Troubling the intersections of urban/nature/childhood in environmental education

Abstract

This collection examines why urban environments are key sites for reimagining and reconfiguring human-nature encounters in times and spaces of planetary crisis. Cities constitute powerful and troubling spaces for human-nature intersections. They typically represent the effects of human dominance over nature: humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of ‘nature’ by domesticating it. Children existing in these mostly adult designed and orchestrated creations are often ignored as city dwellers, along with animals who increasingly migrate into urban areas. Yet cities are also sites of innovation and ‘greening’, of critical democracy and renewal, with the most innovative cities including those where children co-create urban environments, and where animals and plants are valued as co-city dwellers. As this collection shows, troubling and reimagining these sites for diverse forms and ways of living, including of encounter with the other, and thus what can be learnt and taught through urban nature childhoods, is one possible pathway for working out different modes of being human with the earth.

Keywords:

• Nature
• urban
• childhoods
• cities
• education

Introduction

If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our failure to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high consumption, and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively. We will go onwards in a different mode of humanity, or not at all (Val Plumwood 2007, 1)

The idea for this collection on troubling and reimaging the deeply familiar concepts of urban, nature and childhood arose from a study visit to Berlin, Germany, where urban social, cultural, political and ecological initiatives are in constant tension with aggressive capital driven development. In Berlin, like in many of the world’s cities, urban innovation (Ferguson 2014) co-exists with gentrification (Walsh 2013), urban food initiatives (Steele 2008), wildlife and cosmopolitics (Hinchliffe et al. 2005; Duhn 2017), brutal politics of expulsion (Sassen 2014), and with childhoods lived in poverty and childhoods lived in affluence (Chaplin, Hill, and John 2014).

Berlin’s politics of urbanity are at least partly about the ‘renegotiation of the urban commons’ (Ferguson 2014, 14; cf. the urban of Detroit, Johannesburg, Hangzhou, Lamu, Curitba and other case study sites of ‘urban renewal’ in Unesco 2016). Berlin’s negotiations have led to discussions and debate, art works, architectural practices, discontent, disobedience and reclaiming as well as a re-imagining of ‘the commons’ as shared spaces, resources, and shared belongings. In short, Berlin offers a case study of the experience of troubling and re-imagining urban modes of being in a city that is in the midst of remaking itself, and of being remade.

While much is to be applauded about the regeneration of Berlin, to adopt a critical perspective on remaking and being remade involves acknowledgement of its intensifications: of unequal distributions of space, resources and the ‘right to belong’. As we show in this collection, children and nature are disproportionately affected by such unequal distributions, as too are the quality and qualities of urban nature experiences. And in terms of environmental education and its research, crucially: what might be taught or learnt there about one’s place in the world, and that of others, human and more-than-human.

On a global scale, for example, dwellers, migrants and visitors to affluent cities have seen initiatives that attempt to reintegrate urban nature into public spaces which then become urban nature showcases, such as the New York High Line Park (Millington 2015). Yet overall, urban slums are on the rise. Predictions are that by

2030, the cities of the poor countries of the world will house four times as many people as the cities of the well-to-do countries … the population living in urban slums – the most rapidly growing structure of the urban landscape in the less developed world – will double to almost 2 billion in the next 15 years. The drifting apart of affluent and poor urban environments thus marks the ‘uneven globality’ of children today. (Schafer 2005, 1027)

This drifting apart happens at global scales as well as within cities. Even within an inner city radius of 10 km, it is highly likely that uneven childhoods in uneven nature co-exist as inner cities become increasingly stratified for various reasons (Smith 2013).

Urban/nature/childhood in this collection: troubling ontologies

What might be done about this? The approach we take in this collection is to start with troubling the intersections of nature/urban/childhood. This is to signal our intention to move beyond sharp categorizations into working within a more porous space where creative intersections of concepts enable enlivened, complex, possibly messy multiplicities of re-imagined urban/nature childhoods. Contributors to the collection engage critically with nature/urban/childhood intersections to explore what constitutes learning with and about nature for children in urban contexts. Collectively they challenge the assumption that cities are places of human and technological dominance over nature, and that childhoods are increasingly lived in human-centred un-natured urban environments.

