Children’s Geographies

This paper explores children’s (aged 7–16) outdoor play in terms of location preference, usage pattern, and accessibility range of play spaces in three neighbourhoods in Dhaka. Data were collected through a survey of children and their respective parents, interviews with children, and observation of play activities in 21 play spaces. Analytical results reveal diverse geographies of children’s outdoor play across gender, age, family income, urban areas, and length of stay. The preferences for outdoor play and intensity of use of the play spaces were significantly lower among girls compared to boys. The frequency of access to play spaces decreased exponentially with the distance between children’s home and play space (exponent of distance-decay = 0.346 per 100 m). Results add evidence to the everyday geographies of children’s outdoor play and inform urban planners in their efforts to create better play environments for and with children in high-density South Asian cities.

Space, and it various permutations, affects bodies but to what extent does it teach? This paper explores the pedagogic dimensions of space. Engaging critically with phenomenological accounts of body/space relations, it examines how certain aspects of space – what here are termed non-human didactics – equip the body with skills that have application in terms of a broad notion of social order requisite for cohabi-tation and the sharing of social space. As Theodore Schatzki (2002, 1) points out, 'Order is a basic dimension of any domain of entities'. He foregrounds the notion of Zusammenhang or 'hanging together' as a crucial element of social life. Such 'hanging together', however, does not just happen; it involves individuals acquiring certain ways of being, to navigate social space and to operate as part of a larger whole. Importantly, this process of acquisition is not just a matter of learning, it also involves teaching but understood in broad terms as pertaining to the many ways in which, as Raymond Williams (1966, 15) explains, 'the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches'. This paper explores these processes. It focuses on the neglect of pedagogy within theorisations of space and draws on examples from within the institutional space of the school to exemplify their role in the spatial formation of social order.

Governments, civil society, and policymakers assert the potential of international migration to foster development and alleviate poverty. Often such claims are rooted in macroscale geopolitical analyses of migration and development, which mask the localized, uneven, and embodied ways family members “left behind” bear the costs and subsidize the U.S./Mexico (inter)national integration project. Informed by feminist geopolitics, this article demonstrates how the left behind disproportionately bear the
hidden costs of neoliberal restructuring and migration. We draw upon Mexican Migration Project (MMP) ethnosurvey data to frame the narratives of migrant family members left behind. Narratives were constructed through in-depth interviews conducted in rural Veracruz. We conclude that in the absence of geographically specific examinations of the hidden costs associated with neoliberal development and migration it is possible that “migration for development” programs and policies may exacerbate inequities that will perpetuate migration and further weaken Mexican origin communities.

This chapter explores the dynamics of place as experienced by third culture kids (TCKs) who spend their developmental years in multiple and diverse physical and social contexts. Traditional conceptualizations and assumptions about a singular localized sense of place are not congruent with the changeability of TCK experiences, and so the concept of sense of place is reexamined with TCKs as the focus. Readers are introduced to two research-based case studies on TCKs and their relationships with place. A study from Hong Kong identifies potential differences between TCK and local Hong Kong adolescents in terms of their relationships to nature and place attachment and considers how relocation has influenced TCK sense of place (Urquhart, An exploration into the environmental identities and sense of place of internationally mobile adolescents. Unpublished master’s thesis. Retrieved from https://viurrspace.ca/handle/10170/880, 2016). A second case study of TCK adolescents in Qatar explores how the “gatedness” of residential contexts can strongly impact TCK experiences of place and sense of place (Picton, International school students’ experiences of their local environment: a case study from Qatar. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bath, 2016). For TCKs, mobility has the potential to both expand and simultaneously limit engagement and identification with place and nonhuman nature. This chapter calls for the recognition that for TCKs, immediate contexts are intrinsically linked to a diversity of places in their past, present, and future. Key aspects of place-based education (PBE) and the potential pedagogical challenges and opportunities are considered within the contexts of international schools. PBE is highlighted as a way to promote relational conceptualizations of place to drive an inclusive and globally minded sense of place for TCKs.

