Learning from young people and from our own experiences in Barrio San Jorge

Abstract

This paper brings together the perceptions of three youths from Barrio San Jorge, a low-income settlement located in the municipality of San Fernando in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, and the more technical views of three adult researchers working in the same barrio with the Instituto Internacional de Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo—América Latina (IIED—AL). It highlights youth’s perceptions and aspirations within a context of neighbourhood upgrading and transformation, and discusses some ideas on how best to approach and work with youth, addressing the challenges of integration, participation and commitment.

Walking with Youth in Los Platanitos: Learning Mobilities, Youth Inclusion, and Co-production in International Planning Studios

“…Although the Growing Up in Cities Program (Lynch 1977) and the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989 led to a push for youth inclusion in urban planning (Chawla 2002;Chawla and Heft 2002;Freeman and Vass 2010), youth continue to be marginalized in economic and community development processes (Day and Wagner 2010;Vivoni 2013). This is often due to stigma associated with youth as uninterested troublemakers, as we have observed in Los Platanitos and other low-income communities in Latin American cities where we have worked (Sletto and Diaz 2015; see also Hardoy et al 2010). Moreover, the liminal positioning "of youth somewhere within the child-adult binary easily evokes unease, disquiet, and moral panic" (Langevang 2008, 228) in decision makers.…”

“…Due to a lack of youth-oriented facilities such as playgrounds and recreation centers, youth in Los Platanitos move about and congregate in public spaces, often amid household trash in empty lots and on the edges of the severely contaminated cañadas. As work in children’s geographies has demonstrated, young people engage with urban landscapes in a variety of intimate ways, producing places of significance to them as they move about on foot, taking advantage of diverse spaces to produce spatial stories and imaginaries of past and present (see, for example, Hammad 2011; Hardoy et al 2010; Loebach and Gilliland 2010; Philo 2000; Philo and Smith 2003; Prince 2014). Young people come to know their landscape “by making journeys through it” (Halseth and Doddridge 2000, 567), and this is no different in Los Platanitos.…”

Inventing space in the cañada: Tracing children's agency in Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

“…More specifically, we are informed by the literature in children's geographies that locates children's agency in the embodied, everyday practices through which they "transform urban space" (Kallio and Häkli, 2011). Through its "cataloguing of multifarious ways in which spatialities matter in/for children and young people's everyday lives" (Horton et al, 2008: 339), work in children's geographies has examined how children experience and perceive the built environment (Ansell and Van Blerk 2005; Bartlett et al, 1999;Hardoy et al, 2010;Malone, 2001;Matthews et al 1999;Satterthwaite et al, 1996), contributing to our understanding of the co-productions of identity and space in child spaces, including how childhood spaces are reproduced through memory (Mannion, 2007;Moss 2010) and how children's conceptualizations of race and ethnicity are constituted in and through specific places (Christou and Spyrou, 2012;Holloway and Valentine, 2000). An important strand of children's geographies has sought to understand how children actively produce meaningful places (Nairn et al, 2003) under conditions of uncertainty and danger (Bromley and Stacey, 2012) and risk (Crivello and Boyden, 2012;Frankel, 2007;Klocker, 2007;Spencer and Wooley, 2000), such as the case of street children carving out comfortable spaces through appropriation of "urban niches" (Beazley, 2003, see also Davies, 2008;Young, 2003).…”