Children's Presence in the Neighbourhood: A Social-Pedagogical Perspective
Abstract
In this article we discuss some theoretical and methodological perspectives for studying children's neighbourhoods as a social-pedagogical context. This social-pedagogical perspective includes a focus in research on a reflective approach based on the acquisition of empirical indicators about the impact of the neighbourhood on children's socialisation. A research outline based on the idea of mapping children's neighbourhoods within their social and historical context is presented as one possible example of such an analysis.
Introduction
In this article we discuss the neighbourhood of children as a social-pedagogical context. A social-pedagogical perspective on the neighbourhood of children poses the question how and to what extent this environment creates the conditions for realising children's citizenship. The neighbourhood impacts upon children's socialisation in different ways. The neighbourhood creates and restricts opportunities for individual, social and cultural development and expression. It creates learning opportunities as a result of the social relationships that are made possible in this environment (Bernet, 1990). It also influences the relationship between children and society because it is one of the settings in which children can get to know the meanings, rules and values of their community and influence them, and where they can experience different social positions (Holloway and Valentine, 2000a).
This implies a reflective approach (cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Woodhead, 1999) based on the acquisition of empirical indicators about the different ways in which children are present in their neighbourhood. The attention for children's presence in the neighbourhood is not new. In the past different influential studies were conducted into children's relationship with the urban environment (e.g. Hart, 1979; Lynch, 1977; Matthews, 1992; Moore, 1986; Ward, 1977), but Horelli (1998) concluded that these were rather an exception within the mainstream practice of representative planning by experts and a few selected key groups.
In this article, we present one possible perspective for research that pays attention to the differential ways in which the neighbourhood impacts upon children's socialisation. First, we suggest a view on children's neighbourhoods that situates this environment in a broader social-pedagogical framework and defines it as an important social-pedagogical context. Secondly, we present a view on childhood studies that analyses children's neighbourhoods within a broader social, cultural and historical context.
Children's neighbourhoods as a social-pedagogical context
Moore and Young (1978) described three interrelated dimensions of environmental experience: the physiographic space (the landscape of objects, buildings, people and natural elements); the social space (human relationships and cultural values); and the inner space (physiological and psychological life of the individual). Many studies and policy practices relate to the physical features of children's neighbourhoods, especially the play opportunities they offer, and on the child's individual experience of the neighbourhood. In this regard, two recent influential frameworks have largely contributed to these two main focuses in research: the Child Friendly Cities Initiative (CFCI) and the Sociology of Childhood.
An important issue within the Child Friendly Cities Initiative (Riggio, 2002) are the opportunities the neighbourhood presents to children for moving independently and for playing and interacting with other children. Research within this perspective is aimed at defining features of a child-friendly neighbourhood, and at translating these into design principles. Riggio (2002) observed that in relation to childhood policy practices, particularly in high-income nations, a focus on play spaces has become an important framework for interventions in the spatial environment of children. Various pedagogical and developmental psychological theories have resulted in lists of design principles to create a ‘child-friendly’ neighbourhood. Examples of these can be found in Blinkert (2004), The Delft Manifesto on a Child Friendly Urban Environment (2005) and the Kids Street Scan 2.0 (Schepel, 2006). Other studies (e.g. Cope, 2006; De Visscher, 2003; Elsley, 2004; Rasmussen and Smidt, 2003) show that, for children too, living in a certain neighbourhood has a broader significance than the places for playing and interacting with other children in that neighbourhood. Apart from (formal and informal) play facilities, children refer for example to community support functions, stores and places to meet others (not only peers), but also places to do things with meaningful adults.
In recent years, the psychosocial dimensions of children's environments — the second dimension in Moore and Young's model — are being studied mostly within the field of the Geographies of Childhood (Holloway and Valentine, 2000b; Matthews, 2003; McKendrick, 2000; Philo, 2000) as a social-geographical subdiscipline of the Sociology of Childhood (James and others, 1998). Their focus is on children's actual use of their environment (‘geography of children’) and on aspects of representation, meaning and experiences (‘children's geographies’). Especially the second topic, children's geographies, aims at describing children's ‘own’ way of seeing their environment and giving meaning to it. Within this approach, children's social worlds are seen as real places with real (child-specific) meanings, where children's social actions are structured through a system that is unfamiliar to adults. These practices can be mapped through ethnography.