What motivates us is a concern that the notions of nature and the urban with respect to childhoods are often disconnected parts of the mainstream educational discourse. Indeed, educational scholarship in the field of childhood nature studies traditionally aligns with humanist ontologies, foregrounding phenomenological methodologies where nature becomes a rich resource for children’s sensory and embodied learning in the world (Sancar and Severcan 2010; Beery and Jørgensen 2016; Wight et al. 2016). One of our key purposes in this introduction then, is to show how the limitations of a narrow and nostalgic view of ‘child, urban, nature’ might be overcome, and to reimagine more diverse approaches to education and educational research that extend beyond humanist ontologies. We continue our introduction with a few orientating comments in relation to environmental education, before sketching the contributions to the collection and digging into these issues in the remainder of our editorial comments.

From humanist to post-humanist

In brief, studies with an ontological commitment to humanism in both education in general and environmental education in particular are inclined to reinforce the Rousseau-inspired idea that education is philosophically tied to the purity of nature and the innocence of the child (Baker 2001). The underlying logic implies that effective education in nature happens when young learners are introduced early to nature, preferably nature without visible human habitation, such as a forest (Maynard 2007). It is hoped that if a young child experiences nature, then a future adult who feels deeply connected to the natural world and is less likely to exploit it, should be the result.

Another underlying philosophical idea is that the ‘true self’ can only be found in contact with nature (Diehm 2002), drawing from Romanticism and the understanding that the natural world is a unified whole (Wulf 2016). In contrast, cities as spaces where nature is seemingly displaced, appear as places of fragmentation. Urban environments are then in danger of producing a version of self that is less ‘in touch’ with one’s true essence due to the lack of holistic nature experiences (Davison 2008). In this paradigm, learning to be truly oneself relies on experiential learning in ‘pure’ nature. For environmental educationalists and educators, this may mean reconnecting as many children as possible with as much nature in the wild as is still left (Louv 2005). Correspondingly, cities with their highly controlled and unevenly distributed natural spaces, are problematic environments for experiential learning with wild or untouched nature (Dowdell, Gray, and Malone 2011). Yet the fact remains that most children on this planet are growing up in cities (UNICEF 2012). So why do anxieties over a loss of childhood innocence in a globalised, increasingly urbanized world seem to go hand in hand with anxieties over a loss of nature, particularly ‘wild’ nature (Dobrin and Kidd 2004; Mercogliano 2007; James and James 2008; Bruni et al. 2017)?

Troubling urban/nature/childhood categories is one way of unpicking this question. It requires us to take up the urgent challenge of thinking with concepts that are slippery and over-used – be that ‘nature’ or ‘Nature’ – to show the extent to which they have become generic placeholders for anxieties and fears about the future (Heise 2008). Equally, in engaging how to re-imagine urban nature as children’s places for learning about self, other and the planet when the humanist educational project itself is reaching some of its limits (Todd 2016), requires critical theory to shed those anxieties about the future that tempt dichotomous responses, such that the educational project becomes imagined and practiced as that of

making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. (Haraway 2016, 1)

As we illustrate in this collection, education as an inherently human-centric discipline faces particularly messy struggles ahead, and thus its theorists and practitioners must find new concepts and practices that are sorely needed for species’ survival in deeply troubled times (Simms 2009; Bear 2011; Lee 2013; Tesar 2017).

To elaborate, in this collection humans are typically positioned as one species amongst other species on this planet. Humans, animals, plants, microbial life – increasingly life in all its forms – seems ‘on the move’ to adapt to rapidly changing conditions on earth (Cuomo 2011; Tsing 2012; Haraway 2016). It makes no sense to separate humans/other-than-humans, nature/culture, cities/wilderness when climate change, ocean acidification and spatial fragmentation affect all aspects of every living organism on this planet (Teamey and Mandel 2016).

