ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we trace the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge by deconstructing their multidimensional spatial perception. From the late 1960s onward, young people’s positive and negative spatial perceptions and evaluations have primarily been based on a stable set of criteria. However, we have also identified conspicuous variations in how young people grow up in contrasting urban, suburban, and rural settings around the world and in how they perceive and assess spaces. Likewise, throughout their brief biographical reflections on traveling or growing up translocally across different geographic contexts (even encompassing countries in diverse world regions), young people disclose changes in their spatial perceptions comparing here-and-there and before-and-after. Moreover, this multifaceted development of young people’s spatial perception and assessments accounts for the refiguration of the relationship between the production of embodied-experienced and acquisition of mediated stocks of spatial knowledge, which is largely triggered by the increasing influence of (technological) media consumption. All in all, we consider young people’s spatial perception to be characterized by persisting facets and increasingly novel features, which in turn enable them to make distinct assessments of current and future (spatial) scenarios.
