The ‘youth-fullness’ of youth geographies: ‘coming of age’?

ABSTRACT

The 21st anniversary of Cool Places (Skelton, T., and G. Valentine, eds. 1998. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. London: Routledge) provides an opportunity to reflect on the direction of travel in youth geographies and map out future journeys. Here, we argue that scholarship on youth geographies is increasingly dispersed across sub-disciplinary niches of Human Geography. A more conspicuous point of coalescence would be beneficial for the advancement of conceptual and theoretical understandings of youth geographies. It is suggested that the journal Children’s Geographies, offers a meaningful place for the publication of further, dynamic and increased work on youth geographies. To illustrate the exigent research agendas of youth geographies, some exemplars of the ways in which the contemporary lives of young people are being transformed are highlighted. We conclude by asserting that it is an exciting time for researching youth geographies, to grapple with the complex and diverse contested meanings and lived experiences of youth across the Global North and South.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• young people
• millennials
• youth cultures

Introduction

The landmark edited book Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (Skelton and Valentine 1998), which has been the inspiration and stimulus for much subsequent scholarship on youth geographies, turns 21 (years old) in 2019. This is also the year that signifies the passing of the so-called ‘millennial youth culture’, with those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s now seemingly transitioned into ‘millennial adulthood’ (Myers 2016). It is thus timely to reflect on the current wellbeing of youth geographies, its place in the wider discipline and beyond, and the potential of youth geographies to inform and shape future debates on youth and young people within the social sciences. We argue that there is an urgent need for more coherent research on youth geographies given the profound ways in which representations, relationships, embodiments and lived experiences of youth are being reconfigured by dynamic contemporary societal and structural conditions, such as austerity (Holdsworth 2017; Horton 2017; McDowell 2017; Pimlott-Wilson 2017). This also includes the rapidity of technological advancements (e.g. internet-enabled devices, on-line learning platforms, social media), and the restructuring of political and cultural systems to uplift the currency of youth voters and citizens (Wells 2017).

In this special issue, we draw together a collection of six contributions from an organised panel at the 5th International Conference of Geographies of Children, Youth & Families at Loughborough University, September 2017. These authors – including the original editors of Cool Places – were invited to reflect on the contribution of the text and future directions in youth geographies – under the provocative, multi-layered homonym of ‘youth-fullness’. The individual six papers that follow (Aitken; Holton; Horton and Kraftl; Skelton; Valentine; Van Blerk) provide some critical reflections on the direction of travel of youth geographies during the last 21years, as well as mapping out possible future journeys. We provide a brief introduction to the papers at the end of this editorial, but here we outline our own reflections and provocations on youth geographies. Although there is not space in this editorial introduction to fully engage with ongoing debates of the contested meaning of youth (for example, see Woodman and Bennett 2016; Rodó-de-Zárate 2017), this theme is embedded in some of the papers that follow.

The current state of play in youth geographies?

The last two decades have undoubtedly seen the realisation of Skelton and Valentine’s (1998, 25) aim for Cool Places to be a catalyst for ‘stimulating new directions for youth oriented research’. From a geographic perspective, original work on youth has flourished, exemplified by reviews on the geographies of youth/young people (Evans 2008; Jeffrey 2013; Pimlott-Wilson and Hall 2017) and youth or young people being emblazoned on the front covers of potentially sub-disciplinary setting books (e.g. Nayak 2003; Jeffrey and Dyson 2008; Hopkins 2010; Holt 2010; Ansell 2016; Gough and Langevang 2016; Benwell and Hopkins 2017), sometimes ordered behind the front-running term Children. However, very few academic outputs are self-defining as ‘youth geographies’ compared to children’s geographies (for key readings and forward-looking commentaries on this sub-field see Holloway and Valentine 2000; Horton, Kraftl, and Tucker 2008; Holloway 2014; Aitken 2018).

One observation that we would make here, which is particularly salient to the papers that follow in this special issue, is that writings on youth geographies have become more visible and scattered across numerous sub-disciplinary niches of Human Geography. Examples include work on young people’s identities (e.g. gender, religion, nationality) in Social and Cultural Geography (e.g. Jones, Merriman, and Mills 2016), on young people’s geopolitics and citizenship within Political Geography (e.g. Nagel and Staeheli 2015), and on the migration of young people within Population Geography (e.g. Huijsmans 2018). Although these cross sub-disciplinary engagements for work on youth geographies is clearly a very positive development in the field, it would appear that there is not a conspicuous sub-disciplinary anchor for the coalescence of youth geographies scholarship. Indeed, it is plausible to assert that the journal Children’s Geographies, which is closely wedded in its formation to the rise of the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group of the RGS-IBG, offers the most meaningful place for the publication of work on youth geographies. Indeed, the remit of the journal is to publish work ‘upon the geographical worlds of children and young people under the age of 25 and their families’ (see Robson, Horton, and Kraftl 2013 for a discussion of the focus on youth). Yet, our recent analyses of the titles and abstracts of papers published in the journal reveal a relative dearth of work on youth geographies during its first 15 years, with a marked dominance and prevalence of papers on children’s geographies; akin to the title of the journal. In championing the inclusion of children and young people’s voice within different sub-disciplines of geography, could it be that this field of study has inadvertently diluted the body and lexus of work on ‘youth geographies’ in and of itself?