The unsettling of dichotomies such as culture and nature, or human and non-human, then, continues to create turbulences, intensifications and resistance (Davison and Ridder 2006), because it further destabilises the very ground beneath our feet. If there is no nature outside of culture and vice versa, then how do we educate our children to care for the earth? Or are we already beyond teaching to ‘care for the planet’ (Heise 2008), and instead should focus on how childhood/nature/urban as concepts need to be transformed, so to afford a better set of grounds for engagement with the changing conditions our species – as one among many – is facing?

Towards a collective response

Through an open call for submissions, we invited scholars to explore such questions, including how education contributes to knowledges about natured childhoods with a focus on their performances in the urban. Scholars from Canada, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia responded, and we’ve selected for this collection those manuscripts which best help disrupt familiar and naturalised interpretations of our core concepts, as well as expose some of the limitations of well-practiced views on nature that often inform educational debates.

For example, to some, ‘green’ and ‘play’ areas have become too easily associated with ‘soft nature’ and ‘innocence’ as good and safe places for childhoods in the city. Playgrounds often create illusions of child-friendly urban places and connectedness with nature and natural materials, whereas ‘hard’ urban spaces are associated with control, danger, surveillance, and with being devoid of nature and thus non child-friendly (Barratt Hacking, Barratt, and Scott 2007). In this collection, contributors responded to such concerns with theoretically informed explorations by pursuing one or more of the following questions:

•	What are the intersections of childhood/urban/nature and its tensions, possibilities and risks for educational thought and practice (Morgan, and also Taylor)?
•	Which pedagogies become possible when concepts are unsettled, and how do these pedagogies contribute to new conceptual spaces for natured childhoods in cities (Pyyryy)?
•	What is urban nature and what may be the potential of ‘urban nature’ as a pedagogical lens in education for sustainability with children (Rautio, Hohti, Leinonen and Tammi)?
•	What kind of theorisations of urban/childhood/nature might be useful in thinking about city spaces as lived in, and enacted as ‘places’ (Somerville and Hickey)?
•	How has the nature/urban/childhood intersection been shaped over time (Diaz)?
•	What places for children emerge when urban nature is explored as unexpected, unknowable and as a site of interspecies encounters and cohabitation (Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw)?
•	What do children themselves have to say about ‘nature’ (Menezes and  Rios)?

Opening our collection is a contribution from John Morgan, who examines urban and pedagogical imaginations related to the intersection of childhood/urban/nature. Morgan’s focus is on the educational implications of this entanglement, but first he analyses the forces and structures that shape and produce urban spaces. In a nutshell, his argument is that urban pedagogy is linked with the notion of the ‘planetary scale’ and the vitality of ‘life itself’. The processes that shape children’s nature in urban spaces are often obscured, including the effects of economic restructuring. By examining both the conceptualisations and limitations of ‘urban’ and ‘pedagogy’ in relation to nature and childhoods, Morgan critically questions the hybridity of these concepts and explores the potentiality, and possibilities, of ensuing encounters. To illustrate, given the conditions and horizons of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, we must ask: are urban places a site of struggle, of identifying the relationships with children and nature, searching for an ideal liveable, smart and sustainable city? There is a need, as Morgan concludes, for a much wider discussion about contemporary urban natures and childhoods in education, as well as consideration of diverse possibilities, theories and perspectives, given the lack of attention to global political forces in some posthumanist and ‘new materialist’ analyses.

With Morgan’s argument in mind, our next contribution, from Paulina Rautio, Riikka Hohti, Riitta-Marja Leinonen and Tuure Tammi, asks what does environmental education require, when we recognise connecting ‘child’ and ‘nature’ is only ever a partial answer? Working closely with two child-within-nature events, their research positions and analyses these as ‘configurations of mutual emergence of matter and discourse, of subjects and objects, animate, inanimate, human, non-/more-than-human’. This allows them to explore, amongst other things, the relation of a child and a seagull, a relation that exposes ‘“death” as an indication of a society where some “members can be shot and others detained from cursing in the name of becoming human (less animal)"’. Their work exposes and evaluates the connectedness of the two separate units (child and nature) as much as it maps the mutual emergence of children and their surroundings in relation to each other. As the authors argue, by taking as their unit of analysis the ‘shitgull’ as an event, their approach ‘makes it possible to critically review the complex conditions in which similar events arise rather than trying to find fault and inject cure to what are thought of as a priori participants: “child” and “bird”/“nature”’. In conclusion, Rautio et al. offer a child-nature configuration of the ‘urban shop’ that contests the aforementioned definitions of ‘nature’: ‘urban children can and always do live coexisting with their natural environments in many literally profound ways’.