Despite centuries of progressive resistance, the enduring structures of empire, settler colonialism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism have proven resilient. Alternatives have been forged within different scales and spatialities - the local, the urban, the national, and the global - yet these structures of domination persist and in some cases become stronger. In this chapter, I argue that efforts to radically democratize norms and institutions have faltered because they have not been sufficiently grounded in relations of equality and mutual aid among children and adults. Historically, the figure of the child has been little more than an afterthought of critical activism and scholarship. Often deployed as a symbol of a better future, the child is nevertheless positioned as passive with respect to struggles unfolding in the present. The exclusion of children as political equals will either limit or destroy emancipatory struggle, for wherever the notion of naturalized superiority of adult over child is manifest even tacitly in our conceptions of political agency, the seeds of a naturalized superiority of man over woman, rich over poor, and white over black are also sown. If the aim of resistance is to foster a creative, direct, decentralized, voluntary, horizontal, self-managed, reciprocal and sustainable form of collective life, we must begin at the beginning, by embodying, prefiguratively, the inclusion of children as agential partners. Practices of freedom must be deeply rooted in these relations or they will not survive. Worse, we risk introducing entirely new forms of coercive hierarchy.

As a corrective, I offer a necessarily brief and general introduction to the idea of radical children's geographies, an approach which goes beyond the privileging of adult capacities toward the recognition that children's primary mode of agency is non-representational. In the case of the very young - i.e., infants and toddlers - meaning and understanding are generated through their embodied and non-representational mode of engagement with the world and others. This non-discursive type of action is commonly referred to as enactive. Even as children acquire language, until roughly the age of seven, language-use remains rooted in this immediate domain of social relationships and experience. Although our enactive mode of agency is retained for our entire lives, it is the primary and for a time the exclusive form of environmental, personal, and social understanding for children. Recognizing enactive agency as agency is an important first step, but it is also critical that we place it on equal standing with voice, not devalue it as an inferior or less-developed mode of human engagement. The praxis exercised by the child and the adult are distinct yet equal forms of agency admitting of their own relative strengths and advantages.

(In press: November 2020)
Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial
power, which demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more
encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Attentive to the
contingency of childhood - the ways in which particular childhoods are
constituted and configured - the method used in the book is a
transversal genealogy that moves between past and present, and
across a series of discourses and practices framed by children's rights
(the right to play), citizenship, health, disadvantage, and
entrepreneurship education. With an emphasis on the how, where and
when of biosocial power, Refiguring childhood will appeal to
researchers and students interested in examining the relationship
between power and childhood through the lens of social and political
theory, sociology, cultural studies, history, and geography.

This chapter reviews key scholarship on childhood, food, and subjectivity. Popular debates about children and food produce a series of young subjects that are invested with collective hopes and fears, such as the idealized “organic child” (Cairns, Johnston & MacKendrick, 2013), or the pathologized fast food addict (Bugge, 2011). As these young subjects circulate throughout media and policy rhetoric, they provide the discursive context in which young people forge subjectivities through everyday food practices – whether in negotiating meal preferences with family members, or trading snacks within the school dining room. The concept of the “foodscape” is used to situate children’s subjectivities within particular food spaces, relations, and practices. Drawing upon research from Europe and North America, the chapter explores three key sites within children and young people’s foodscapes: family food, school food, and fast food. Just as the restaurant “kids menu” specifies a designated array of items from which the young consumer can choose, children’s foodscapes serve up a range of available subject positions – subject positions that are relationally constituted and morally evaluated. In keeping with this section’s thematic focus on representation, the chapter explores the interplay between the construction of the young subject within dominant food discourse, and the formation of young people’s subjectivities within everyday food practices.

With the advent of the Trump presidency we are facing
the most anti-refugee and immigrant administration in
recent U.S. history. This follows on the heels of the Obama
era, characterized by record deportations and severe U.S.
policies of deterrence towards Latin American refugees and
migrants in its own backyard. This aggressive expansion
of U.S. Homeland Security migration control included:
outsourcing enforcement to Mexico; re-introducing
migrant family detention; increasing ‘family unit’ raids; and
accelerating immigration court hearings. These strategies of
state deterrence and enforcement heightened vulnerability
of asylum-seeking women and children from Mexico and
Central America to human and legal rights abuses. I employ
a feminist geopolitical approach to interrogate the intimate
and embodied spaces of migration controls that ground the
workings of the state in the normalized, routine, and informal
practices of state officials and in the experiences of vulnerable
yet resilient women and children refugees. Drawing upon
examples from two research projects, informed by personal
experience as a volunteer, I critically examine the everyday
state practices of U.S./Mexico migration enforcement in three
arenas - border security spaces, legal spaces, and carceral
spaces. I contend that rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee
crisis,’ these restrictive and intimate performances routinely
deployed by border and legal bureaucrats reproduce and
reinforce the structural and systemic crisis of rights and
responsibility we are currently witnessing. Through a feminist
ethic of care, social justice, and action, migrant and refugee
narratives of everyday restriction may be deployed in resisting
rights abuses and fostering responsibility, humanity, and
hospitality towards newcomers.

