CIVIS Open Lab: Contemporary Childhoods/Youths (CON-CHY)

CIVIS

ZGIS, together with iDEAS:Lab, is a partner in the project Contemporary Childhoods. Funded as a CIVIS Open Lab (OL) project, it focuses on an analysis of young people’s participation in public urban spaces. Participation is framed as a social right within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Promoting young people’s place in and engagement with urban life — making cities more “child-friendly” — is understood as a deeply socially inclusive and sustainable effort within urban policies and planning. Building on this framing, the project proposes collaborative work with children and youth, pursuing two general goals:

Goals

  1. To document and identify, alongside children and youth, their everyday dynamics of inclusion and exclusion from urban public spaces (Cresswell, 1996) in local community settings
  2. To create and implement, with children and youth, performative intervention devices (Sanchez-Criado and Estalella, 2023) that raise social awareness of exclusionary dynamics in contemporary urban contexts.

Approach

The project adopts a comparative case study approach (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017) and will develop three local studies and interventions with children and youth. Each case addresses the two general goals but is situated within a local reality and operationalizes them in ways adapted to the specific realities, research focus and expertise of each study site. Each study also builds on the methodological expertise and resources of its local team and facilities. A core feature of the OL consortium is to promote shared training and methodological exchange between the university teams and the OL team.7

Actions

The project involves three interrelated actions:

  1. a collaborative local case study;
  2. the implementation of a performative device in each local context and a final celebratory exhibit, including creating and curating a digital platform for sharing experiences across sites;
  3. a work plan to exchange interactive methodological tools, collaborative research supervision and training through mobilities and digital resources.

Case Studies

  1. Young people at social risk in Madrid neighborhoods: This case study involves working with NGOs that provide after-school and community support to children and adolescents at social risk. Members of the UAM research team have an established relationship with key organizations and will implement a collaborative work plan with young people centered on their mobilities and leisure activities within neighborhood settings; particularly in areas of the city of Madrid heavily affected by gentrification and touristification processes that tend to exclude lower-income residents and young people with limited consumer resources. The specific research devices to document these processes will be negotiated and co-designed with children and youth but may include personal cartographic projects (Benzi, 2020), photovoice interviews and walks (Volpe, 2019) and the construction of soundscapes of neighborhood experiences (Samuels et al; 2010).  
  2. Young people’s places and spaces in Salzburg This case study draws on the resources and expertise of PLUS, including iDEAS:Lab (the interactive laboratory for inquiry-based learning at all levels, geoinformatics experiments and engagement with the general public). It will explore adolescents’ leisure and informal socialization places — which adults are generally not aware of. The objective is to identify spaces of youth participation and exclusion in the city. Members of the PLUS team will draw on an established relationship with a network of secondary schools and other informal learning settings. They will use geo-participatory tools such as map-based surveys or collaborative maps (IFAD 2009; Pánek 2016) to have young people map and characterize their favorite places in Salzburg. Besides approaches such as geocommunication and crowdmapping, the team will use different digital cartographic and geovisualization tools to represent these patterns and create opportunities for critical discussion with adolescents. The use of geodata and geomedia brings a variety of advantages widely discussed in the literature (e.g. place/space as interface, geomedia excitement factor, interactivity and flexibility; Hennig and Vogler 2016; Vogler et al., 2018). Read about project updates here:  Salzburg StoryMap.
  3. Maputo youth on a public university campus This case study explores the unexamined complexities of the Eduardo Mondlane University (EMU) campus as a boundary space between districts with very different socio-economic realities in the city of Maputo. The EMU campus is a transition area for different types of youth and is used in various ways by young people who are not EMU students. Through interviews — including geographical mapping — and other collaborative tools, we will examine how adolescents from poorer districts use the campus and the tensions and contradictions these uses generate in the local community. The project will co-design with participating youth an expressive/artistic intervention on the campus aimed at making these practices and appropriations visible and at starting a discussion between the different social groups that in practice inhabit the EMU campus. The research will use both quantitative and qualitative methods in order to incorporate quantifiable data and capture subjective elements such as the beliefs and perceptions of local youth. The qualitative methods will be predominant — particularly documentary and literature review, direct observation, in-depth interviews and focus groups.

Partner Universities

  • Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
  • National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
  • University of Bucharest
  • University of Salzburg
  • Eduardo Mondlane University