In our next contribution, Noora Pyyry asks, ‘How to examine the complexities of children’s meaningful engagement with the city?’ She reads children in the urban place and their onto-epistemologies through an intra-active lens, arguing that children play with human and non-human subjects, and objects, alike. Pyyry utilises Bennett’s (2010) call for enchantments, that is, those events that offer disruptions which open up space for new reflection. In light of this, for children – and other human subjects – being in the city is about making a home for oneself in the world and with the world, as a childhood/urban/nature entanglement would suggest. However, these theoretical and philosophical ponderings lead Pyyry to alternative ways of thinking about pedagogies and different ways of conceptualising learning. In such thinking, definitions, dichotomies and singularities become extremely problematic. For example, Pyyry asks, what and where and when are the pedagogical spaces where non-linear and rhizomatic ideas, as imagined in childhood/urban/nature complexities, can exist? Through Ingold’s concept of dwelling with (which Pyyry uses in order to explore the complexities of childhood/nature entanglements in the urban landscape), she argues for treating urban places as loose spaces, where intra-active play takes place with human subjects, the more-than-human, and things. In conclusion, Pyyry’s work underscores the importance of fostering pedagogies that grow rather than diminish children’s power and agency, so that actually, their implication in the shaping of urban places is made clear, including through their pedagogical relationships and entanglements with nature as they dwell with/in urban landscapes.

Mindful of the global intersections of various urban/nature/childhood configurations, Isabel Menezes and Clementina Rios examine four Portuguese schools in suburban settings: three sites are close to major cities, and one is situated in a village. Their contribution explores how young children articulate their understandings on what, where and how they learn about nature, to emphasise that young children’s participation in group discussions about nature, environmental problems and solutions are necessary if we are to ensure civic-political dimensions of environmental education from children’s perspectives. Menezes and Rios argue that this focus on children’s ability to voice their thoughts on nature, their concerns about environmental issues and their ideas for solutions is largely missing from education and educational research, due to deep-seated assumptions about childhood as a time of innocence. As Menezes and  Rios point out, children as young as 5 years of age are capable of speaking about their imaginings of a more caring relationship between humans and ‘nature’. The authors suggest that involving children in group discussions highlights the potential of children to become active citizens and to take a central role in re-imagining and renewing a ‘common world’ that is shared by humans and more-than-humans alike. The authors conclude that transformative pedagogies can only be successful if underlying assumptions about children’s capacity to contribute to civic-political dimensions in environmental education are challenged alongside assumptions about human and more-than-human entanglements.

The possibilities and risks involved when animals are introduced to teaching practice are at the centre of the contribution from Fikile Nxumalo and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. Their work analyses the dilemmas of teachers in an early childhood centre in British Columbia, Canada, when confronted with the challenges of managing a burgeoning stick insect population. These forms of urban/nature/childhood encounters bring to the fore the complexities of ethical animal-human relations. The authors describe the focus on the explicit inclusion of pets in the early childhood curriculum to introduce young children to basic biological epistemology. Stick insects have become particularly prominent in many North American programs as insects are perceived to be more manageable than mammals or birds. The authors pose questions that explore the ethical, political and ecological dimensions of child/animal/educator encounters. For example: what to do when children notice that some of the insects are missing parts of their legs? In what ways are child/animal/teacher relations reconfigured when walking stick insect dilemmas are kept visible, in their complexity and their messiness? The authors explore what happens when pedagogies ‘stay with the trouble’ to engage with the affective and imperfect practices of urban/nature/childhood through ethical, political and ecological lenses.