This may be pertinent to our own experiences of publishing our work. Despite our diverse engagements with research on youth populations (as students e.g. Smith 2009 and citizens e.g. Mills 2015, respectively), we have not extensively published our work on youth geographies in Children’s Geographies. Our own experiences may epitomise a wider general trend in the field of youth geographies, whereby other concepts in youth-orientated research (e.g. migration; politics; gender; religion; rurality) are still the core focus and prioritised, and youth is somewhat relegated. We suggest that recent studies of studentification (e.g. Smith and Hubbard 2014), youth (un)employment (e.g. Crisp and Powell 2017) and youth migration (e.g. Frändberg 2014), for instance, have tended to by-pass mainstream youth-oriented debates and have not effectively engaged with wider understandings of youth and ‘representations, scale, place and sites of resistance’ – the four key sections of Cool Places.

As work on youth geographies becomes more dispersed and fragmented across different sub-disciplinary outlets of Human Geography, we would provocatively suggest that although this work is positively informing other (sub-)disciplinary debates, these contributions do not often coalesce and prioritise the advancement and theories of youth geographies in and of themselves. We contend that there continues to be a certain reticence to engage with the complexities of youth itself and the contemporary geographies of youth cultures. The advancement for conceptual and theoretical understandings of youth geographies could have been slowed down by this orthodoxy.

A useful exemplar here is the growing body of scholarship that is rapidly deepening knowledge of the increased sub-national and international mobilities of young people for education. These processes are a leading-edge form of urban (and rural) change at a variety of intersecting scales across the globe, and are one of the most profound inscriptions of changing youth populations upon urban landscapes and cultures. For instance, large commercial organisations, developers and institutional actors have restructured urban landscapes to meet the growing demands of student in-migrants for temporary accommodation, distinct retail and leisure services, and predilections for updated, modern spaces for learning. Importantly, these changing urban forms are vividly illustrative of the ways in which notions of youth and representations of youth populations have been reconfigured during the last twenty years in many different national contexts (Nakazawa 2017). Typically, the skylines of most university towns and cities have been transformed by the development of large blocks of purpose-built student accommodation, or the (re)development of university buildings for youth populations. The production and consumption of these new urban landscapes, as well as the commodification of student living and studenthood, emphasises the need to more fully consider the changing nature of youth populations as socially and culturally constructed phenomena. Yet, to date, academic scholarship in this area has tended to bypass possible useful engagements with wider social science debates on youth, and, instead, tended to hook-up with debates in urban (e.g. Hochstenbach and Boterman 2017) and population (Smith, Rerat, and Sage 2014) studies. Likewise, and inter-woven with the above trend, a burgeoning area of research in human geography has examined the rise of international students and the globalisation of education. For example, although King’s (2018) discussion of the links between migration and youth transitions emphasises that migration is embroiled within wider processes of becoming, unbecoming and ruptures, there is limited engagement with broader scholarship on youth geographies to more fully grapple with these links between migration and youth.

From millennials to centennials and beyond

In this section, we reflect on the changing ‘speed’ of children and young people’s lives and call for an urgency in a more coherent understanding of youth geographies, given the profundity, rapidity, scale and magnitude of change in young people’s lives. Skelton and Valentine (1998) could not have foreseen the profound ways in which the multiple geographies of youth have been reconfigured during the last two decades. The dramatic changes to youth geographies, undoubtedly, reinforce their enduring call to unpack youth as a social construct, interrogate its social, cultural and political meanings, and to more fully put youth in the spotlight. This means that the concepts and theories of youth must not be relegated below other thematic nodes, and there is real potential to have a ‘fuller’ Youth Geographies going forward.

There are certainly some fascinating, unfolding, trends that offer rich and exciting avenues for researchers of youth geographies. We briefly outline seven exemplars below to illustrate this point. Although these trends are primarily informed by developments in the Global North, we also reference work on related themes in the Global South where relevant:

• There is a more intense concentration of youth populations in distinct residential neighbourhoods of towns and cities, closely tied to the formation of more socio-spatially age-segregated societies (Sabater, Graham, and Finney 2017). These urban youth geographies are associated with the clustering of youth-oriented infrastructures and services, including pubs and clubs, distinctive retail and leisure provision, advertisement hoardings, and dedicated management of public space for youths (i.e. police, security) (e.g. Roberts 2015; Holdsworth, Laverty, and Robinson 2017). The increasing exclusionary nature of local housing markets, and the necessity for youth populations to privately rent accommodation (Mackie 2016; Hoolachan et al. 2017) is an important factor here; propelled by the proliferation of housing in multiple occupation and new-build, small flats and apartments for investors (Petrova 2018).

