ABSTRACT
In 2007, humans could justifiably be described as a city-dwelling species when for the first time a majority of the world's population was recorded as living in cities and urban environments. This chapter examines historical and contemporary evidence for the material experience of children in the city, but also how historically-located constructions of the child and the city are braided into the complex entanglements that constitute the trope of the child in the city. It draws on whether these entanglements serve the interests of children inhabiting globalised and transnational realities, as well as whether they provide a solid platform upon which education to meet the goals of economic and social justice on a planetary scale can be realised. Schooling was transformative not only for children and their place in the city, but also contributed to a growing modernising consensus about the meaning of ‘a good childhood’.
