V alentine's (1996) major review of the historic and contemporary meanings of childhood closed with a call for the "politics of childhood" to be investigated. Her review showed how children are often treated as "human becomings" rather than competent social beings who actively create their own experiences and negotiate the spaces and institutions they encounter. Recent sociologies and geographies of children and youth have expanded on these themes. They have moved away from earlier treatments of children as "adults in training" (such as Dunne (1980) argued). Instead scholars have increasingly considered how children and young people construct their own understandings of their environments; negotiate a range of social relations; and actively create their own cultures and social practices (e.g. Matthews et al. These trends shaped the research on which this paper is based. In studying young people's experience of their local 'communities' 1 we recognize youth as knowledgeable, creative and competent members of their society. We have also drawn on Valentine's attention to power relations to construct our own readings of the politics of youth, based on the social and spatial dimensions of their lives. Thus this paper presents a politics of how young people 2 (aged 13-18 years) understand and negotiate their lives in a rural town in southern New Zealand. It traces the spatial and social relations young people encounter while living in, and moving around, Alexandra.This town of approximately 4,600 people is the nearest, largest centre beyond the regional city of Dunedin (110,000 people, two hours away -see Figure 1). It services a large and relatively sparsely settled agricultural area dominated by pastoral and horticultural activities. Alexandra is the seat of the Central Otago District Council and provides a range of administrative, commercial and social services (including a high school and boarding facility) to the town and district residents, and the many travellers and tourists who stop on their way to the Queenstown Lakes district. This paper presents young people's accounts of 'community' as they gathered in the 'public' and open spaces of Alexandra: streets, shopping areas, parks etc. We collected young people's accounts of 'community' as they experienced and negotiated the 'everyday spaces' of their town (Valentine 1996, p. 597, Matthews et al 2002 3 .