Introduction to Children and Young People, Space, Place, and Environment

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Part of the Geographies of Children and Young People book series (GCYP, volume 3)

Abstract

Three central geographical concepts are at the heart of this volume on Space, Place, and Environment from the Geographies of Children and Young People series. The volume demonstrates the multiple imbrications of space, place, and environment with/in children and young people’s lives. All the contributors offer a suite of theoretical tools for thinking through how space, place, and environment are (con)figured in children and young people’s lives. They demonstrate how the social borders between childhood and adulthood and spatial borders between rural and urban, countries, neighborhoods, and institutions are relationally produced. The volume on Space, Place, and Environment is organized into five sections: “Indigenous Youth – Space and Place”; “Children, Nature, and Environmental Education”; “Urban Spaces”; “Home Spaces and Homeless Spaces”; and “Border Spaces.” These themes are indicative of some major issues in cutting-edge children’s geography scholarship, but they are, necessarily, partial. In various ways, all of the contributors advocate greater recognition of children and young people’s spatial rights, whether in the home, outdoors, at school, crossing borders, in public and digital spaces, or simply looking for a safe place to sleep. Children and young people’s perspectives on space, place, and environment, and their desire for places to call their own, tie the volume together. The volume is a testament to the politics of the spaces and places of childhood, highlighting how many children and young people face obstacles to living well and to living where they desire. All children and young people deserve a place in the world where they can live well.

Keywords

Bedroom culture Border spaces Childhood studies Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) Dynamic simultaneity Education for sustainability’ (EfS) Environment and nature Forest schools Independent mobilities Intergenerational relations Land and place National Parks Outwardlookingness posthumanism Social experience Space and place Border Euclidean views Homeless and home Urban Spatiality Definition Street children Urban space Wilderness children’s geographies new wave of childhood studies geographies of education scale Indigenous childhoods social media 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.College of EducationUniversity of OtagoDunedinNew Zealand
  2. 2.School of Geography, Earth and Environmental SciencesUniversity of BirminghamBirminghamUK

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