Children's geographies in the neighbourhoods of Athens

In this article we focus on children’s everyday places and their significance in Urban Studies.  Our exploration is framed through the perspective of the socio-spatial dialectic and the relational structure of each place – ranging from the body, the chair, and the desk to the neighbourhood, the city and beyond.  Embracing an interdisciplinary approach, we engage in dialogue with disciplines of Children’s Geographies, Critical Pedagogy, New Sociology of Childhood, and Critical Cartography. We aim to conduct a perspective for exploring the places in which children live and act through their views and embodied practices. Our objective is to highlight that focusing on children in research and education is a process of critically questioning what is assumed to be given and reconsidering our perceptions of childhood.

Through cartographic documentation of ethnographic research in Pagrati neighbourhood (with children 7-12 years old) and multiple educational workshops, both inside and outside the school context, in various neighbourhoods of Athens (Metaxourgeio, Exarcheia, Kipseli, Pedion Areos and the wider area between Patision and 3rd Septemvriou streets) (Map 1), we emphasize the importance of understanding children’s perspective on the city, as well as the need to integrate the socio-spatial dimensions of place into the learning experience. With this viewpoint, we propose a situated pedagogy, which is reinforced and practiced through exploration and mapping practices of place. Studying with the children in their everyday practices, we observe that their varied and differentiated spatial choices form a persistent dynamic in the city. Their mappings challenge dichotomous considerations, prompting us to reflect on adults’ tendency to place children in pre-ordered spatial arrangements.

Map 1: Municipality of Athens

Children’s geographies in research and education

Children and young adolescents (up to 14 years old) constitute 13.9% of the population of Attica, a percentage reduced by 20.8% since 1991. The Municipality of Athens (Maps 2,3 & 4), in particular, maintains a similar percentage, depicting a relatively diverse population composition, despite its aging, which probably justifies the concentration of a significant percentage of elderly people (Maloutas and Spyrellis 2019).

Map 2: Percentage concentration of the age category 0-14 years in Attiki. Municipal level, 2011

Data source: ΕΚΚΕ-ELSTAT (2015)

Maps 3 & 4: Percentage concentration of the age category 0-14 years in Athens per URANU [1], 1991 and 2011

Data source: ΕΚΚΕ-ELSTAT (2015)

These youngest urban dwellers usually live more ‘locally’, appropriating and co-shaping their everyday places, developing practices and relationships. Spatial and social networks develop around children’s habits and routines, often forming the organizational backbone of each neighbourhood (Gayet-Viaud, Rivière and Simay, 2015). Yet their perspectives, concerns, and insights are often overlooked by urban policymakers, as there is a scarcity of focused studies on children’s habits in university education within disciplines of space (architecture, urban planning, geography…), nor in school curricula. In mainstream narratives, children are frequently referenced by their absence, such as in publications on the aging population and the problem of under-aging; οr in research on their exclusion from public spaces in the city, the risks they face from traffic, and the generally stifling urban environment. However, Athens’ children do not constitute a homogeneous population category. Instead, age differences in the city’s neighbourhoods intersect with various ethnic, gender, class, family, and other differences, shaping a multifaceted everyday life. Here, we endeavour to shed light on these multiple intersections, aiming to establish a perspective in urban studies that emphasizes children’s places, their spatial negotiations, and their explicit and implicit claims.

Since the 1980s, the theoretical elaborations of the New Sociology of Childhood have been destabilizing the categorizations of predetermined (natural) adulthood, shedding light on social factors that contribute to the formation of each child’s identity. By exploring the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, they also deconstruct the view of the child as a passive recipient of a prescribed, ‘normal’ course of socialisation. The visible presence and the acceptance of difference, as well as the consideration of children as agents challenge regulatory practices that objectify children’s interests and rights, seeking in the ‘here and now’ of their life in the city, their own perspectives, thoughts, everyday practices, and spatial inventions (Καραμπίνη, 2023: 17-18).

The above formulations, are aligned with approaches from radical geography, feminist and cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial thinking. They develop a strong research interest in the socio-spatial parameters of childhood and emphasize the importance of space in the educational process. Different spatial scales and interconnections are thus highlighted, with the city emerging as a significant site for habitation, everyday life, study, and learning. These explorations form two converging disciplinary areas: children’s geographies (see Holloway & Valentine, 2000) and place-based education (critical pedagogy of space) (see among others Morgan, 2000) (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The chemin of the neighborhood: twelve maps cut and joined for us

Source: From the educational program ‘Between Two Squares: Vathis – Agios Pavlos, 2012-13’, https://elenakyla.wordpress.com

Children’s geographies have gradually developed since the 1990s, building upon earlier approaches by a generation of geographers in the 1970s who recognized children’s cartographic skills as a valuable research and educational tool [2]. Within the framework of an interdisciplinary dialogue they spotlight and map the exclusion of children from everyday urban spaces and advocate the viewing children as equal and integral members of the population, deconstructing the dominant notion that places them as a distinct (lower social) group -where entrenched narratives usually place women, migrant bodies, sexual heterogeneities, dyslexic or hyperactive students, and so on. Postcolonial approaches further contribute to this perspective by highlighting colonial mechanisms that undermine the multiple worlds of childhood under the lens of Western perspectives, but also the myriad networks that link children’s local experiences to global political-economic rearrangements (see Katz, 1994; Aitken, Lund and Kjørholt, 2007).

