Banners for the Street: Reclaiming Space and Designing Change with Urban Youth

Abstract

This article underscores the importance to childrens' development of utilizing urban neighborhoods-even problematic ones—as arenas for critical learning and intervention. It describes one participatory public art project undertaken with young people in a low income neighborhood in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The project provided teens with an opportunity to critically assess and positively revision their neighborhood through exploratory walks, surveys, discussions, and design activities that culminated in the production of colorful banners. In a larger context, the article goes on to explore methods to help young people claim a more central place in the life of their cities and begin to effect environmental change. It examines obstacles to such endeavors and considers how those in the planning and design professions might help support such efforts.Myrna Margultes Breitbart is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts 01002 USA Lafayette and his nine-year-old cousin Dede danced across the worn lawn outside their building, singing the lyrics of an L.L. Cool J rap, their small hips and spindly legs moving in rhythm. The boy and girl were on their way to a nearby shopping strip, where Lafayette planned to buy radio headphones with the $8.00 he had received as a birthday gift.Suddenly, gunfire erupted. The frightened children fell to the ground. &dquo;Hold your head down!&dquo; Lafayette snapped, as he covered Dede's head with her pink nylon jacket. If he hadn't physically restrained her, she might have sprinted for home, a dangerous action when the gangs started warring. &dquo;Stay down,&dquo; he ordered the trembling girl.The two lay pressed to the beaten grass for half a minute, until the shooting subsided. Lafayette held Dede's hand as they cautiously crawled through the dirt toward home. When they finally made it inside, all but fifty cents of Lafayette's birthday money had trickled from his pockets. (Kotlowitz 1991, 9) Ideas about the dangers of city streets and efforts to restrict the access of children to them have a long history in the U.S., dating back to the 19th century when reform programs targeting youth crime were first conceived. Crime then, as now, was variously defined to encompass everything from &dquo;hanging out&dquo; with friends on street corners to petty theft and violence. Expressing concern about the risks they were purported to face, middle class reformers designed programs such as the Fresh Air Fund to remove city children to the salubrious countryside. Sometimes these risks were associated with childrens' physical safety; more often than not, they were associated with the &dquo;damages&dquo; presumed to result from being in the &dquo;wrong&dquo; environments to learn respectability or the proper tools for social advancement (Breitbart 1984(Breitbart , 1991. In the context of the unpredictability and brutality of contemporary life in public housing, as described above by Kotlowitz, being a child in the city in the 1990s can do more than put o...

Art and Civil Society: From Protest to Cooperation

“…In line with this argumentation, children should also be encouraged to critically judge and creatively change their surrounding. In a longer perspective, such an approach is expected to bring stronger identification, deeper concern, and greater involvement with the local community (Breitbart 1995).…”

Boundary Crossings: Transitions from Childhood to Adulthood

“…Yet as Katz (1998) and Vanderbeck and Johnson (2000) both argue public spending cuts, urban degeneration and crime have eroded young people's access to other forms of public space. In the US moral panics about 'gangs' and violence have demonised non-Anglo youth (Lucas, 1998) to such an extent that curfews and policing tactics are selectively deployed against them (Breitbart, 1995), for example producing swathes of Los Angeles as no-go areas for black and Chicano youth (Davis, 1990). Thus as Rattansi and Phoenix (1997, p. 143) argue, 'while it is obviously important to emphasise young people as creative makers of their own identities [and I would add spatialities], in relation to consumption as well as other spheres, these creative possibilities are bounded.…”

“…Breitbart's (1995Breitbart's ( , 1998 work is an important example of the way young people can attempt to challenge hardships that appear beyond their control. In the face of economic decline which impacted directly on young people through the built environment, youth in Detroit, Michigan, US used creative talents usually expressed through graffiti, to revision their local environments through public art projects.…”

Promoting youth participation in communities through youth master planning

“…Numerous opportunities for youth participation in planning and community development have been documented in recent years, with many of the positive aspects frequently highlighted (Breitbart, 1995;Dennis, 2006;Frank, 2006;Gurstein, 2003). The research suggests that when participation is done "right," and youth are trained in the appropriate skills and are actively engaged in meaningful ways, benefits can be anticipated for both the individual and the community (Checkoway, 2011;Checkoway, Pothukuchi, & Finn, 1995).…”