ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the spaces produced through the enactment of contemporary youth cultures. The chapter shows that contemporary youth cultures are enacted through cultural flows and identifications that transgress established territorial boundaries (such as those defining scalar differences between ‘the local’ and elsewhere) and produce unique spatialities that are specific to particular youth cultures or scenes. The flows of cultural symbols – and the practices through which these flows are enacted and materialised – take place within a complex, fluid and mutable spatiality that does not conform to distinctions between the ‘local’ or the ‘global’, and creates unpredictable cultural connections between young people in very different social and political circumstances. At the same time, the globalisation of youth cultural symbols takes place through economies of symbolic prestige that valorise and devalorise modes of youthfulness both across and within different spaces and places. In this respect, the spatiality of youth cultures offers a unique perspective on the globalisation of culture, showing how cultural practices enact relationships and connections across distant localities, thereby producing new and constantly shifting topologies of youth cultural practice.
