ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of children, childhood, and adolescence as social and cultural constructs, leading to a discussion on children's and young people's continued lack of social status and power and the implications for children's environmental experience. It discusses the nature of urban childhood experience in particular and the increasing pressures at work in cities, influencing children's environmental and social opportunities in urban neighborhoods. This leads to some concluding reflections on the potential for children to experience placelessness in 21st century cities. The discussion of children's experience of place and placelessness is based on the theoretical propositions that have emerged from contemporary childhood sociology. Children's experience in all areas of life, including their environmental experience, has received greater attention as the needs of children and adolescents have been better understood and given greater social value. Children and young people still have very little social and civic status and power in most developed societies.