• There is rising regional and international mobilities during the youthful phases of the lifecourse for many social groups (Smith and Sage 2014; Cairns 2017; Waters 2017), with the possibility of migration for younger age groups becoming the ‘new norm’ in the Global North (King 2018; on youth mobilities and migration in the Global South, see Skelton and Gough 2013; Esson 2015; Punch 2015). Importantly, the mobilities of young people do not always yield positive experiences such as exciting overseas adventures and encounters, and progressive learning (Brown, Scrase, and Ganguly-Scrase 2017; Chee 2018; Holdsworth 2018). This is stressed in a recent special issue on European Youth migration (King and Williams 2018), which reveals the diversification of migration of young people across Europe (e.g. Lulle, Moroşanu, and King 2018). As King (2018, np) summarises: ‘there is a harsher, darker side to the new intra-European youth migrations, overlooked by the often too-celebratory, self-referential rhetoric of the ‘Erasmus generation’. For many workers from the CEE countries, migratory life in the ‘West’ is often about pure survival, living on low wages, and doing tough jobs in degrading conditions – on building sites, in the casualised labour niches of the urban service economy, or in agricultural labour in extremes of weather.’

• There is a growth in youth groups being more fully recognised as valued stakeholders, and increasingly given a recognised voice within consultations and debates both in the public and private arenas (Patrikios and Shephard 2014). This is typified by the rise in the high number of councils, forums and youth parliaments – infrastructures that have been explicitly established to more fully capture and hear youth voices (Cushing and van Vliet 2017). Although we can ask whether these spaces are meaningful or tokenistic attempts to engage young people in the political process, or solicit their views, there is no doubt they have risen and become almost ubiquitous in spaces of public life with the institutionalisation of youth voice since the turn of the century (Mills and Waite 2017).

• There is an apparent politicisation of youth groups, and upsurge in national media and political discourses, globally, about the need for changes to the voting age and activism (Jeffrey 2013; Hopkins and Todd 2015; Hsieh and Skelton 2018).

• There is an increasing number of ‘safe spaces’ for, and co-produced by, children and young people, often supporting political mobilisation (Djohari, Pyndiah, and Arnone 2018).

• There is an increasing commodification of youth and youth lifestyles tied to the formation of new cultural practices and commodities, such as new forms of sociability and community (Buckingham and Kehily 2014). Although this is clearly not a new phenomenon, some marked directional shifts are evident in the ways that youth lifestyles are reshaped and rebranded (see Woodman and Bennett 2016), often in tandem with advances in technology and the incipient extension of social media into everyday lives and cultures (Gordon, Elwood, and Mitchell 2016)

• There is a growing recognition of the serious links between youth and mental health and well-being, emphasised, for example, by recent national media campaigns in the UK to raise awareness of the personal stresses triggered by the intensive commodification of higher education and the perception of heightened responsibilities, debt and anxieties that are experienced by younq people at university or college. Equally, the growing precarity of youth employment in the Global North and South (as well as links to health and livelihoods) remain key issues within this context (on these themes, see Ansell et al. 2014; Gough and Langevang 2016; Worth 2018).

Although each of these trends is of interest individually, the collective work to map these shifts is urgent and timely because they are changing the social and cultural meaning of youth itself and the ‘stretching’ of youth across age groups. We suggest there are some interesting debates emerging around new terms used to define those who have seemingly ‘failed’ the transition to adulthood. These include ‘Kidults’, ‘rejuvenile’ and ‘adultescent’ to describe millennials aged 18–33 who represent the ‘death’ of adulthood and its ‘traditional’ markers (Bhalla 2017). For example, in the UK this generation is described by media and government as choosing to live with their parents to ‘delay’ responsibility, rather than because of a crippling housing market or poverty (Stone, Berrington, and Falkingham 2014). These societal frustrations about ‘Peter Pans’ who ‘won’t grow up’ clash with (middle-class) narratives about ‘staying youthful’ and achieving mindfulness through fashionable ‘adult’ colouring books. Indeed, in the Global North we are seeing the commodification of ‘adultescence’ through new leisure spaces (e.g. soft play nightclubs and adult sleepaway camps). What then, are acceptable practices of ‘being young’ or ‘grown-up’? The perceptual (and other) boundaries between childhood, youth and adulthood are becoming more blurred and, we suggest, are vacillating. These categories and boundaries are now widely recognised within the social sciences as fluid and liminal, and yet vacillating acknowledges an unsteady ‘swaying’ between childhood, youth and adulthood, as well as capturing the sense of uncertainty during this time, discussed in this section. There is therefore a need for research that explores these contemporary processes of social change for millennials, and increasingly centennials, and that asks provocative questions about some of the above assumptions and their geographies.