The social-pedagogical framework that we want to suggest in this contribution focuses on the third dimension in Moore and Young's framework: the neighbourhood as a social space. This means that we are especially interested in how the neighbourhood intervenes in children's social and cultural development. Our current research shows that children refer to important places in their neighbourhood, according to whom they meet at these places or who lives there, rather than to the physical features of a place. They refer to the multiplicity of encounters and social interactions, intrinsic to their way of being present in and moving through their neighbourhood. They do not only refer to peers but also to younger or older children, like brothers and sisters, and to adults in the neighbourhood. The focus on the neighbourhood as a social space does not exclude the importance of its physical features or children's individual experience, but as Moore and Young argue, complements it.
Children as fellow citizens
The focus on the neighbourhood as a social-pedagogical context approaches children primarily on their social position within this environment. Children are addressed on their actual status as fellow citizens, rather than as citizens in the making (Lawy and Biesta, 2006). Matthews and others (1998) pointed to the importance of not seeing children as a homogeneous group in discussions on the neighbourhood, but that the environmental behaviour of groups of children within a locality is often a function of their own microcultures. An important issue for social-pedagogical research is the social and cultural opportunities a particular environment actually allows, enhances or impedes. In other words, the focus in research should not only be on the (normative) assessment of particular environments as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ neighbourhoods for children to grow up. The focus should be on the actual story of a particular neighbourhood, the ways in which people (including children) move through their neighbourhood, how they use it, express themselves and develop social and cultural opportunities through their neighbourhood, but also on the ways in which the neighbourhood creates boundaries between or excludes individuals or particular social and cultural groups. A focus that remains limited on the physical design of public spaces that meets the different developmental needs of children often overlooks the reality of the limited tolerance for children's presence in public space on the one hand, and for the position of public spaces in children's life worlds on the other.
The position of children in public space is not self-evident. This experience could be summarised with Valentine's (1996) phrase that children should be seen and not heard. This means that children are easily seen as a nuisance in public space. Besides this lack of tolerance for children's presence in the urban public realm, there is often little appreciation for the position of the urban public space in children's education too. As Woodhead (1999) argued, the images of what are assumed to be normal growth in children and childhood environments are based on developmental psychological models, and often do not meet the cultural diversity of children's life worlds. Many of these developmental models describe the city streets as undesirable educational environments. The CFCI from UNICEF describes the relationship between children and the urban environment as follows:
Children live in informal settings and on city streets, with little opportunity to play as children should, with indoor space that is typically overcrowded and outdoor space that is filthy and contaminated. Traffic, pollution, and a shortage of green and open spaces in which to play constrain children. Urban children feel increasingly imprisoned and isolated. (The Child Friendly Cities Initiative, 2004)
A number of authors (e.g. Holloway and Valentine, 2000a; Valentine, 1996; Zeiher and Zeiher, 1998) refer to the dominant social position of children in their neighbourhood in terms of spatial segregation: the banning of children from the adult world and from public space, run and controlled by adults. This spatial segregation fits in with the more comprehensive pedagogical idea that minors should be protected in order to safeguard their personal, social and cultural developmental opportunities. In order to integrate them into adult life, children need to be ‘educated’. This concretely means that the social world of children is increasingly being structured in a ‘pedagogical’ sense (Depaepe, 2000). In the context of this discussion, James and others (1998) pointed to the increasing privatisation and institutionalisation of childhood within the domestic sphere as related historical developments. Compared to the situation before the 19th century, nowadays childhood is lived increasingly in private spaces such as the home or organised settings (leisure facilities, childcare institutions, etc.), and decreasingly in public spaces.
