ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I suggest how the street1, a metaphor for all outdoor spaces within the public domain, acts as a liminal setting or a site of passage, a place which both makes possible and signifies a means of transition through which some young people move away from the restrictions of their childhood roots towards the independence of adulthood. I consider how the street is infused with cultural identity and how, in their attempts to claim socially autonomous space within the public domain, young people frequently collide with adults and with other groups of young people. Confrontations of this sort are the rituals of transition within the socially barbed spaces of the street. In order to disentangle these street stories, I pay particular attention to the ways in which age and gender cut across place use. In developing these ideas I draw upon the theoretical notions of habitus (Bourdieu 1977, 1992; Cahill 2000) and the rites of passage (van Gennep 1909 (1960); Winchester et al. 1999), as well as the new literature on the cultural politics of difference and diversity (Bhabha 1994; Matthews et al. 2000a; Prout 2000). To pull these ideas together, I critically discuss the social construction of binaries (Skelton 2000), in this case those common cultural practices, interpretations and assumptions that unequivocally relegate children to adult becomings or persons not of the adult world. All of these thoughts are developed with reference to an empirical study that considers how a group of young people aged 9 to 16 years in an East Midlands town within the UK make use of their local neighbourhoods. Children’s own words are used extensively in the text.