Resumen: En este artículo exponemos los resultados de diversas investigaciones que hemos realizado en la Ciudad de México para estudiar la relación que tienen los niños con el espacio público urbano, con un enfoque sobre los espacios de juego. Se reporta el trabajo con 137 niñas y niños de segundo y tercer año de primaria, así como de 68 niños de 6 a 12 años de edad que se encontraban jugando en los parques de varias delegaciones de la ciudad. Los resultados nos permitieron conocer lo que ellas y ellos consideran como entornos amigables u hostiles, así como las diversas problemáticas que enfrentan durante su presencia en el espacio público. Frente a la hostilidad de la ciudad, los espacios de juego aparecen como unas pequeñas islas donde los niños sienten que pueden estar. Sin embargo, la forma en la cual los perciben y los usan nos hace preguntar si estos espacios son realmente territorios de los niños. Palabras claves: Estudios sobre infancia. Entorno urbano. Espacios de juego. Ciudad de México. Resumo: Neste artigo, apresentamos os resultados de várias investigações que realizamos na Cidade do México para estudar a relação que as crianças têm com o espaço público urbano, com foco nos espaços de diversão. O trabalho é relatado com 137 meninas e meninos do segundo e terceiro ano da escola primária, bem como 68 crianças de 6 a 12 anos de idade que estavam jogando nos parques de várias delegações da cidade. Os resultados permitiram conhecer o que eles consideram como ambientes amigáveis ou hostis, bem como os diversos problemas que enfrentam durante sua presença no espaço público. Diante da hostilidade da cidade, os espaços de diversão aparecem como pequenas ilhas onde as crianças sentem que podem estar. No entanto, a maneira como eles os percebem e usam nos faz perguntar se esses espaços são realmente territórios infantis. Palavras-chave: Estudos sobre infância. Ambiente urbano. Espaços de brincadeiras. Cidade do México.

This is a special issue of Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography, volume 97, issue 3, pages 209-274.

INTRODUCTION: NEOLIBERALISM AND POST-WELFARE NORDIC STATES IN TRANSITION (pages 209–212), Guy Baeten, Lawrence D. Berg and Anders Lund Hansen

ENCOUNTERING RACISM IN THE (POST-) WELFARE STATE: DANISH EXPERIENCES (pages 213–222), Kirsten Simonsen

MAJORITY AND MINORITY NATIONALISM IN THE DANISH POST-WELFARE STATE (pages 223–232), Lasse Koefoed

CHILDHOOD IN A NEOLIBERAL UTOPIA: PLANNING RHETORIC AND PARENTAL CONCEPTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY STOCKHOLM (pages 233–247), Sofia Cele

RENEWING URBAN RENEWAL IN LANDSKRONA, SWEDEN: PURSUING DISPLACEMENT THROUGH HOUSING POLICIES (pages 249–261), Guy Baeten and Carina Listerborn

COMMODIFYING DANISH HOUSING COMMONS (pages 263–274), Henrik Gutzon Larsen and Anders Lund Hansen

In verschiedenen städtischen Kontexten weltweit brachte das 20. Jahrhundert den Übergang von der Stadt-als-Spielplatz, die von Kindern angeeignet und gelebt wird, zum Rückzug der Kinder auf speziell für sie gestaltete Spielplätze. Die gegenwärtige Verbreitung von Spielgeräten ähnlicher Bauart und Materialien in vielen Städten entspricht bestimmten Vorstellungen sowohl der Kindheit als auch der Stadt. Dieser Beitrag wählt einen interdisziplinären Ansatz, um diese Repräsentationen von Kindheit und Stadt und die Interaktion zwischen ihnen zu diskutieren. Mit besonderem Fokus auf Spielplätze in Mexiko-Stadt diskutiert der Aufsatz das Verhältnis zwischen diesen und der Entstehung eines globalen Bildes von Kindheit. Es wird untersucht, inwieweit der Bau von Spielplätzen tatsächlich auf die Förderung des kindlichen Spiels abzielt und ob Spielplätze heute noch räumliche Bezüge und Territorien für Kinder darstellen (können). Der Artikel setzt sich kritisch mit dem Begriff des öffentlichen Raums auseinander und zeigt, wie dieser dazu dienen kann, eine neoliberale Transformation der Stadt voranzutreiben.

