Youth and Spatiality

The agenda promoted in this special issue suggests a shift from youth as an experience of progress through time, to youth as a heterogeneous process that unfolds relationally as part of the material and symbolic production of space. This special issue is published at a time when young people are at the forefront of changes in the social organization of space, and spatiality is beginning to be recognized as foundational to understanding young people’s lives (Farrugia, 2014; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Valentine and Skelton, 1998; Worth, 2015). The relationship between youth and spatiality can be seen in the ways that the global mobility of contemporary capital is reshaping youth, exemplified by both the devalourization of young people growing up in the former industrial centres of the global north (Furlong, 2015; MacDonald and Marsh, 2005; Serracant, 2012), and the repositioning of rural Southeast Asian young women as the ideal labour force for contemporary manufacturing (Wolf, 1992). Young people are at the forefront of new modes of urban living in the trans-national networks of ‘global cities’ that Sassen (2012) has identified as constituting the critical economic and networks of the current age (Ball et al., 2000). In addition, contemporary youth cultures demonstrate both a strong investment in the uniqueness of a local scene, as well as the articulation of transnational popular cultural flows made available within the digital spaces of online networking sites (Bennett, 2000; Greener and Hollands, 2006; Skelton and Valentine, 1998). As spatiality is a critical dimension of youth, youth studies is positioned to make critical interventions into the way in which space, place and globalization are theorized and empirically investigated.

However, a focus on space upsets some influential intellectual and disciplinary assumptions, which assume that youth is fundamentally about temporality—or progression and change in and through time. The assumption of youth as temporality dates back at least to the colonial era, in which evolutionary discourses described the development of youth as a rehearsal of the development of humanity, and in which young people were positioned alongside racialized categories of colonized peoples as pre-modern (but nevertheless developing) human beings (Lesko, 2001). The assumption of youth as developmental time continues in developmental psychology, in which childhood, youth and adulthood are positioned along a linear developmental trajectory signposted by the individual accomplishment of certain biological, intellectual and social capacities (such as physical maturity and the capacity for rational self-governance). Linear developmental time operates as the fundamental ontological and epistemological category for understanding youth, and thereby provides the basis for normative judgements about youth development in relation to developmental milestones.

Whilst the individualism and normative assumptions built into developmental models of youth have been critiqued within youth studies (Wyn and White, 1997), the taken-for-granted assumption of youth as temporality has continued with the dominance of the transitions metaphor for understanding youth, which is deployed to understand young people’s engagement with education and work, as well as their intimate relationships and forms of political participation (Evans and Furlong, 1997). The notion of transitions is currently heavily debated for what critics suggest is the ongoing influence of unexamined normative assumptions about the timing of young people’s transitions as well as an inability to capture broader processes of social change connected with late modernity (Furlong et al., 2011; Wyn and White, 1997). However, the focus has remained on how best to understand the relationship between the temporality of youth and the temporality of broader social changes, and the construction of youth as fundamentally about time underpins this otherwise diverse theoretical landscape, and which authors in this special issue argue significantly overlooks the key place of space.

We are, of course, not alone in calling for an emphasis on the spatiality of the social world (see Gieryn, 2000, for example), and the intellectual currents above are not unique in prioritizing time. Social theory has long privileged temporality over spatiality, theorizing time as social change and the exploration of possible social alternatives whilst space was an empty and neutral container for social life (Massey, 2005). Theorists such as Lefebvre (1974) have been critical to the development of relational and socially embedded approaches to spatiality. Lefebvre’s triad of perceived, conceived and lived space described how material spaces unfold through the relational dynamics of capitalist production, as well as forming the basis for political rationalities and particular, locally emplaced subjectivities. This work established the importance of space in the (re)production of social relations and introduced spatiality as an empirical focus and ontological sensibility in social theory. Drawing on theoretical developments in post-structuralism and process philosophy, Massey (1992: 79) has described spaces as emerging through flows of sociality, and goes on to make an explicit connection between space and time, arguing that ‘space is not static, nor time spaceless. Of course spatiality and temporality are different from each other, but neither can be conceptualised as the absence of the other.’ She argued that both space and time must be understood as the result of social interrelations at all spatial scales from the most local level to the most global.

