Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 11

One of the central concerns of childhood geographers has been to examine children’s use of public space. Much of this work contends that children subvert the intended use of designed play space and make play and leisure spaces out of the interstices of public space – hidden spaces and wasteland. Colin Ward’s lovingly photographed The Child in the City (1978) is probably the classic text here. Other geographers working in this area include Stuart Aitken (2001a) and Owain Jones (2000). On a slightly different but perhaps related track, other geographers have written on how children in public spaces are often considered to be ‘out of place’ and therefore unruly and threatening. This is an interesting area of inquiry in that it allows for comparative analysis of the experiences of street children in the South and that of teenagers caught in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood in the North (see Valentine 2004; Beazley 2000; Matthews et al. 2000).

Holloway and Valentine in their introduction to the edited collection on Children’s Geographies claim that ‘geographical studies can add texture and detail to the currently rather broad-brush analysis of the social construction of childhood’ (2000: 9). Whether the claim that the sociology of childhood has a ‘broad-brush’ approach is justified, social geography has made it very clear that, just as childhood changes over time or in history (see above), it is also shaped by place or geography. Literally, where children live will shape their experience of the world and the expectations placed on them (Holloway and Valentine 2000: 9–11). The split that James et al. (1998) identify between global processes that shape children’s lives and local cultural lifeworlds can be transcended by a spatial appreciation of the connections between the local and the global. Cindi Katz’s excellent comparative study of the lives of children and youth in Howa, a Sudanese village, and in a district of New York, Growing up Global, shows how global economic restructuring has reshaped experiences and expectations of childhood and youth, and how children and their parents are responding to the new demands that new economic processes have placed on them (Holloway and Valentine 2000: 11; Katz 2004).

Thinking about how space and territory are organized by global forces and processes and how these impact on the organization of children’s lives and concepts of childhood has been fertile ground for childhood geographers.