Moving across continents and towards non-western ontologies and epistemologies, Margaret Somerville and Sandra Hickey’s paper invites us to explore Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal perspectives on the emergence of urban/nature/child pedagogies and intersections in a project that sets about ‘re-claiming’ remnant woodlands. Framed by its attention to indigenous issues, the authors attempt to engage critically with a claim by a group of ecologists, that as urbanisation increases globally, indigenous languages and knowledge are being lost in parallel with the loss of species. Their work analyses children’s multimodal images and texts, seeking to draw out as much as dwell on alternative storylines and pedagogies that embrace new imaginings for children to potentially name and change their worlds. Located in a school in the highly urbanised area of Western Sydney, with a significant population of Aboriginal and Torres Islanders and children from diverse cultural backgrounds, Somerville and Hickey call for both the transformative and special capacities of entangling environmental education with indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, including the more than human world. Their paper concludes by questioning how children are seeking out wild places, and how in alternative storylines ‘urban/nature/child pedagogies […], time and urban space are conceptualised by the children who bring the past into the present, the present into the past, and past/present/future time exist simultaneously’.

Taking intersections in the past as her immediate horizon, Claudia Diaz offers a fresh perspective on children’s lives in rural nature in British Columbia from the 1920s to the 1940s. Diaz’s extensive research draws on letters from the Elementary Correspondence School, written by children in rural areas to their teachers in the city. Diaz argues that these letters serve to unsettle certain notions of childhood and nature by highlighting that rural and urban were/are constantly reconfigured in children’s letters to their school. The letters then, provide evidence of complex interrelations that shape real and imagined senses of place and self. As Diaz argues, urban life as the imagined place of learning had presence and materiality in remote communities, and children’s letters demonstrate a strong attachment to far-away places and people even though most of these children never left their rural community. In essence, Diaz’s research looks to re-invigorate debates about the ‘contours and terrains’ of place-based education by challenging a notion of ‘place’ that is fixed in time and space. Children in rural British Columbia experienced place as here-ness and there-ness, transgressing the rural-urban divide through the practice of writing letters and engaging in relationships over time with their teachers in cities. For example, many of these children were hard workers who contributed to their family’s economies through working the land and being in nature as much as they were learners in and out of schools with a sense of urban life – contributing yet another perspective to our sense of urban/nature/childhood entanglements.

In the final paper in this collection, Africa Taylor argues that many environmental educators have yet to fully engage with the complexities, challenges and most importantly the implications of the Anthropocene. Taylor’s view on the interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates is, that they require educators to engage in a paradigm shift in considering what it means to be human, even as the notion of sustainability remains, as Taylor argues, largely disconnected from debates about the Anthropocene. On the one hand, ‘well-meaning, stewardship pedagogies do not provide the paradigm shift that is needed to respond to the implications of the Anthropocene’. On the other, and to respond to this concern, Taylor examines possibilities for alternative ways of considering stewardship pedagogies in environmental education, which take into account the consequences and compelling challenges of the Anthropocene. In so doing, Taylor presents an argument for ‘common world pedagogies’, and how they can move our shared thinking onwards, from not only relational ontologies that recognise inextricable and productive entanglements with other living beings, entities and forces on earth, but also to a worldly response to the Anthropocene based on collective, more-than-human notions of response-ability and agency. For Taylor then, this entangled relation has the potential to nourish a flourishing future for children who will inherit this uncertain future, an argument that we as editors (and educators) see as pertinent to understanding urban/nature/childhood entanglement.

With these brief sketches of each contribution in mind, we now provide a short overview of each node to further frame the authors’ discussions, and return us to our opening themes of reimaging and reconfiguring their intersections.

Nature

Nature can often double up for ‘other-than-city’ while the idea of urban ‘wild’ nature might appear as an oxymoron (Hinchliffe et al. 2005). At times, in environmental activism, nature as a sociological and ecological concept is taken to refer to wilderness and those untouched (by human civilisation) yet increasingly precious last remnants of ‘pure’ nature (Pickerill 2008). However, as Pulitzer-prize winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) outlines, there is no untouched nature left on a planet that is deeply striated, fragmented and racing towards mass extinction of species. Indeed, the dawning of the Anthropocene, as some argued even before its widespread use of as a term, marks the ‘death’ (Merchant 1980) or the ‘end’ of nature (McKibbon 1989; cf. Morton 2010).

