Out and About in Global Cities

Abstract

This chapter considers childhood in the context of global cities, taking the space of the city as a site of everyday life and its multiplicity of cultural practices. Informed by cultural theory concerned with spatial practices, the practice of place, and the ways that everyday life is implicated in the formation of culture (Certeau, 1984), and drawing on the work of scholars from the transdisciplinary field of global studies, the chapter explores how social imaginaries of the global city are enmeshed within broader contexts, cultures and world events. Through a discussion of city spaces, events and activities available to children in the public spaces of global cities, local histories and everyday practices of art, politics, play and culture are shown to extend beyond what might otherwise be designated as “local”, and to instead be porous to the space and time of elsewhere. Images from galleries, museums and parks illustrate multiple entanglements between embodied practices in children’s lifeworlds and social imaginaries of global childhoods, which in turn take place in dialogue with dynamic global forces that continue to shape social imaginaries of global childhoods.