Children, Geography of

The geography of children is a subdiscipline that examines the relevance of space and place to the study of childhood. Research in this area examines the unique experiential, political, and ethical experiences of this social group. The geography of childhood was born out of the fields of environmental psychology, urban planning, Marxist geography, behavioral geography, and geographic education. While Roger Hart discussed an explicit geography of childhood in his 1979 book, Children's Experience of Place, its modern practitioners did not publish widely until the 1990s.

Early research examined how children used, perceived, and made sense of space and place for the purposes of developing theories on children's spatial learning and planning environments that take into consideration children's unique experiences. Recent studies apply a wide range of disciplines to the field, such as sociology, psychoanalysis, and feminist geography, to examine diverse topics such as children's participation in community development and environmental management and children's identity formation in relation to the cultural practices of a particular place.

Childhood as studied by geographers varies widely in its definition and concept. Some research is based on biological classifications, such as age and other developmental considerations, while other work addresses cultural and socially constructed definitions of childhood. Researchers acknowledge the unique experiences of children, as opposed to adults, and some argue that children have historically been marginalized by society, rendering their actions and agency as a threat to the moral order of the adult world. Since the cultural turn in geography, researchers have come to view children as active agents in the construction of their lives and environments. This has led to a fundamental shift in ideology toward childhood, one that complicates adult-child relations and challenges what some refer to as adult spatial hegemony.

The status of research on children's geographies in the early 21st century is quite comprehensive (Table 1), including topics such as youth [Page 393][Page 394]subcultures, spatial representations and sites of resistance, the impact of gentrification on children's play spaces, the impact of globalization on children's participation in the labor force, the role of physical and social hazards in children's spatial freedom and practices, designing environments for and with children, and children's rights in international law. The importance of children's geographies as a subdiscipline is further witnessed in newly created academic journals devoted to the topic, such as Children's Geographies; Children, Youth and Environments; and the Journal of Youth Studies.