A protection discourse appears in the discussion on children and public space in two ways: there is concern about the risks run by children in public space on the one hand (Karsten, 2002) and the nuisance caused by children in public space on the other (Harden, 2000; Valentine, 1996). This double concern is connected with the broader image of youth as ‘troubled’ and ‘troubling’ (Griffin, 2001). A recent European survey (Tutt and Janssen, 2005) has indicated that 77% of Belgian parents report fear (for strangers and accidents) as the most important reason for keeping their children out of public space. Furthermore, the study has shown that 28% of Belgian parents do not allow their children to play outdoors at all. On the other hand, the latest report of the Flemish Committee on the Rights of the Child mentioned legal charges by local residents against children playing for violating legal noise rules (Vandekerckhove, 2005). These observations raise questions about the actual citizenship of children.
Childhood studies beyond the tunnel vision
Studying children's neighbourhoods is not just a matter of registering their different ways of being present in the neighbourhood. Many studies focus on the neighbourhood here and now, isolated in time and social context. Verschuren (2003, p. 128) referred to this with the concept of the ‘tunnel vision’. In relation to children's neighbourhoods, this means that we should not just record children's patterns of using their neighbourhood, but that we should also try to understand how these patterns are influenced by the social and historical conditions in which they grow up.
Understanding children's views on their neighbourhood and their patterns of use and movement through the neighbourhood is also a matter of understanding the neighbourhood in itself. Blondeel (2005) referred, for example, to the habitus concept developed by Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), as a tool for urban research and — in a further stage — for urban renewal and development. The habitus can be defined as a set of unconscious schemes that structure our situation-specific ways of thinking, perceiving and acting. Applied to the neighbourhood this means that we ‘read’ and ‘write’ the city as we have learned to think, speak and behave in (class and cultural) specific ways (Blondeel, 2005, p. 1). Blondeel does not only register how people behave in their neighbourhood, but also addresses the question as to why people behave, dwell, think, speak, etc. in the specific ways they do. The key to this understanding lies in the history of a neighbourhood, as constructed by its residents.
Besides a historical perspective, a good understanding of children's presence in the neighbourhood requires an analysis of the social and cultural conditions and changes that influence their position in public space. The studies of, amongst others, Chawla (2002), Jensen and others (2004), Katz (2004) and Stanley and others (2005) show, for example, how children's position in public space is influenced by the larger social and economical structures and inequalities in which they grow up.
Children's presence in the neighbourhood
As part of a PhD project we are currently conducting research into the social-pedagogical meaning of children's neighbourhood. A short outline of the underlying research questions and methodology is presented below as one possible way to study the social-pedagogical meaning of the neighbourhood.
Different analyses of the changing social and spatial conditions of childhood show that children grow up in an increasingly urbanised (Chawla, 2002), privatised (James and others, 1998; Katz, 2006) and segregated environment (Zeiher and Zeiher, 1998). The question is then, what kind of geographical imaginations are possible in a population growing up under these conditions.
Also in a less negative discourse, three important questions for analysing the impact of children's neighbourhoods on their socialisation and their position as fellow citizens remain in a social-pedagogical research agenda. These questions concern the ways in which children are able, allowed and willing to be present in their neighbourhood: what individual, social and cultural opportunities does the neighbourhood offer; in which places do children identify themselves; what physical and social restrictions do children experience when using their neighbourhood; and how do they deal with these restrictions?
The research is organised as a case study of three contrasting neighbourhoods in the city of Ghent in Belgium: ‘Nieuw Gent’, a social housing neighbourhood sometimes referred to as the Chicago of Ghent because of the many apartments and their bad reputation; Steenakker, a neighbourhood with a mixture of public and private housing consisting of individual houses with a garden; and Sint-Pieters-Buiten, an upper-middle-class neighbourhood sometimes referred to as the Millions Quarter because of the expensive houses in it.
