Youth geographies: navigating exclusions in public space

With children and youth geographies emerging as an important sub-discipline in the recent years, planners and designers can play an important role in expanding young people’s relationship with urban space. This paper presents and analyses teenagers spatial experiences and appropriation of public space through interviews and mapping activities in the Vinex neighborhood of Nesselande in Rotterdam (NL). The paper addresses three specific objectives: first, to theorise teenagers use, attachment, and experience of public space; secondly, to explore socio-spatial and material identities, their preferences, and ownership of public space; and thirdly, to identify implications for addressing the needs of teenagers as co-producers of space and identify possible policy implications. The creative ways of using the built environment, improvisation, exclusion from space, demonstrates the need for planning and design to better serve the youth population by allowing for more creativity and flexibility within urban environments.