Children's spaces in coastal cities: challenges to conventional urban understandings and prospects for child-friendly blue urbanism

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the relevance of the ocean in children's urban experiences, putting into dialogue the premises of blue urbanism and child-friendly cities. The focus is on discussing how children's lives are entangled with coastal cities, urging the field of children's geographies to unpack how spatial conditions in coastal cities serve as a lens to make sense of children's narratives in urban spaces. The most significant themes that emerged from this interest include the narratives of children in coastal public spaces, child-specific risks, diversity of childhood(s) in coastal cities, and children's agency toward disaster resilience. Such discussions suggest that both the principles of blue urbanism and child-friendly cities are instructive to shift the fixity of our thinking about children's urban spaces, urging children's geographies to extend its mantle to cover the emergent logics of children's narratives in the coastal cities. Overall, this work is an invitation for children's geographers to further explore the ocean-child interconnectedness as a way of rethinking urbanity. Child-friendly blue urbanism is still uncharted but the opportunities thereof are immense. It is then the task of children's geographers to build on this potential and traverse other disciplines toward further navigating children's lives in coastal cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Child-friendly cities
• coastal cities
• blue urbanism

Acknowledgements

This piece is for all children living in coastal cities, whose lives have challenged my views on children's geographies in many unexpected ways.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).