The case study consists of three parts, representing three interrelating ‘maps’ of children's position in each neighbourhood. The first map, the socio-spatial map, describes the social and spatial conditions of the selected neighbourhoods. Different social and spatial constructions of the neighbourhood create different opportunities and restrictions. The second map, the mental map, describes how residents have created shared meanings about the features of and changes in their neighbourhood. And the third map represents children's actual presence in and movement through the neighbourhood. Children were asked to talk about their personal map of the neighbourhood, with the aid of photographs taken by children, interviews and task-based focus groups.
At present, the handling of the data is still ongoing. Therefore it is not possible to report on the global findings of our research. However, we provide some first general comparative findings from the case studies of Steenakker and Sint-Pieters-Buiten in order to illustrate the kind of findings resulting from this research.
Socio-spatial map
Before analysing people's presence in and opinions about their environment, it is important to learn more about this environment in itself, especially the way in which the physical and social design creates distinctions between social groups. Space is a vector of social change and social relationships (Ben Abdeljelil, 1999); a material carrier of social and cultural meanings (De Rynck and others, 2003; Massey, 1995). Similarly, space creates a basis for social (inter)actions. The design of public space can facilitate or impede social interactions between people and between different groups. An urban space in which each group and every function having their respective own places will have a different impact upon potential social interactions compared to a public space, where different functions are combined, allowing different groups to intermix in that place.
The socio-spatial map of each neighbourhood was reconstructed by analysing different kinds of documents (articles, policy and academic reports) describing the original design of the neighbourhood, the social, demographical, cultural and spatial changes in the neighbourhood, as well as the present situation of each case. This information is analysed in relation to the question what kind of citizenship of children is enabled through the construction of the neighbourhood.
The Sint-Pieters-Buiten neighbourhood, for example, was intended to be a prestigious environment, designed by the most famous architects of the time. The focus on the architecturally exclusive appearance of the neighbourhood was supposed to reflect the grandeur of the World Exposition that took place in 1913 in that area. There were strict aesthetic guidelines concerning the architecture of the private houses and public spaces, but no specific attention was given to children's presence in the neighbourhood's public spaces: for example, there were no playgrounds planned, nor other places for children to meet in public space. Gradually, the older generations are disappearing from the neighbourhood. Some of the remaining houses have become too expensive for individual families and ended up being divided into smaller units, attracting new groups like students and single persons. At the same time, the small towns south of the city of Ghent are becoming attractive to better-off families. They offer the peace and openness that Sint-Pieters-Buiten used to offer; hardly any other social groups live there; and they can still make use of the city's provisions because the distance can be easily crossed by car.
The Steenakker neighbourhood was designed according to the concept of the Garden City (De Decker and others, 2005), a socialist concept for working class neighbourhoods. The design of the neighbourhood includes a strong emphasis on public green spaces, small inner courts and alleys combining the different housing units. The public housing was spatially divided according to the political and ideological background of the residents. The Catholic, Socialist and Liberal housing agencies built their housing units in different parts of the neighbourhood. Starting from the late 1980s, other groups entered the neighbourhood, including immigrants from different cultures. Currently, some 70 different nationalities are living in Steenakker and Nieuw Gent.
Mental maps
The way in which the individual child behaves in his neighbourhood is influenced by the way in which he or she has learned to perceive and move through this environment. Therefore, the mental map for each neighbourhood is reconstructed. In our study, the concept of a ‘mental map’ is not used in its usual psychological meaning (e.g. Matthews, 1980), namely as the way in which individuals perceive, interpret and represent their environment (cf. our definition of a personal map in this study), but is used in a meaning that rather reflects Bourdieu's habitus concept (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). This refers to the past of a neighbourhood, the ways in which people have given meaning to the changes in their residential environment and to the ways in which they currently give meaning to their neighbourhood. For this purpose we used oral histories as a source of information (cf. Bouw and Karsten, 2004; Mantell, 1970). Oral history is a body of spoken narratives that are told by people about themselves and their environment (Mantell, 1970) and that thus depict people's social world against a specific social and historical backdrop. It is not just a conversation about the past, but a highly planned, systematic, semi-structured account on a specific topic, based on a clear (social-) historical question (Baum, 1974). Comparable research has been carried out by Bouw and Karsten (2004) in three streets in the Dutch city of Amsterdam. Based on a combination of oral histories and observations, they addressed the question of comparison to see whether any changes occurred in the spaces since the time when the contemporary parents were children themselves. Other examples of historical research into children's presence in the neighbourhood include the research of Raymund (1995) and Wridt (2004). The value of working with oral histories is that they complement ‘formal’ written historical data by focusing on the everyday history of people. As such, oral history is useful for reconstructing the social-cultural past of groups who do not have access to dominant historiography (Portelli, 1991; Thompson, 1988).
