This reader takes debates about children's services forward by drawing on ideas based in social pedagogy and arguing that the concept of 'space' is crucial to relationships and practices with children and young people. It will stimulate students to question and rethink, and practitioners to innovate and challenge mainstream thinking.

Rethinking Young People's Lives Through Space and Place explores three main themes, how children navigate real and imaginary borders, how space constitutes belonging, meaning-making, and representation, and how space informs learning and identities.

The Routledge Handbook of Designing Public Spaces for Young People is a thorough and practical resource for all who wish to influence policy and design decisions in order to increase young people’s access to and use of public spaces, as well as their role in design and decision-making processes. The ability of youth to freely enjoy public spaces, and to develop a sense of belonging and attachment to these environments, is critical for their physical, social, cognitive, and emotional development. Young people represent a vital citizen group with legitimate rights to occupy and shape their public environments, yet they are often driven out of public places by adult users, restrictive bylaws, or hostile designs. It is also important that children and youth have the opportunity to genuinely participate in the planning of public spaces, and to have their needs considered in the design of the public realm. This book provides both evidence and tools to help effectively advocate for more youth-inclusive public environments, as well as integrate youth directly into both research and design processes related to the public realm. It is essential reading for researchers, design and planning professionals, community leaders, and youth advocates.

Based on presentations at a session of the 15th IUAES-Intercongress held in 2003 at Florence.

How do we understand children and young people's lives in ways that do not rely on nostalgic romantic ideals or demonising prejudices? Can the geographical concepts of space, place and spatiality enhance our understanding of childhood and how children experience their lives as social actors? This book draws on a rich and growing academic literature concerned with the spatiality of childhood and the spaces and places in which children live, learn, work, and play. It examines changing ways of seeing space, place and environment and how these can promote rethinking about children's lives across local and global scales. In common with other texts in the “New Childhoods” series, it asks for a reappraisal of modernity's assumptions about childhood and for a move towards full participation of children and young people in matters that concern us all. Combining critical discussion of theory with examples drawn from research, Rethinking Children's Spaces and Places offers readers a language to facilitate rethinking and catalyse active responses to the challenges of 21st-century childhoods.

Bringing together theories, ideas, insights and experiences of practitioners and researchers from Brazil, India, South Africa and the UK, this book explores children and young people's involvement in public action. The contributors consider the potential of children and young people's participation to be transformative.