In this context, social changes associated with globalization, new spatial inequalities, and the intensification of cultural flows across territorial boundaries have meant that especially since the 1980s, social theory has seen an increasing emphasis on space as produced through social relations and made meaningful in the rhythms of daily life in place. Critical geographers such as Harvey (1985), Soja (1989) and Massey (1994, 2005) have explored how regions and territories are formed as part of the operation of the capitalist economy. Critical geography has also established place as a term which describes both the meaningful textures of life as lived, as well as the porousness and ongoing production of symbolic differences between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of a particular locale. Anthropologists such as Appadurai (1996) have described the world in terms of various ‘scapes’, or complex and often disjunctive flows of capital, people and ideas that meet to assemble the complex and diverse localities through which the social world takes place. In sociology, theorists such as Giddens (1984) and Castells (2009) have described the mutable relations of distance and proximity that characterize an increasingly interconnected world. Castells has described contemporary economies, cultures and political movements in terms of the operation of global networks that cross established territorial boundaries, and has foregrounded the renewed significance of locality as a defence against the insecurities arising in this ‘space of flows’. The production of space and the day-to-day significance of place are now critical to social theories, especially those grappling with the consequences of global social change.

Drawing on these timely developments, the purpose of this special issue is to disrupt the taken-for-granted temporal frameworks through which youth is currently understood through a deeper engagement with spatial thinking. We argue that at this time, spatiality is re-emerging as critical to the social landscapes of young lives in different parts of the world, and that a focus on space offers new opportunities to rethink the nature of youth itself. The agenda we set in this introduction, and which each of the authors in this special issue engage with in different ways, suggests a spatial turn in our thinking about youth, understanding youth as a collection of social processes that unfolds in place, within the social production of space, and as part of networks of material and symbolic relationships stretched across the mutable territories of a globalizing world. In this we are recognizing fundamental changes in the production of space and place that have positioned young people across the globe within a dramatically reorganized spatial terrain and that have, we suggest, fundamentally reshaped the nature and experience of youth. In this we also recognize the heterogeneity, interconnection and productivity of place in the experience and social organization of youth. A focus on spatiality therefore constitutes both a new ontological and epistemological approach to youth, as well as opening up the possibility of new agendas for theoretical development and empirical research.

This project also suggests new connections between disciplinary traditions. For example, as one of us has argued previously, the theoretical progression of sociological perspectives on youth have reflected a particular geography of knowledge which privileges the urban metropole, reflecting a sociological obsession with an urban modernity that dates back to the classical sociological theories of Durkheim, Tonnies and Marx (Farrugia, 2014). Theoretical debates in the sociology of youth frequently take the experiences of young people in the urban metropolis as emblematic of youth as a whole, neglecting the significance of research that documents the lives of young people outside of these places. In sociology, this metrocentric blindness to place continues in influential theories of late modernity such as the individualization thesis (Beck, 1992), and in youth studies debates about a homogeneous ‘reflexive young subject’ risk obscuring the structural conditions and community dynamics of particular localities in the formation of youth subjectivities (Farrugia, 2013). In order to break from this tradition, and thereby to introduce spatiality into the theoretical repertoire of youth studies, it is necessary to engage with disciplinary traditions outside of this classical sociological tradition. As discussed above, the theoretical resources for this interdisciplinary work are available, and this special issue demonstrates an interdisciplinary sensibility in youth research, especially an engagement between theories from sociology and human geography.

This interdisciplinary sensibility is expressed in issues covered in this special issue, which includes papers exploring key dimensions of youth and contemporary spatiality. While each paper makes critical individual interventions into the field, their contributions can be grouped into three themes, each of which, we suggest, could constitute a new research agenda in contemporary youth studies.