Oral histories in Sint-Pieters-Buiten revealed that residents regret a sense of loss of local community. When they were a child, they experienced their neighbourhood as a small, village-like community, firmly demarcated from the outside world. Now, the neighbourhood has become more ‘cosmopolitan’, to cite one of the residents. This does not mean that there is a great social mix now, but that the neighbourhood is more subjected to external influences. The middle and higher class families, living in the better-off towns outside Ghent but working in the city of Ghent, make use of the provisions in Sint-Pieters-Buiten for their children. The elementary school, scouts group and even the church community in Sint-Pieters-Buiten are among the most popular in Ghent because of their good reputation. More than half of their population consists of people from outside the neighbourhood. This puts a lot of pressure on the local community.
In Steenakker, oral histories point out that public space has always been an important setting for children's social and cultural opportunities. This contrasts with Sint-Pieters-Buiten where large parts of children's lives have always taken place in the private home and in institutional settings. However, the public life and social practices in Steenakker have always been socially divided — in the 1950s according to ideological background (Catholics, Socialists and Liberals); in the 1970s and 1980s between the original residents and the people from the new apartments of Nieuw Gent; and from the late 1980s until now between people of Belgian origin and immigrants.
Personal maps
In order to gain a perspective on the variety of personal maps of young residents, a group of 39 children were asked to keep pictures about their neighbourhood for a period of 1 week. Comparable research has been carried out, amongst others, by Burke (2005), Chawla (2002), Lynch (1977), Rasmussen and Smidt (2003) and Nic Gabhainn and Sixsmith (2006). Especially, Lynch's (1960) description of people's mental representation of a neighbourhood as a network of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks has been very helpful to analyse children's personal maps.
We clearly instructed the children not to take pictures of ‘typical’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘well-known’ places, but to focus on those places where they were actually present or that they actually passed by during that week. Afterwards, an interview took place with each child about his pictures. During these ‘photo-elicited’ interviews (cf. Prosser and Schwartz, 1998) children were asked to choose three pictures about which they would talk and the researcher additionally chose two other pictures. We asked questions about what was on the picture, when it was taken, who was around when the picture was taken, what the person was doing in that place when taking the picture and why he had decided to take that picture. We did not restrict the interviews to the content of the five selected pictures, but we tried to assess the neighbourhood's opportunities and restrictions from children's point of view in a comprehensive way, by also asking more general questions about the neighbourhood.
After all interviews were conducted, the data were analysed for nodes in the neighbourhood. In this study, nodes are defined as places in the neighbourhood where the separate personal maps of the participants join up. A node was merely physically defined, based on the number of times that a certain place appeared in children's personal maps. Whether these places created opportunities for interaction between children or between children and adults did not matter to be defined as a node. In that sense our definition differs a little from Lynch's (1960) definition of nodes as points or strategic spots where there is an extra focus, or added concentration of city features. We were particularly interested in these nodes in order to discover to what extent these places could teach us anything about the kind of social interactions that were enabled in a particular neighbourhood. These nodes were the basis for a task-based focus group in each neighbourhood. This focus group was conceived as a child-guided walk through each neighbourhood, in which the participating children were asked to walk to the nodes and add extra information. The aim was to find out more about the characteristics of the different nodes.
As a final stage, the information was presented in an exposition during a local community event staged in each neighbourhood, acting as a vehicle to present the results to the participants and the local community and to verify the information within a larger context.
