has dealt with difference and how a more nuanced understanding of nature can influence urban geographies.

Political Ecology, Nature, and the City

Critical theories of nature have figured largely in the field of political ecology. Indeed, the relations between humans and “nature” are a central concern in geography, and throughout the twentieth century there were numerous ways of both theorizing and studying this relationship (see Castree, 2008 for an overview). Contemporary scholars in political ecology have been at the forefront of rethinking nature and nature–society relations. Drawing on Marxist interpretations of nature–society relations from the 1970s and 1980s (Harvey, 1974; Sayer, 1983; Smith, 2008 (1984); Smith and O’Keefe, 1980), and on newer, post-structuralist theories of social construction, the “matter of nature” was taken up energetically in the 1990s (Fitzsimmons, 1989; Haraway, 1997; Hayles, 1995; Soulé and Lease, 1995). This opened up new ways of thinking about the kinds of “nature” that geographers study. Within the growing debates were numerous perspectives to what a “socially constructed nature” referred (Demeritt, 2002). Demeritt clarifies that although “nature is frequently taken to mean the totality of everything that is not humanly constructed,” it is now common to talk of produced “nature,” and socially constructed “nature,” which refer to both the way that concepts of “nature” are defined by groups of people, and how people make particular material (physical) natures (Demeritt, 1998: 22). What both types of construction insist upon is that, paradoxically, “nature is not simply nature” (Castree, 2003: 205). However, the distinction between these two c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Children, Nature, and the City
• PART I PLACING NORMAL NATURES: THE MORAL GEOGRAPHIES OF YOUNG PEOPLE’S ENVIRONMENTS
• PART II NEGOTIATING NATURES: YOUTH, POLITICS, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE
• PART III LEARNING AND GROWING: PLANNING FOR URBAN NATURES
• Index