The child and the city: contributions from Childhood Geography

Abstract

This text is about children and the space they occupy in their everyday lives, that is, the physical area where they spend their lives in the city. Dialoguing with authors working on the interfaces involving children, childhood and urban spaces, this book presents a contribution to these fields from the area of Children’s Geography. The considerations presented here are based on the assumption that space cannot be separated from life, and on the refusal to accept a logic according to which human trajectories on Earth are linear paths set in a chronological sequence. The notion of geographical spaces as an expression built on life, and on places where life begins, embraces children’s universe and makes it part of a dialectic process in which life and space are interwined. Therefore, talking about Children’s Geography, and interpreting childhood from the perspective of the encounter allowed by the geographical spaces, is accepting children as a potential presence in our lives and as explicit subjects of enunciation acting under specific circunstances of time and space, and inserted into the political, symbolic and material dimensions of our society.