Boundary Making in everyday geographies
- Empirical findings and methodological considerations on the urban practice of young people in Vienna
Lecturer
Date
- 24 July 2024–26 July 2024 (Catholic University of Chile)
Keywords
Urban Studies, Urbanism, Poverty and Social Exclusion, Child Research, Youth Research
Text
Every third child in Vienna lives with the risk of poverty and exclusion (Statistik Austria, 2022). Yet child poverty is often an invisible problem in Austria. When concerned with socio-spatial questions of socio-economically disadvantaged children, researchers, social workers and political actors tend to focus on deprived neighborhoods. Vienna is characterized by a widespread social housing strategy and a comprehensive social infrastructure. Therefor neighborhood effects are complex to understand and socio-economic deprivation often difficult to identify. Nevertheless, they shape children’s scopes and their everyday geographies. The contribution presents results and methodological reflections on two qualitative research projects with nine to twelve year olds. Both are part of a multi-year research project that integrates various methods in a grounded theory design, studying everyday spaces from the perspective of marginalized children in a privileged district of Austria’s capitol. How do they experience, appropriate urban spaces? The analyses of their everyday geographies uncovers, how they establish spaces of belonging, but it also shows how deprived social participation manifests spatially. In understanding city spaces from children’s points of view, several dimensions of boundary-making become apparent, in this case socio-economic exclusion, gender, age and racism. These processes of socio-spatial separation among children and between them and other age groups (see Fegter and Andresen 2019) are embedded in everyday practice of social groups co-existing in the neighbourhood and must be accessed by a relational understanding of space. Talking about space is difficult (see Martina Löw 2018) and co-research settings with marginalized young people must make even more effort to develop shared means of communication. Schultorparasiten employed strategies of visual elicitation, participatory spatial interventions and group interviews to understand the interlink between formal and informal educational spaces in children’s appropriation of the city. Figures of speech used DIY-3D technology to navigate and capture individual places of importance, enabling and empowering children to position themselves in the city beyond social attributions, an art-based alteration of a mobile interview (see Kusenbach 2018).
Title of Event
The politics and spaces of encounters: advancing dialogues between and within the Global North and the Global South