History, Space and Time

The first theme is the inextricable relationship between space and time, or between history and spatiality. This is best expressed on a theoretical level by Massey (2005), who has described space as the product of power-geometries, or the ‘thrown-togetherness’ of place as a collection of histories bundled together to form a particular locale. Ingold (2007) describes something similar when he describes social life as a ‘meshwork’ of lines, or temporal movements that come together to form a temporary territorial assemblage. As well as these abstract theoretical claims, the historicization of space and the spatiality of time are central to process of globalization, in which social change takes place through changes in the social organization of space, as particular localities are shaped in different ways with the various ‘scapes’ (Appadurai, 1996) through with capital and culture are organized on a global scale. Finally, space, place and history intertwine in the production of biographies and subjectivities, which are structured according to territorial divisions across space, and made meaningful through affective investments and forms of belonging rooted in place, neighbourhood or locale. Far from the normative temporality of youth as development or transition, what we are describing here is what Massey (2005) has called ‘radical contemporaneity’, or social change as the production of difference on a global scale.

Two articles in this special issue contribute to a disruption of short-term and linear notions of time and space by situating the research within longitudinal (Cuervo and Wyn) and much more historically framed analyses (Fraser, Batchelor, Leona and Whittaker) of youth. In these two papers, space is an inextricable dimension of time—space/time in Massey’s (1992) terms. In different ways, both these articles explore this theme by highlighting the close interrelationship between young people’s biographies and relational practices in specific places, and how these change through time.

In Fraser et al.’s article (in this issue) this involves interrogating the impact of globalizing forces on young people’s leisure and work. Drawing a comparison with historic research of Scottish and Hong Kong youth in Pearl Jephcott’s (1976) classic book, Time of One’s Own, the authors examine patterns of contemporary youth leisure and work practices. They argue that while there are some signs of convergence between youth in Glasgow and Hong Kong as a result of neoliberal global forces, young people’s leisure habits ‘remain rooted in the fates and fortunes of their respective cities, and the distinctive social, spatial and cultural arrangements that have emerged from these historical processes’. Their ‘city as lens’ approach provides a conceptual lens through which to analyze how global forces are filtered and refracted in the context of urban environments. The authors argue that this offers a way to make explicit connections between local place, space and history and young people’s current leisure and work habits. Such insights reveal how space is both temporal and social and needs to be understood in a relational way—as a reflection on the unique dynamics of globalization on young people’s localities.

In a similar way, Cuervo and Wyn’s article (in this issue) illustrates the relational nature of space and how concepts of place attachment and belonging are not ‘a given feeling, right or a priori social position, but a condition that is established over time’. Their longitudinal examination of rural young people’s lives over time reveals the significance of everyday and often routinized acts—such as caring for family members, or interacting with local flora and fauna—in shaping a sense of well-being and place attachment. Their focus highlights the deep affective significance of lived space in contributing to a sense of belonging that is manifest through the layering of everyday practices over time—which, in turn, also create place. They argue that seeing belonging as a performance allows us to move beyond traditional conceptualizations of place-attachment that imply static affiliations to place, to something that is more in constant flux. These ideas broaden our conceptualization of space in sociology as they focus our attention onto everyday spatial and relational practices within a longer sense of time and space, illustrating how ‘the temporal moment is also spatial’ (Massey, 1992: 78).

Power, Space and Inequalities

The second theme is the constitutive role of space in the social organization of power and difference, including both material inequalities and hierarchies of symbolic worth. Contemporary globalization is taking place through the creation of economic zones emerging as part of the valourization and devalourization of spaces and localities, a process which is intrinsic to the dynamics of global neoliberalism (Ong, 2006). Place is a critical aspect of inequality, and young people are positioned within landscapes of poverty and privilege that unfold as part of the shifting geographies of production and employment in a global context. Space is also critical to the symbolic and moral hierarchies that distinguish young people. As one of us has argued previously, culturally privileged modes of consumption and lifestyle are associated with the metropolitan centres of the global north, whilst the tastes and ways of life outside of these localities are stigmatized as either unsophisticated (Farrugia, 2014) or signifiers for moral fecklessness associated with poverty.