Others expand on such qualifications of the vitality of our notion of nature by arguing that it is now an empty signifier devoid of political meaning (Swyngedouw 2011). As such it become increasingly difficult to conceptualise ‘nature’ in meaningful ways, particularly in relation to economic and political systems that perpetuate global policies and practices of exploitation of natural resources, of people and of animals (Glasson et al. 2006; Heise 2008). Yet it is this insistence on nature’s otherness that has driven conservation politics and education, including policies and practices that led to the establishment of protected national parks and World Heritage sites (Zerner 2000). A powerful example of nature-as-otherness in its own right is Bolivia’s legislation that gives earth equal standing with humans (Gianolla 2013). As Latour (2014) puts it, ‘Nature’ is more than one.

In this, certain scholarship has sought to pick up on how understandings of nature are deeply tainted by post-colonial and neoliberal capitalist thinking, which continues to dominate what ‘nature’ means in post-consumer advanced capitalist societies (Jaffee 2007; Lloro-Bidart 2015). To illustrate, ‘Nature’, particularly in the urban contexts of well-educated adults with high levels of disposable income, comes to stand for lifestyle choices: when the knowledgeable consumer has the option of purchasing the slightly more expensive Nestlé pod that carries the fair-trade organic sticker. Nestlé, it is argued, continues its well established and largely unchallenged practice of land/people/animal exploitation but diversifies its offerings for consumers with a niche product for the discerning adult. Nature here becomes a differently exploited, possibly more carefully managed resources that allows consumers (current and future generations thereof) to feel that they care. The example drives home the point that nature is an empty signifier at this historical moment for many Westernized adults, who may socialise as much as educate the next generation into such a status quo.

Given this problematique, instead of a search for meaning, it might be strategically more important to pay close attention to the conditions and the practices that create ‘natures’ in everyday encounters. Such attention generates highly specific mappings of how nature materialises through repetitions, refrains and also through disruptions in places and across time (Grosz 2008), including through education. The historical, and at times deeply romanticised entanglement between childhood and nature (Taylor 2013) adds another layer of complexity to an already unsettled territory. Recently, the ‘children in nature’ movement, using social media, conferences and publications has had resurgence in public visibility (Bruni et al. 2017).

A key message being promoted here, particularly to early childhood and primary levels of education, relies on an adult sentimentality regarding urban children’s loss of connection to nature, the ills of growing up in contemporary society, and the implications for children’s lives and their lack of learning about nature. With this popularisation of grand statements about the importance of children’s relationship to ‘nature’, it is timely to consider what influence these views of ‘child’ and ‘nature’ might have on the fields of environmental education and its research. Particularly, as these statements are often underpinned quite liberally by a number of key anthropocentric views, for example: ‘(1) human societies used to be closer to nature, (2) our current way of life is unnatural or distant from nature, and (3) proximity to nature is a question of learning (and teaching)’ (Rautio 2013, 449). These sentiments support the perception that humans are not nature and it is possible for some species, namely humans to be more or less nature, connected or disconnected from nature, and superior to or dominant over nature. How is this taught and learned, and more importantly, where and when, directly and indirectly?

Urban

As we show in this collection, cities are central sites for the (possible) reconfiguring of human-nature encounters in the Anthropocene. Cities act as microcosms of a planetary whole, fashioned specifically for human species (Vince 2014). The city as a selection though, constitutes a powerful imaginary, particularly of the human-nature disconnect and therefore brings credence and attention to our seemingly and increasingly ‘de-natured’ lives. Critiques of city living highlight the effects of the human dominance over ‘nature’; humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of the natural world, keeping nature out. Thus cities as urban spaces are a major element of the organisation of space within the Anthropocene, and continuities as much as changes to their configurations serve to illustrate how and why spatial organisation matters for all species.

