Overview

The Growing Up in Cities project in England was conducted in two locations in order to compare children's lives in an old inner-city neighborhood and a new suburban estate. Semilong, a working-class neighborhood in inner-city Northampton, is characterized by a dense network of grid-iron streets lined with Victorian and Edwardian terraced rowhouses, interspersed with local authority apartment blocks constructed in the 1970s. The neighborhood contains few green spaces and is boundecd by three main roads. The suburban location of Hunsbury, by contrast, consists of sprawling modern estates providing a mix of largely private homes with gardens, combined with a few smaller homes and flats.

Between 1996 and 1998, Barry Percy-Smith, a doctoral student in geography at the time at University College Northampton, carried out semi-structured interviews with 80 ten through 15 year olds in Semilong and 101 in Hunsbury. More intensive case studies were done with 12 boys and 12 girls at each location, using a number of methods: in-depth interviews, drawings, child-led walks, child-taken photographs, focus group discussions, and behavior mapping at significant outdoor places. Interviews were also conducted with parents, youth workers, planners and park managers.

The research revealed that suburban participants commonly spoke more positively about their area, whereas young people in the inner city identified their area's poor environmental quality and lack of opportunities–especially in the case of girls. At both locations, young people generally agreed about the community qualities that they valued or disliked. Paradoxically, the study revealed much greater fear of crime and strangers in the suburb versus the inner city, despite an apparently higher level of hazards in the city. Suburban participants were also more likely to complain about boredom, although a large number of young people at both sites said that they wanted a wider variety of things to do. Inner-city young people enjoyed greater freedom to explore and use their neighborhood and appeared to derive richer place experiences from their engagement with their local environment. In England, as at the Growing Up in Cities location in Australia, participants frequently encountered hostility from adults, who feared gatherings of adolescents in public places. Too old for playgrounds but too young for the adult world, they found themselves without a legitimate place in the public realm.