Geographies of Youth/Young People

Abstract

From the early 1990s onwards, geographers have made significant contributions to work considering the spatialities of young people's lives. Children's geographies is a vibrant subdisciplinary area and geographical work on children and young people is making important contributions to academic and policy debates within and beyond the discipline of geography. There have recently been some concerns that within children's geographies, teenagers and young people have been marginalised through a focus mainly on children and childhoods. This article reviews the position of young people in geographical research through interrogating the definition of young people in relation to children and adults and reviewing recent work on youth as a transition; through providing an overview of recent work that questions the restrictions placed on young people's use of public space; and through signposting some recent debates about the future of geographical work on young people.