For UNICEF (2012), a key challenge is that an estimated 60 million people in low income nations leave the countryside every year, such that cities grow globally at around one million new people every week. It is a challenge to comprehend the impact of this for those humans arriving for the first time and those already adrift in the city. As UNICEF reports, unfortunately one-third of all such city dwellers, especially those newly arrived, will start city life on the streets until they can find makeshift housing in slums or transitional communities on the margins or edges of the metropolitan – land that is unstable or leftover, wild or degraded. They often share these spaces with the animals who have also been pushed to the margins of the sprawling urban populous. As an introduction to being on the margins of urban life, it can be exceptionally grim for all, especially children and animals (Malone and Truong 2017).

While urban spaces are densely populated in comparison to rural areas, they can create temporary incidents of increased diversity as species move in response to pressures in their ‘natural’ environments. But urbanization, by increasing the concentration of humans, is also decreasing biodiversity locally and globally. As cities grow, vital habitat is destroyed or fragmented into patches not big enough to support the complex ecological communities of plants and animals that once lived in those places. Many animals who depend on natural habitats such as forests, fields or wetlands to survive are increasingly at risk, if not already erased from the life of a city. Urban growth has meant that in many cases, more-than-human habitats have been degraded, lost or paved over to make way for the markers of human urban inhabitation: houses, factories and roads. In the city, those plant and animal species that once flourished have become endangered, or extinct, they are literally swallowed up by human habitats. Even worse, those rural areas that have been abandoned are not necessarily left to be places for animals and plants to flourish or the natural ecology to be restored. Instead they are taken over by other interests, typically those of corporations, and depleted even further (Simms 2009).

These pressures create new ‘oxymoronic’ events, such as the discovery of biodiversity hotspots in inner city environments where highly endangered species appear at a greater rate than elsewhere in the landscape. The emerging patterns are complex and are only beginning to become visible to research. Ives et al. (2016), for example, argue

Australian cities support substantially more nationally threatened animal and plant species than all other non-urban areas on a unit-area basis. Thirty per cent of threatened species were found to occur in cities. Distribution patterns differed between plants and animals: individual threatened plant species were generally found in fewer cities than threatened animal species, yet plants were more likely to have a greater proportion of their distribution in urban areas than animals. (117)

In this, humans are not the only climate refugees. Life in general is on the move in search of conditions that allow survival (Kolbert 2014). Yet for researchers, especially in high-income nations, the emphasis has often been on child friendliness or healthy cities for children by addressing the quality of the outdoor environment, such as improving recreational spaces, green spaces, young people’s alienation, and controlling traffic to make streets safe for young citizens. In contrast, in low-income nations, the focus on child-cities-nature has predominantly been on more immediate issues such as the impacts of poverty, historical and political injustices, climate change and environmental degradation. Our plea? That environmental educators and researchers examine how urban childhoods are lived and located in assemblages of uneasy and messy urban/nature/childhood encounters. While on matters of where to start, our next node and its intersections with those mentioned above suggest a range of areas we summarise in the conclusion to this introduction.

Childhood

Children growing up in urban places and cities are often perceived as the most disadvantaged group in the Anthropocene. Changing childhood landscapes, the retreat of children from playing outdoors, the poor quality of city environments, are all contributing to this shift in what it means to be growing up in urban spaces.

Many of the world’s children are growing up in crowded, polluted environments, with limited opportunities to engage with others species due to an increasing degree of factory agriculture, housing and industry. Highly regulated and monitored lives speak to fears and risks of child abductions and abuse. All these elements have contributed to children’s capacity to be independent and more freely in urban environments. But these are not just contemporary issues. Abandoning support for a ‘natured’ childhood, cityscapes have become degraded for decades. Even when asked to reflect on their own childhood, many adults reminisce about having far more freedom in their urban places than children have today (Malone 2016). Yet the argument accorded to this ‘new’ child-nature disconnect often relies on an assumption that past generations of children had a closer and more intimate relation with the planet, de-emphasising what has been ‘a long history of environmental degradation and disconnectedness’ (Dickinson 2013, 7) where the experience of being in ‘nature’ may not have been predominantly positive.

