Children's Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 13 No. 2 (2003) ISSN: 1546-2250 Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning Holloway, Sarah and Valentine, Gill (2000). London and New York: Routledge; 271 pages. ISBN 0415207304. Two recent books from Routledge, Children’s Geographiesand Geographies of Young Peopletrace a knife edge between an excited engagement with the spatiality ofchildren’s lives and a sober awareness of the limitations of thesespaces and the opportunities children and young people have forengaging them. It is in many ways an exciting and anxiety-provokingmoment to be studying and doing research with young people. These twovolumes in Routledge’s “Critical Geographies” series are evidence ofboth an expanded interest in children and young people in geography anda deepening of the sorts of inquiry taking place in the field. Readingthem- one a monograph by Stuart Aitken and the other a collectionedited by Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine- is to bear witness toreflective and trenchant conversations among contemporary researchersfocused on children’s relationships to place. They are accomplished,engaging books that are sure to bring broad attention to concerns atthe core of a growing field concerned with the geographies of youngpeople. Yet the burgeoning interest in childhood is partnered withdramatic social and spatial shifts that have serious consequences foryoung people and the compass of their experiences. Both volumes speakto the tensions in children’s everyday lives provoked by the social,economic, and political transformations associated with globalization,technological development, privatization, migration, and “security,”among other things. The authors are attentive to the geographicimplications of these concerns and make clear the subtle and manifestways that spatiality matters in understanding contemporary childhoodand young people’s everyday experiences. In their scope, both volumesare welcome additions to the geographic literature on children; theHolloway and Valentine for its international and historic perspectiveand the Aitken for the broad sweep of theories it addresses. 201 Children’s Geographies, edited by Holloway and Valentine, is animportant resource for the growing interdisciplinary social scienceaudience concerned with the shifting contexts of young people’s lives.While most of the authors work in the field of geography, this book isa fine example of the strength of interdisciplinary research and theoryconcerning issues at the interface between children and their everydayenvironments, including cyberspace, playgrounds, “nature,” commercialspaces, public spaces, and the home. While geographers may take forgranted that space, place, and nature matter in understanding youngpeople’s (or anyone’s) experience, each chapter in Children’s Geographiesmakes the nature of that importance vibrantly clear and will beappreciated by researchers in such fields as sociology, psychology, andanthropology who are now paying more attention to context. Holloway and Valentine are well-known and strong voices incritical geography whose work has been influential in advancing bothmore substantial conversations about contemporary young people andopening up the grounds for what these conversations encompass. Theirsis an important project, and in this volume they bring together a broadrange of serious, empirically grounded and theoretically informed workon which to build it. While the purview of their concerns is broad andthe book is international in scope (drawing on empirical work fromEurope, North and South America, Africa and Asia), it exhibits aproblematic tendency toward insularity in British geography. With fewexceptions, the authors in this collection work in the UK and areinadequately attentive to the breadth of scholarly work on children’sgeographies taking place in other places, notably in the Nordiccountries, North America, and Australia. This publication follows the widely read Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures(1998), a volume edited by Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine thatprovided geographers and others with a range of geographicallysensitive and critical analyses of the experiences and everydaypractices of contemporary youth in relation to issues of culture,representation and resistance. Children’s Geographies buildsupon this earlier work by focusing on young 202 people of all ages asactive agents negotiating the socio-spatial relations and structuresthat comprise their everyday lives and the horizons of their futures. The editors’ introduction develops a theoretical framework that setsthe stage for the subsequent chapters exploring constructions ofchildhood in different times and places as well as children’s manyengagements with space, place, and nature. Holloway and Valentine offera critical and historical review of issues relevant to what they callthe “new social studies of childhood,” a burgeoning...