The articles by both Ravn and Demant and Stahl and Habib exemplify this theme. Examining perceptions of ‘hipsters’ held by young people in four different rural and urban communities in Denmark, Ravn and Demant offer an important analysis of the relationship between space, taste, consumption and class. Drawing on Skeggs and Bourdieu, Ravn and Demant focus on how classed subjectivities are spatially organized to produce hierarchies of cultural sophistication. Focusing on the hipster as a ‘figure’ for the cultural politics of class (Threadgold, forthcoming), they argue that ‘figures are not only socially and culturally produced, but also connected to the way we make places and make sense of places’. For young people in rural areas, the figure of the hipster was unfamiliar, out-of-place (Cresswell, 1996), and therefore a subject of derision or anxiety about class and social mobility. This contrasted sharply with urban young people for whom the hipster was commonplace and seen as conforming and not radical. Their analysis makes an innovative connection between cultural studies, space and class by showing how class inequalities and subcultural identities are instantiated through the construction of cultural distinctions between places, as well as the hierarchical organization of youth subjectivities through the nexus of place and class.

Stahl and Habib develop this theme further in their analysis of the spatial dimensions of social class, and the relationship between place, class and hierarchies of moral or symbolic worth. They illustrate how young people in Bermondsey, South East London developed complex and contradictory notions of belonging to their working class suburb. On one hand, their experiences and shared understandings of contextual codes and social practices led them to ascribe pathologized, classed and racialized views of their suburb as ‘not a nice area’. However, these young people also held ‘counter narratives’ of themselves as ‘subjects of value’, and of their suburb—as a place which was also home—‘a family’ in which ‘everyone’s behind each other’. These contradictory positions of pride and hostility were deeply spatially and socially classed and showed a reflexive negotiation around conceptions of respectability, authenticity and value. Similar to Wacquant’s (2009) work on advanced urban marginality, Stahl and Habib’s article is a powerful illustrator of the spatiality of contemporary inequalities, and shows how material, symbolic and moral hierarchies develop in the creation of ghettoized poverty within comparatively wealthy nations. In both articles, spatiality is critical to the production of difference and inequality between differently positioned young people.

Space, Culture and Embodiment

The third theme covered in this special issue is the relationship between spatiality, culture and embodiment. This theme describes the way that culture and subjectivity is formed when people come together to make place. The role of embodiment in place is affirmed in recent ‘non-representational’ theories which describe what Thrift (2004) calls ‘intensities of feeling’, or what Anderson (2009) has describes as the ‘affective atmospheres’ of place. These theories describe places as formed through embodied relationships and experienced relationally, through the co-presence with others. As well as being formed relationally, places also offer particular ways of relating to others, or affordances that provide the possibility for enacting particular social relationships as part of the embodied experience of a place (Duff, 2010). These affordances are both aspects of place, and actively constructed through the relational and embodied practices that make up particular places, which emerge as meaningful and affective sites for the production of social life. In this sense, the creation of culture and embodied sociality is also the creation of place, an insight which has wide implications for youth studies.