Drawing on geographical research on children’s everyday places, experiences and practices, diverse research elaborations seek ways to integrate the school neighbourhood into the teaching practice (see among others Smith, 2002; Gruenewald, 2003), to be used as a platform for learning, tacit knowledge and active participation in their communities (André et al., 2012). Critical considerations of cartography contribute to the shift towards studying the neighbourhood through appreciating and systematizing local knowledge. They push the conceptual boundaries of spatial representations beyond traditional school geographic representations (school maps and atlases), revealing new perspectives on space derived from personal and collective experiences (Harley, 1989; Crampton, 2001). These considerations shift the focus to social mapping practices, activating subjective socio-spatial perspectives and moving away from positivist approaches to the study of space (Del Casino and Hanna, 2005) (Figure 2). They highlight the multiple levels of knowledge that children produce about the world and encourage an understanding of their existence as integral to its spatial and relational dimension (Kitchens, 2009).

Figure 2: Mapping of the Pagrati neighbourhood

Source: From the experiential workshop ‘Mapping the Neighbourhood’ with children from the 1st grade of the 13th Primary School of Athens, 2020

This view differentiates the content and meaning of geography: it redefines our approaches to children’s spatial experiences, and the way we interpret space between the local and the global. In our approach, a map, a drawing, an experiential narrative does not describe in a neutral way what space is but studies what we do with space, imaginatively and politically (Gerard Toal in Graves and Rechniewski, 2015).

Children’s everyday places in Athens

In our country, the discourse regarding children’s geographies is still in its infancy, while the formal pedagogical curriculum is rather inhibiting its advancement. Nonetheless, over the past decade, there has been an emergence of ethnographic research and educational programmes examining the experiences and practices of children in the neighbourhoods of Athens, thus promoting a scholarly production that engages with the genealogy of Greek urban space and underscores its significance (Καλαντίδης et al., 2023). These situated studies shed light on an important sociological argument that has influenced the evolution of geographical thinking regarding childhood (see Qvortrup, 1987; Alanen, 1988). The argument is that: children’s lives are not solely confined to institutional, domestic, and specially designed spatial environments, such as the school building, the child’s room and the playground, but are broadly articulated in the spaces of their everyday lives. To encounter and investigate children in the city, we may follow their traces in everyday life. In the urban environment, apart from the designated thematic corners tailored for the child, elements such as streets, public transportation, urban amenities, textures and materials of the built environment, shops, apartment complexes, neighbours, and various unremarkable objects and details within the urban space constitute the lived spaces of children in their neighbourhood (Figure 3). It is in these ordinary and common urban spaces that children’s coexisting everyday life unfolds.

Figure 3: Spaces of children’s everyday life in the neighbourhood

Source: Children’s photographs from the ethnographic research archive in Pagrati, in Καραμπίνη, 2023

Children’s geographies are shaped in the same spaces shared by the rest of the city’s residents, highlighting the dynamic and dual meaning of this coexistence. On one hand, the actions and the presence of children in public spaces reveal their spatial and social marginalization in the city. The spatial manifestations of public interest, driving urban redevelopment projects in the centre of Athens, primarily cater to tourists and passersbys, often neglecting the needs of residents in the city’s neighbourhoods. On the other hand, the coexisting everyday lives of children reveal connections and alliances they forge with one another, with parents, caregivers, neighbours, pets, or stray animals, all of which seek social acknowledgment and institutional support. These everyday intersections invite us to highlight common spacetimes in the city, thereby disrupting the existing spatial divisions and social categorizations.

Children’s spatial mobility in the neighbourhood is largely centred around their homes. Contrary to dominant Western representations that associate the home with introversion and circular repetition (Fleski, 2000), children’s agency restores the social dimensions of domestic life. According to children’s mappings, home is conceptualized through the notions of housing, habitation, family and belonging (Figure 4). Marina mentions: “I’m going to draw a line and put dad’s here and mom’s here. We have very different things at mom’s and at dad’s. At mom’s we have apartment buildings and at dad’s we have a house with a yard”

Figure 4: The circle with my neighbourhood, Marina 8 years old

Source: From the ethnographic research archive in Pagrati, in Καραμπίνη, 2023

It is a multimodal place that activates multiple spatial practices in the neighbourhood: daily visits to the local market, social gatherings and children’s parties at homes, family rituals that bonds family members, and, of course, neighbouring. For children, neighbouring is a process of great importance, as it facilitates their familiarity with other residents. Their tendency to identify and map their neighbouring with other children, without necessarily getting to know each other personally, is particularly interesting (Figure 5). Helen says: “I am the only child living here. However, I have my friend Vassilis across the street. And further down my friend Christos […] At school no [we don’t talk]. On the balcony [only], when he goes out”