ABSTRACT
The effects of control, regulation, and adult influence, together with parental guidelines and restrictions, on young people’s spatial practices are ubiquitous across studies on spaces of childhoods and youths. For instance, young people’s self-determined and unsupervised spatial practices are limited in many contexts around the world. Therefore, we underscore how adults (notably parents) attempt to spatially control young people and look into how this influences their spatial knowledge. The key argument we make in this chapter is that spaces, and consequently periods of childhood and youth, are increasingly shaped and determined by social control and spatial pedagogization. This, we argue, has manifold consequences for young people’s spatialities, and by extension their spatial knowledge. Throughout the chapter, we discuss how adults’ social control restricts young people’s independent mobility and unsupervised play in public spaces. Subsequently, we broaden the scope and examine child- and youth-dedicated spaces, whose underlying spatial pedagogization is particularly evident. Afterward, we emphasize how parental guidelines and restrictions affect young people’s spatial practices. Next, we discuss spaces of consumption as spatial arrangements that have prominently gained in importance among young people over the last 50 years and, oddly enough, are subject to pervasive social control. Eventually, we describe young people’s coping strategies to counteract social control and spatial pedagogization. Finally, we relate our findings to the overall topic of young people’s evolving spatial knowledge.