Indeed, the changing speed of children’s geographies that we referred to at the beginning of this section will inevitably impact future youth geographies. We can consider the potential influence of the expansion of digital technologies and social media for centennials (or Generation Z) and their shifting geographical imaginations, whereby children today (for the most part) are currently more connected to news, politics, fashion and knowledge from across the globe than the millennials they follow ever were. It is unsurprising that many of the recent debates surrounding ‘fake news’ and democracy concern the potential impact on children, with a number of public moral panics about technology, early childhood, and the digital lives of future ‘screenagers’ (Boyd 2014).

The fullness of youth geographies: reflections and moving forward

We now turn to the six individual papers that make up this special section. First, Aitken outlines some of the changes in global youth activism, civic engagement and youth cultures since the publication of Cool Places and reflects on wider shifts in young people’s lives, hinted at in this opening editorial. He points to the role that Skelton and Valentine’s (1998) text has played in his teaching and outlines general trends in youth culture(s), spaces and politics within his student cohorts in the US over time. Aitken concludes by reflecting on young people as agents of change during (in)secure times and their imaginative creativity. Second, Holton uses student geographies and the politics of higher education as an entry-point into wider reflections on youth geographies. His paper discusses ‘post-adolescent mobilities’ and student experiences, drawing on Skelton and Valentine’s (1998) focus on scale, place and youthful sites of / for resistance. Third, Horton and Kraftl provide a lively and personal account of the role Cool Places has played in their individual research and teaching careers – a text they describe as ‘neon bright’ with inspiring ideas, passion and possibilities. Their paper highlights key approaches and challenges within the field over time, and in relation to wider youth studies, arguing that the book remains an ‘important, hopeful political-theoretical waymarker’ in relation to future research. Fourth, Skelton provides a personal and reflective account of the emergence of Cool Places, placing the text alongside wider moves in feminist studies and the ‘cultural turn’ during this period. She reflects on a ‘present absence challenge’ for research on young people within Geography and work still to do. In conclusion, Skelton discusses the key context of Asia for current and future work on youth geographies. Fifth, Valentine reflects on why youth geographies – as a discrete sub-disciplinary field in its own right – has ‘not developed the same coalescence of capacity as ‘children’s geographies’. She suggests a number of reasons for this comparative failure of maturity, outlining the wider context of the new social studies of childhood, funding programmes, and the success of the journal Children’s Geographies. Valentine ends with reflections on generational and social change and the notion of ‘youthquake’ as affording possible opportunities for future success. Finally, Van Blerk’s contribution importantly highlights research on young people’s lives in the Global South and the demographic shifts that will inevitably shape youth geographies going forward. This final paper of the special section outlines the significant gains within youth geographies in recent years, especially through growing work on young people’s lives beyond Europe and North America, but the challenges that remain in addressing vital issues of social justice.

All of the contributions in this special issue show that it is both an exciting and challenging time for researching youth geographies, and serve to demonstrate the value of taking stock of the achievements of scholarship in this field. With this in mind, and to conclude, it is important to stress that we intentionally scripted the term ‘youth-fullness’ to evoke two main, but contrasting, meanings and questions: first, are understandings of youth geographies (still) at a fledgling phase of development and has the sub-discipline not reached a level of maturity; second, and contrarily, is scholarship on youth geographies truly burgeoning and well served by a constant high rate and pace of outputs. We would contend that work on youth geographies is, indeed, flourishing – but the scattered distribution of this work across many sub-disciplines of human geography could be more fully woven together in a more effective, systematic way if there was wider awareness and uptake of the remit of this journal to publish work on youth geographies (e.g. Wilkinson 2017, 2018; Dillabough and Yoon 2018). There may be value in this journal to undertake a campaign to inform the wider discipline of its remit for youth geographies, perhaps a point which is obfuscated by the distinctive and, potentially narrowing, journal title Children’s Geographies.

At the same time, the diverse contested meanings of youth in different regional and national contexts across the Global North and South may mean that the upper age ceiling of 25 could perhaps be more fully relaxed, to galvanise more interest from some national contexts in the Global South where meanings of youth may extend upwards into the early 30s. In this way, Children’s Geographies may more fully become the meaningful place for anchoring the leading-edge studies and debates of the dynamic and changing geographical worlds of youth across the globe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Darren P. Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0775-1221

Sarah Mills http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0645-1596