Within children’s geographies there has been an absence concerning sexuality and in particular how this can lead to the discrimination and marginalisation of individuals. Similarly, within geographies of sexualities the demographic of non-heterosexual children and youth has been under researched, with studies concerning the space of the school being very limited. This thesis sought to address these absences by carrying out qualitative interviews with non-heterosexual individuals about their school experiences. The interviews showed the importance and variation of both physical and time-spaces in the (re)production of heteronormativities, and that the agency of the individual was asserted through the use of negotiation strategies that sought to navigate or resist heteronormativities.

This paper advocates for increased scholarly curiosity about the painful and hopeful psychic agency of children and youth in critiquing neoliberal urban gentrification and imagining alternative forms of city life. It performs a geographically and theoretically informed reading of American director Ira Sachs’ 2016 film "Little Men," a story about a brief but intense childhood friendship that is ended by an eviction. Drawing on the gentrification and psychoanalytic geography literatures, I turn to psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s key clinical observations regarding ‘antisocial’ children and youth. Bringing these tools into dialogue with "Little Men," I consider the revealing differences between the film’s shooting script and the final cut, as well as the film’s reception. "Little Men" and its child protagonists, I argue, should inspire more finegrained attention to gentrification’s psychic dimensions, which both animate the process and open it to contestation.

Power is a critical aspect of child-adult relationships and the formation of children's geographies. It is tempting to see the adult world as all powerful and children's worlds as subjected to control and direction, but the picture is more complex than that. Children do have less power in many respects, but they also have agency, and child-adult relations have complex interplays of power; for example, children's skilful manipulation of parents and adults. One way in which power fl ows between adults' and children's worlds is through adult constructions of what childhood is and how it should be treated. Jenks (2005) shows that differing ideologies of childhood result in children's lives being shaped in markedly different ways.

School gardens are widely celebrated as spaces to promote health and sustainability by connecting children with their food. While scholars have assessed the effects of gardening in practice, media discourses play a key role in constituting this site. This paper examines how the school garden is discursively constituted within American and Canadian newspaper coverage. The analysis reveals specific forms of connection that are said to flourish in the school garden: between food production and consumption, between bodies and knowledge, and between the urban child and nature. While all children are said to benefit from connecting with their food, these connections are articulated differently in relation to particular bodies and spaces, evident in racialized and classed narratives of stewardship and salvation. As children's relationship to food is invested with the hopes and fears of collective futures, the discursive construction of the school garden provides crucial insights into contemporary understandings of childhood.

This paper examines the relevance of the ocean in children's urban experiences, putting into dialogue the premises of blue urbanism and child-friendly cities. The focus is on discussing how children's lives are entangled with coastal cities, urging the field of children's geographies to unpack how spatial conditions in coastal cities serve as a lens to make sense of children's narratives in urban spaces. The most significant themes that emerged from this interest include the narratives of children in coastal public spaces, child-specific risks, diversity of childhood(s) in coastal cities, and children's agency toward disaster resilience. Such discussions suggest that both the principles of blue urbanism and child-friendly cities are instructive to shift the fixity of our thinking about children's urban spaces, urging children's geographies to extend its mantle to cover the emergent logics of children's narratives in the coastal cities. Overall, this work is an invitation for children's geographers to further explore the ocean-child interconnectedness as a way of rethinking urbanity. Child-friendly blue urbanism is still uncharted but the opportunities thereof are immense. It is then the task of children's geographers to build on this potential and traverse other disciplines toward further navigating children's lives in coastal cities.

In this essay, Kate Cairns considers the implications of assessing garden pedagogies, arguing that a rhetoric of effects assumes an essentialist conception of the child-as-educational-output and bolsters a neoliberal vision of social change rooted in personal transformation. Drawing from ethnographic research with youth gardens in Toronto, Ontario, and Camden, New Jersey, she highlights contextualized experiences of learning and labor that exceed the boundaries of an effects framework. Cairns argues that garden pedagogies must be understood in relation to specific dynamics of racial, economic, and ecological injustice. The essay closes with reflections on how feminist theories of social reproduction might reimagine pedagogies of the garden in a way that attends to young people's participation in life's work.