The personal maps of children living in Sint-Pieters-Buiten consisted mostly of institutional places like the school, scouts centre and church, and the routes between their homes and these places. Besides these institutional settings, children often referred to places outside their neighbourhood: private clubs and friends’ homes, mostly situated in the richer towns outside Ghent. Public space in their neighbourhood has little more value than a transitional zone between private and institutional settings. Some even perceive their public home environment as unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable territory. Social and cultural developmental opportunities are mostly created through a personal network of institutional leisure facilities and private contacts.
In Steenakker, the personal maps indicated that children (as well as adults) are intensively and visibly present in public space, but that their presence is mostly group-related. These groups are based on various features like living place, gender and cultural background. Children of Turkish origin, for example, described their neighbourhood almost exclusively in terms of where different members of their family and Turkish friends lived, worked or gathered. And the formal and informal play spaces in the northern part of the neighbourhood were, to give another example, unfamiliar and even uncomfortable territory to the children living in the southern part of the neighbourhood. Still, these different groups do not live completely segregated. The different group-related patterns meet each other in certain places, which are mostly functionally unspecific or multifunctional places like a central square or road in the neighbourhood.
Discussion and conclusions
In this contribution we presented a social-pedagogical perspective on the neighbourhood of children. This perspective focuses on the question as to how the neighbourhood influences the relationship between children and society. More specifically the neighbourhood as a social-pedagogical context refers to the conditions of citizenship and community into which children are being socialised as a result of the physical and social construction of their neighbourhood and children's own social actions. Lawy and Biesta (2006) defined citizenship as a social practice that is embedded within the day-to-day reality of (young) people's lives, instead of a fixed outcome of a linear socialisation trajectory. Citizenship-as-practice suggests that young people learn to be citizens as a consequence of their participation in the actual practices that make up their lives.
As such, the differences in children's presence in the neighbourhood are the effect of the social-pedagogical space in each neighbourhood, created by the physical construction of the neighbourhood, the socially constructed meanings, boundaries and values in the neighbourhood, and children's agency. Our methodology was aimed at mapping the social-pedagogical space in children's neighbourhoods from these interrelated perspectives through the reconstruction of socio-spatial, mental and personal maps. The use of these different maps is not new, and many of the observations are in accordance with the more general conclusion that different social groups live spatially segregated (e.g. Musterd and De Winter, 1998) and develop different relationships with public space (Blokland, 2003). But the combination of these three maps helps to understand how children's actual presence in and movement through the neighbourhood is not only a matter of the personal traits of children or the physical features of environments.
The two cases from the city of Ghent illustrate very different social practices and views on the meaning of public spaces and community into which children are being socialised. The Sint-Pieter-Buiten neighbourhood, where social practices take mostly place in private and institutional settings and where social interactions remain limited to the own social group, refers to a different interpretation of citizenship-as-practice than the Steenakker neighbourhood, where public space represents an important setting for the development of social practices and where different social groups develop different patterns of time and space, but are regularly confronted with each other. Sint-Pieters-Buiten seems to reflect a rather libertarian notion of citizenship, focusing on individual development and expression, whereas Steenakker seems to reflect a rather communitarian notion of citizenship, focused on the membership, shared values and practices of one or several social groups within the neighbourhood.
If different neighbourhoods contribute to different notions of citizenship and community, and if future research would turn out that these differences are class-related, then more debate is needed about how these different social-pedagogical contexts can contribute to the realisation of a democratic or inclusive society, and how they relate to sociological processes such as individualisation, globalisation, privatisation of public spaces, etc.
References
Contributors’ details
Sven De Visscher is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Welfare Studies, Ghent University. He is currently finishing a study on the social pedagogical meaning of the neibourhood of children.
Maria Bouverne-De Bie is Professor in Social Welfare Studies, Ghent University. She teaches in the programmes of Social Work and Educational Studies. Her research is focused on the relationship between social work and social welfare rights.
