ABSTRACT
Through a qualitative meta-analysis, we followed the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge over the past five decades and evaluated it within the context of the refiguration of spaces. Summing up the most important insights, we traverse the different thematic scopes of our meta-analysis, such as everyday spatialities, spatial perception and assessment of material affordances, learning arenas and agencies of spatial knowledge production and acquisition, and spatial pedagogization and social control.
We highlight how overlapping features of young people’s spatialities developed somewhat sequentially but are today coextensive. Accordingly, their spatialities and therefore their spatial knowledge have become more pluralized and heterogenous. Moreover (especially digital), mediatization has influenced young people’s spatial knowledge, producing convergent spatialities and even fostering more spatial plurality. Likewise, we could also see how the effects of urbanization and urban transformation, transitions in political systems, and regional or international migration fluxes have shaped young people’s spatial knowledge inasmuch as learning arenas and agencies have accordingly undergone conspicuous changes. At the same time, young people’s everyday spaces are becoming pedagogized and controlled, to a greater or lesser extent. Therefore, young people are also required to grapple with a spatially pedagogized, socially controlled, and mediatized-networked world and its contradictions. Finally, we highlight that young people have experienced new opportunities to produce and acquire spatial knowledge as mediatization is on the rise. Therefore, young people’s spatial knowledge is also shaped by spaces they have never experienced firsthand.
Our findings call for further research, for example, with regard to young people’s creation of hybrid spaces today. Additionally, the methods behind the qualitative meta-analysis itself should be developed further. Ultimately, design and planning practices still have to turn young people’s spatial knowledge into participatory action, now more than ever before.