Based on research in the Totonacapan region in Veracruz, Mexico, we examine left-behind children’s perceptions of migration to the United States (“el otro lado”) as manifest in their complex understandings of the journey, landscapes of urban life, social (space/interactions), and material culture. We privilege young children’s perceptions about the migration experience through writing and drawing activities. While multiple factors shape children’s perceptions, the migration stories of adults and older youth are among the most present influences. By focusing on children aged eight and nine, we demonstrate the young age at which narratives about migration processes are already ingrained. The so called “surge” of unaccompanied migrant children to the USA in 2014 highlights the need to pay attention to left-behind youths’ ideas about migration. We find that left-behind
children’s narratives demonstrate astute perceptions of urban life and economic amenities in the USA, as well as of migrants’ risky journeys. These narratives also demonstrate clear tensions between what the children perceive as the life conditions that await migrants on the other side and the risky journey that they feel migrants must undertake.

This article investigates the effects of relocation on children’s satisfaction with mass housing built in the context of squatter housing regeneration. The results are based on a survey and group interviews with 137 nine-to-twelve-year-old children living in three mass housing developments in Ankara, Turkey. At the home level, it was found that while there was no significant change in the satisfaction level of children who moved to an outer-city mass housing development, satisfaction scores significantly increased among children who moved to inner-city estates. Moving from squatter or non-squatter housing did not significantly influence children’s dwelling satisfaction. At the neighbourhood level, regardless of their location in the city, satisfaction scores significantly decreased among children who moved from a formal neighbourhood; no significant change was observed among children who moved from a squatter settlement. Depending on where they moved from and their current place of residence, children explained the change in their residential satisfaction by referring to different dwelling and neighbourhood characteristics. Nevertheless, after relocation, all children mentioned some issues, such as the loss of home gardens, low-traffic volume streets, traditional commercial establishments, and parks and playgrounds with diverse activity areas and furniture.

Canada’s rural idyll is embedded within the colonial legacy of a white settler society; however, little research has examined how class and gender up- hold this articulation of rurality and whiteness. This article draws on ethnographic research with white, working-class rural youth to develop an intersectional analy- sis of rural imaginaries. The analysis shows how youth construct their own rural identities through racialized representations of urban and global “others.” I argue that these racist place-narratives must be understood in the context of competing discourses of rurality in Canada: the romanticized pure white rural of colonial history, and the pathologized poor white rural of a cosmopolitan future. Even as youth locate their gendered performances within the rural idyll, they are marked as “dirts” by their classed, rural status. By inscribing racist discourses onto others, youth resist the classist imagery projected onto their community and thereby re- claim a pure white rural idyll.

Political geographies of youth can be defined as the politics of young people across differing geographical and environmental landscapes, geo-economic contexts, and spatial domains. It is also understood as a new subfield of research within childhood studies and the related subfield of children’s geographies. This entry provides an overview of the differing kinds of research inquiries that constitute this field and shape the meaning of political geographies of youth. This entry also highlights the challenges within contemporary research on the politics of youth geographies and suggestions for future directions of research.

Özet Son yıllarda çocuk çalışmalarındaki artışla beraber çocuk coğrafyalarına da ilgi artmıştır. Çocuk coğrafyaları, çocuk ve çocukluk kavramına bakışı çeşitlendiren disiplinlerarası bir yaklaşıma sahip olmasının yanında beşeri coğrafya içindeki farklı paradigmaların izlerini taşır. Bir diğer altı çizilmesi gereken husus ise, iletişim ve ulaşımdaki gelişmelere bağlı olarak 'hareketlilik'in artması göç çalışmalarına da yansımıştır. Ulusaşırı toplumsal alanlar ya da ulusaşırı mekânlar gibi kavramlar vasıtasıyla bireysel ve toplumsal unsurların sınırları aştığına dair bir vurgu vardır ve özellikle göçmen çocukları bu yeni olgunun en başat unsurudur. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışmanın amacı ulusaşırı mekânlar ile Londra'daki Türkiyeli çocuklar arasındaki ilişkinin altını çizmektir. Bir diğer amaç ise, bir çok yer ile bağı olan bu çocukların o yerlere dair duygusal coğrafyalarını bizzat onların sesinden duyma çabasıdır. Bu bağlamda, çalışmada nitel yöntemlerden derinlemesine görüşme ve katılımcı gözlem yöntem olarak kullanılmıştır ve elde edilen bulgular kısaca şöyle ifade edilebilir: Londra'daki Türk çocuklarının belli yerlere dair duyguları oldukça çeşitlidir ve birçok duygu birbirine girmiştir. Bu duygular kişiden kişiye farklılık gösterdiği gibi zamanla bizatihi aynı çocuğun duyguları da değişebilir.