An emphasis on romanticising the lives of previous generations of children normalises what has been likened to a ‘perfect’ Disneyfied childhood (Taylor 2013), even though significant evidence has revealed that poverty, disadvantage and environmental degradation have had a long lasting and sinister impact over many generations on children’s natured lives. Research illustrates that childhood encounters with the ‘natural world’ are not always restorative, healthy or as spiritually uplifting as nostalgic writings suggest (Malone 2015, 2016). Within an utopian white middle class America, for example, which is most evident in the writing of influential authors and speakers such as Louv (2005), the experiences of children in less developed nations or disadvantaged cities in high income nations are mostly rendered invisible: those that speak of growing up next to high polluting industries, busy highways and degraded landscapes. For these and many children, perceptions of the environment can be those related to fear and uneasiness. For example, Hordyk, Dulde, and Shem (2014, 6) reporting on research with immigrant and refugee children in Canada revealed: ‘Nature was not a utopian ideal waiting to be experienced by children’ and ‘human and animal predators made walks in a forest dangerous past-times’ for these children.

These issues are real for children. Children growing up in such urban areas around the world are facing serious danger from pollutants and pathogens in the air, water, soil or food. Street children for instance, who are often invisible in the research on urban environments, can be exposed to a lack of health services, the danger of traffic accidents, child trafficking and abuse. Finding secure and safe places for refuge (to play and encounter nonhuman others) will continue to be of critical importance for them. All of these vulnerabilities are compounded by the detrimental impacts of an acceleration of climate change and other global disasters predicted to increase in the future.

Studies also reveals the quality of urban environments can have detrimental immediate impacts on children’s health, and longer impacts. For example, it has the prospect of limiting young people’s ecological identities and their sense of connectedness and empathy with the nonhuman world – including the opportunity for kin relations with other worldly folk. How a child engages with spaces therefore differs enormously on the urban environments where one’s childhood is located, yet there has been a tendency for universalizing childhood in child-nature research. Educational initiatives to support children and young people to respond to the impending ecological crisis in urban spaces needs to be attentive to the urban landscapes of childhood (Malone and Truong 2017).

Re-worlding the human/more-than-human in environmental education

To summarise, children’s encounters in cities are central to how a child learns what it means to be human, including a human who is in relation with the nonhuman world. Urban spaces shape children and children shape the urban; therefore, childhood experiences, and what is and isn’t taught and learned through them, should not be separated from questions of the child and other entities with whom they live (Raittila 2012).

The authors in this collection argue that humanist ontologies have largely failed to justice to this complex situation. Diverse narratives of children growing up in cities at this time of the naming of the Anthropocene illustrate that the child’s body becomes more than simply a ‘naturalized child’; they are a product of the assemblages, associations and relations through which they are connected to the more-than-human in diverse and complex means. By shifting away from the child in urban nature as the only agential body and focusing on the materiality of child bodies as well as the bodies of other nonhuman entities as relational assemblages, the papers in this collection serve to open up new ethical imaginings for children and their encounters with urban environments as natured potentials with future possibilities.

By troubling what constitutes learning through the intersections and entanglements of child/urban/natures this collection calls into question how we commonly come to view and represent the relations of child-nature-bodies in cities; that is, it is not as simple as traditional discourses and practices of environmental education might have us believe. This collection performs the task of unsettling childhood imaginings where children/nature/urban lives exist separately from one another, or are apart from the many other species and living organisms they co-exist with.

Our goal in this collection then, has been to overcome limitations of a narrow and nostalgic view of ‘child, urban, nature’ and to reimagine other approaches to education through the lenses of each node and their intersections with each other. It seems timely to trouble big concepts such as nature, urban and childhood and to go beyond humanist ontologies that assume humans are exempt from the ecology of the planet. Instead, as we trust this collection shows, we can seek imaginings and practices for different modes of being human with the earth, now.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Iris Duhn’s research interests include early childhood and sustainability, with a focus on new materialism and post-qualitative methodologies. She has published on childhood and sustainability, policies, globalisation and methodologies.

Karen Malone is a professor of sustainability and environmental education. Her international work has focused on child-friendly cities and more recently on childhood in the Anthropocene.

Marek Tesar’s research is focused on childhood studies and early childhood education, with an expertise on the philosophy of education and childhood. His research is concerned with the construction of childhoods, notions of place/space, and methodological and philosophical thinking around ontologies and the ethics of researching these notions.