Abstract
This paper examines experiences of young people (9–16) who live in new communities that are under construction. In the context of large-scale housing developments, built in England after 2000, it analyses various ways in which young people engage with life ‘on a building site’. From ethnographic research in three unfinished communities, several inter-linked themes became apparent: how young people engaged with building sites in both aesthetic and material registers; how building sites could, paradoxically, constitute places for both safer play and of significant risk; how such sites could afford sociability whilst simultaneously representing foci for intergenerational tensions. Thus, the paper contributes to studies of architecture/urban design, geographical studies of childhood, and expands a recent call for critical geographies of construction sites. In particular, we argue for the significance of building sites as important, often-overlooked times and places where meaning–making and everyday routines are fostered and normalised in new communities.
Highlights
The UK New Labour Government (1997–2010) introduced a series of large-scale housing policies to address the need for housing provision in England
We argue that building sites offer a peculiar time–space in a community through which struggles over meaning–making are heightened and in which residents – especially young people – engage actively and creatively with the ‘messy’ materialities of architectural and urban forms
As well as more positive opportunities for play and sociability in what were perceived to be the ‘safer’ spaces of building sites, young people’s accounts emphasised particular risks of living with ongoing building work: including trips caused by piled construction materials, falls from raised kerbs or ironworks, and punctures to bicycle wheels caused by unfinished surfaces
Summary
Taken together, the five empirical sections of this paper makes three key contributions to extant geographical literatures They exemplify and develops recent, ‘nonrepresentational’ geographies of childhood and youth (Horton and Kraftl, 2006), by opening out some of the diverse emotional and embodied styles through which young people engage with building sites. Despite a long, if patchy heritage of work on children’s play in wastegrounds (reviewed in Section 2), and notwithstanding Sage’s (2013) attention to construction professionals, there remain very few studies that examine the experiences of residents – including young people – who live on or very near building work This latter contribution goes some way to fulfilling the key aim of the broader research project on which this paper was based: to examine the experiences of young residents living in new, ‘sustainable’ communities in England. We present ethnographic data produced with young people about their everyday encounters with building sites
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