This article explores the cultural, youthful, and embodied acts of subject-making of South Asian immigrant teens growing up in a post 9/11 New York City, wherein they experience Islamophobia in their neighborhoods and schools. I argue that these acts of subject-making, situated in particular sociopolitical contexts, and made evident in multiple in-between sites of an after-school center, street corners, and online forums, can be read as performative politics of youth, and offer insights into the political agency of young people.

This work explores the socio-spatial relations, urban practices, and institutional arrangements that contribute to the inclusivity of urban nightlife to children. Through a survey of selected literature, this work shows that while there are efforts to address issues of children's overnight experiences, some urban practices also downplay children's urban night experiences. The most significant discussions that emerged from this interest are related to the meaning of public spaces at night; differences in cities' inclusion of children during the day versus the night; privileged and underprivileged childhoods at night; and attention to adults who work on behalf of children, such as women, educators, and neighbourhood communities. Together, the literature reveals the importance of urban policies and research toward children's social integration in the city nightlife. Finally, this chapter proposes the “ethics of care” in everyday life as a framework in creating urban spaces in which children are integrated into the conviviality of the city nightlife.

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this paper explores three key elements of what I call the geography of ethnography. These include: (1) the spatial politics involved in constructing a research ‘site’; (2) the shifting location of the ethnographer in research practice; and (3) the liminal space of the focus group. Anchored in specific interactions in ‘the field,’ the paper demonstrates how integrating insights from cultural geography and feminist post-structuralism can yield new ethno- graphic understandings. I argue that educational ethnographers need to better account for the geography of ethnography in order to attend to the power-laden sphere of ethnographic research.

Video ethnography is one way that researchers might investigate how adults, children and young people interact with their environment and with each other. Video produced by research participants, or 'video ethnography', can provide fascinating insights into these interactions, providing novel and exciting ways for geographers to better understand lived experiences which might otherwise be difficult to access. After summarising how video has typically been employed by geographers, we focus on videos produced by children, and how these provide insights into how children playfully produce and perform their own multimedia identities, the cultural influences that shape that production, and children's own analysis of outdoor spaces. This chapter will introduce you to how participant-led filming can be used in research, using the example of children in outdoor environments as a guide. The chapter provides: • A critical introduction to video and video ethnography in geographical research; • An exploration of the methodology employed in our research; • Examples of children's video ethnography in outdoor settings, and our analysis of it; • An activity to familiarise students with the application of video ethnography.

À partir de données qualitatives issues d’une année d’observation dans des établissements scolaires du secondaire genevois, cet article met en dialogue la notion de carrière, et le concept de place. Il postule que pour trouver sa place sur le marché des sociabilités et y faire carrière, le jeune doit apprendre les codes culturels adéquats, un apprentissage qui passe par la maitrise de sa propre spatialité et la conscientisation de celle des autres pendant les temps de pause. Cette lutte pour les places entre groupes sociaux est d’autant plus accrue et complexe dans un contexte scolaire hétérogène et plus contraignante pour les filles.

This study investigated the predictors of children's geographical knowledge of other countries and, in particular, whether a child's demographic characteristics, travel experience, and a¡ect towards a country predict the child's level of geographical knowledge about that country. 261 English children aged between 6 and 13 years old were interviewed in order to assess their a¡ect for, and knowledge of, ¢ve speci¢c countries: France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain. The children's travel experience to these countries was also assessed. The children comprising the sample were di¡erentiated in terms of their age, gender, social class and locality (urban versus rural). It was found that the predictors of the children's geographical knowledge varied across the ¢ve target countries. There were demographic di¡erences in children's travel experience, with age and social class being the principal predictors of travel. Travel experience to a particular country did sometimes predict the level of positive a¡ect towards that country, but travel did not usually predict geographical knowledge of that country. A¡ect towards a country also did not predict geographical knowledge of that country. However, there were demographic di¡erences in knowledge: age was found to be the most important predictor of knowledge, with additional independent contributions also being made by social class and gender in the case of some target countries. It is suggested that previous studies which have concluded that there is either a linear or curvilinear relationship between a¡ect and knowledge in this domain might have ignored the covariance of the predictors of geographical knowledge, and that multivariate statistical procedures are required in order to identify relationships between variables in this domain.