This theme is reflected in the article in this issue by Kennelly, in which spatiality and embodiment are put to work methodologically to create new perspectives on urban inequalities experienced by young people. The methods that Kennelly describes here go beyond the disembodied speech of traditional qualitative interviews, positioning research participants as embodied subjects with whom research data are produced relationally in place. Kennelly’s methods include workshops in which research participants move their bodies within the physical boundaries of a room, moving to express their relationship to statements and questions from the researcher. Through this methodological process, data emerge through participants’ embodied relationships to one another, which also reflect their negotiation of the social and political implications of Kennelly’s research on urban inequality. In other methods, Kennelly accompanies participants on walking tours to significant spaces, and offers the opportunity for participants to create visual representations of their own relationships to place. Here, Kennelly suggests that the combination of spatial and visual methods allows a deep phenomenological understanding of young people’s experiences of space and the way that their lives are shaped by, and interact with, urban housing projects and other zones within the city. In this, Kennelly argues that spatial methods ‘generate an ethical potentiality to understand the research participants through a rich and complex set of symbols that evoke their “whoness” as opposed to allowing the researcher to stay focused on their “whatness”’. In this way, and through an engagement with Bourdieu, Kennelly is able to show how changes in the social organization of space interact with the habitus of her participants, and thereby how spatial inequalities contribute to the formation of embodied young subjectivities. Kennelly’s artricle is an innovative demonstration of the potential methodological role that spatiality and embodiment may play in youth research.

The relationship between place, culture and embodiment is also explored in innovative ways by Sand who develops the notion of ‘rhythmanalysis’ (Lefebvre, 2004) into her analysis of the appropriation and affordance of place in the practice of youth cultures and music scenes. Sand’s theoretical framework is especially innovative here in the appropriation of concepts from musicology and social theory to describe place and culture in terms of improvisation, rhythm and spontaneous inter-subjective practices which cohere in and around a place to facilitate musical expression. Sand’s participants come together in marginal or abandoned spaces to play music and hang out with one another. However, these music scenes also draw on the materiality of places, and the lighting, acoustics and atmospheric background noises to be found in such marginal places are all included in the performance and the music. In appropriating the materiality of these places, these participants are afforded unique opportunities for sociality, as well as spontaneous and improvisatory bodily flows through space. The musical performances are themselves improvisatory, leading Sand to describe a ‘spatial jam-session’ in which bodies, places and musical improvisations come together to form a spatial rhythm.

Conclusion

Together, the issues in this special issue suggest a movement from the universality of linear time to the ‘radical contemporaneity’ of difference in a global context (Massey, 2005). The articles demonstrate the spatial dimensions of youth as manifested in global patterns and interrelations, as well as within the micro spaces and the webs of social relations (Arendt, 1958) within which young people form their sense of place, identity and citizenship (Wood, 2016). These articles also imply a much closer engagement with space and its intersections with time. As Fraser et al. demonstrate, young people’s lives are more richly understood when we view them through a longer lens of time (historic) and space, and see these as mutually constitutive. This shapes affective and symbolic notions of inclusion, exclusion and belonging, as Cuervo and Wyn, and Stahl and Habib show, belonging is constructed through layers of everyday interactions at the intersections of time and space. Furthermore, articles by Ravn and Demant, and Stahl and Habib also illustrate how space intersects closely with class to create and reinforce perceptions of distinction and value. Through this, we gain a much deeper sense of the social and cultural production of young people’s subjectivities within spatial contexts, and, how in turn, places are shaped by young people’s embodied spatial rhythms (Sand) and performed and lived experiences of place (Kennelly). Through the ideas and approaches outlined in this special issue, a spatialized youth studies is positioned within theoretical discussions concerning the production of inequality and cultural distinction on a global scale, as well as providing insights into young people’s biographies, practices and modes of place attachment within the mutable territories of the contemporary world.

Finally, we want to suggest that spatial thinking offers a timely opportunity for the creation of new interdisciplinary research agendas. The problems facing contemporary youth studies are complex, and little is to be gained by further separating the various dimensions of social life into disciplinary silos. Theoretical debates relating to the structuring of young people’s biographies, the production and practice of youth cultures, and the day-to-day practices of belonging, are all connected to processes such as globalization, the emergence of territorial inequalities, the spatiality of cultural flows and relational dynamics of place. With these issues in mind, we hope that this special issue opens new agendas and avenues for exploration within an increasingly interdisciplinary youth studies.

David Farrugia University of Newcastle, Australia Bronwyn E. Wood Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand