ABSTRACT
In order to understand how children relate to the idea of ‘place’, we need to appreciate that places can take different forms and be experienced on a number of levels. Massey (1994) has argued that places do not have simple boundaries in the sense of divisions that frame enclosures, nor do they have single, unique ‘identities’. Instead, they tend to be full of internal conflicts and differences. She also cautions against making too simple a distinction between terms such as the local and the global. Instead, every place can be seen as the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations, with this very mixture producing effects that could not simply be repeated elsewhere. This necessary complexity arises too when the ‘subjectivity’ of place is considered, since places mean different things to different individuals and social groups. Children will have a variety of particular relationships to place, the complete determinants of which are unlikely to be straightforwardly identifiable. For example, age-related limitations on children’s mobility and breadth of cultural knowledge need to be set in the context of particular lives lived in particular localities and kinship networks. For this reason, Holloway and Valentine (2000a) argue that the new social studies of childhood need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of spatiality that takes account of this complexity.