Με αφετηρία την αρχή της δεκαετίας του 1990, ο διακριτός κλάδος που ονομάζουμε "Γεωγραφίες των Παιδιών" [Children’s Geographies] έχει συγκροτήσει ένα σαφές πλαίσιο για την έρευνα πάνω στην καθημερινή ζωή των παιδιών από τη σκοπιά της γεωγραφίας. Στην πραγματικότητα, τα θεμέλια του κλάδου είχαν τεθεί πολύ νωρίτερα, το 1971, όταν ο πρωτοπόρος William Bunge, στο βιβλίο του "Fitzgerald, Geography of Α Revolution", χρησιμοποίησε την αστική χαρτογραφία για να καταδείξει πώς μέσα από την επιτόπια παρατήρηση στον χώρο μπορούμε να ανακαλύψουμε – αλλά και να «δείξουμε», με τεκμήρια – τις βαθιά πολιτικοοικονομικές αιτίες που κρύβονταν πίσω από την εξέγερση των αφροαμερικανών που ζούσαν στο γκέτο του Fitzgerald. O Bunge υποστήριξε ότι «τα παιδιά είναι σαν τα καναρίνια σε ορυχείο: αν σωριαστούν τα παιδιά, τότε οι μεγάλοι πρέπει να ανησυχούν για τους εαυτούς τους». Μεταφέροντας την παραπάνω υπόθεση στη σύγχρονη ελληνική πόλη, «τεκμήρια» είναι για μας οι εμπειρίες των παιδιών – αποτυπωμένες σε εικόνα [φωτογραφίες] και λόγο – από τον αστικό χώρο. Οι εμπειρίες αυτές μάς καθοδηγούν στην αποτίμηση της πραγματικότητας της πόλης και στα μοντέλα αστικού σχεδιασμού που την έχουν παράγει, ανοίγοντας μια σειρά από ερωτήματα. Είναι η «εικόνα της πόλης» στα παιδιά μια κοινή, συλλογική περιβαλλοντική εικόνα, όπως σε κάθε ομοιογενή ομάδα ή κατηγορία χρηστών σύμφωνα με τον Kevin Lynch; Ποιες είναι οι πολιτικές, κοινωνικές και πολιτισμικές συνιστώσες που την ίδια στιγμή σχηματοποιούν την καθαυτό εμπειρία της πόλης από τα παιδιά στην ελληνική πόλη σήμερα; Με ποιους τρόπους μπορούμε να χρησιμοποιήσουμε το υλικό που προέρχεται από τα ίδια τα παιδιά σε μια διαφορετική, κριτική χαρτογραφία της πόλης;

This article focuses on the material and discursive constructions of nature and chil dren in the city. While dominant representations and idealizations of nature and child­ hood depend on the binary logic of the nature/culture and rural/urban divide, there is also a simplification and romanticization of nature in children's geographies and a lack of chil­ dren and their spaces in urban political ecology. We argue that children and nature in cities need to be removed from a binary model of being and attended to in more nuanced ways in urban political ecology and children's geographies. In this regard, we suggest that both nature and children in cities need to be queered. We need to ask how the production of urban spaces (re)creates particular romantic and idealized relations with natures that reify the binaries between nature/culture, and male/female through a heteronormative framework. The purpose of this article is to bring the critical nature–society theories of urban political ecology into conversation with work in children's geographies that explores the 'nature' of childhood, and in doing so queer the relationship between children and nature. Drawing on research on queer ecologies, and queered childhoods, we aim to provide a framework to rethink and queer both nature and children in cities.

Se presentan en este artículo reflexiones derivadas de dos investigaciones complementarias, que tuvieron por objetivo contestar a las siguientes preguntas: ¿cuál es la relación de los niños con el espacio públic urbano en la Ciudad de México? y ¿los niños forman parte del "todos" de la "ciudad para todos"? Se buscó entender cómo niños de diferentes entornos urbanos perciben y viven la Ciudad de México, y cómo las políticas urbanas repercuten en su integración - o la falta de ella - en el espacio público.