ABSTRACT
In his landmark study The Child in the City, Colin Ward acknowledges that, following demographic shifts in the twentieth century, ‘the majority of urban children in Europe and North America are in fact suburban children’ (1978, p. 67). Despite this, just one chapter of Ward’s book is devoted to the child in the suburb. A suburban childhood is the most common type of childhood in the West; partly for this reason it is seen to deserve only minimal attention, or otherwise evades scrutiny altogether. In the area of literary production, representing suburban childhood is certainly a minority pursuit. There has been a prolific outpouring of writing over the last century and a half in response to suburban development, particularly in the Anglophone West, but almost all of it is focalized through the perspective of adults (see Jurca, 2001; Beuka, 2004; Hapgood, 2005; O’Reilly, 2012). On the other hand, within the burgeoning field of children’s geography, expressions of embarrassment about the apparent over-representation of suburban childhoods (and therefore the over-representation of the experience of growing up in white, stable and relatively affluent environments) are not uncommon. Inevitably, these childhood experiences are far more accessible to western researchers; David Sibley anguishes though that the treatment of street children in Brazilian and Columbian cities by death squads is ‘a more pressing issue than mealtimes in Laburnum Crescent’ (1995, p. 137; see also Horton and Kraftl, 2006, p. 262). Actually, geographers whose work focuses on children, as well as scholars of children’s literature (e.g. Jones, 1997; Jones, 2002; Bavidge, 2005), often overlook suburban experience and representations due to their pre-occupation with the dichotomy between urban and rural childhoods. If a long-standing association between childhood and nature renders children and urban environments incompatible (with far-reaching implications for the way children’s access to urban space is regulated by adults), suburban childhood is left unacknowledged and unproblematized.
