Moving young lives: Mobility, immobility and inter-generational tensions in urban Africa

Abstract

This is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Geoforum. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A denitive version was subsequently published in Porter, G., Hampshire, K., Abane, A., Robson, E., Munthali, A., Mashiri, M. and Tanle, A. (2010) 'Moving young lives : mobility, immobility and inter-generational tensions in urban Africa.', Geoforum., 41 (5). pp. 796-804, doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.05.001 Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. In the story we present in this paper, mobility -as experience, opportunity, challenge, temptation and performance -plays a key role.Mobility and immobility, we argue, are key factors shaping young people's urban experience and their future life chances across sub-Saharan Africa. For young people, mobility achieved may, on the one hand, be a source of excitement, temptation, thrills, inclusion, opportunity and perceived success; on the other, a cause of exhaustion, danger and fear. Mobility frustrated, by contrast, is most often seen purely in negative terms: a source of anger, despair, exclusion and perceived failure. In this paper we focus on mobilities in the everyday -daily journeys to school, work, church, the market and video house, to meet friends, relations, lovers, teachers, business operators. The more extensive mobilities of migration from the distant village or another country are largely outside our 2 frame. Our principal aim is to chart young people's mobility experiences -how they use and experience the city -developing a comparative perspective across the three urban study sites that links young people's mobility with the power relations which operate to shape their movements in individual locations. In particular, we consider how positive and negative images of young people's mobility play out in terms of the intergenerational frictions and negotiations generated by their mobility performances within local cultural settings. We also reflect on the developmental consequences of mobility achieved and mobility frustrated, in terms of young people's access to services and income and their participation in the social networks and peer culture which may shape their life trajectories. This requires us to consider how factors such as gender and age intersect with specific local conditions (ec...

Youth, mobility and mobile phones in Africa: findings from a three-country study

“…Issues of gender and inter-generational relations are important elements in this account. Mobilities -whether physical or virtual -play a highly significant role in young lives (Porter et al 2010a(Porter et al , 2010b and mobile phones have the potential to dramatically change the mobilities landscape in which young people operate. Control over physical mobility has long reflected and reinforced power in diverse contexts across the world (Sheller and Urry, 2006).…”

“…The inter-generational dimension of this power dynamic is highly significant in Africa, where cultural constructions which tend to emphasise the lowly position of young people in family hierarchies, and the importance of respecting and obeying elders, can be set against images of unruly and potentially destructive youth who are vulnerable to political manipulation (van Dijk 1998;Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999;Durham 2000;Abbink 2005;Porter et al 2010a). Gender is also substantially implicated, in that girls' and women's mobilities are commonly more constrained than those of boys and men, due to concerns around female vulnerability (Porter 2008(Porter , 2011Porter et al, 2010aPorter et al, , 2010bPorter et al, , 2011. As we show below, the mobile phone offers young people -male and femaleremarkable opportunities to leapfrog physical mobility constraints and the power relations with which these are bound, with potentially life-changing impacts, some highly positive, others more negative.…”

Youth employment in a globalising world

“…Consequently, many young people combine a range of activities in their attempts to generate livelihoods sometimes moving between places according to where they consider their best options to be. Whilst for some young people a move may be permanent, many oscillate between places in response to education and employment opportunities, family obligations, and living preferences (Gough 2008;Olwig and Gough, 2012;Porter et al, 2010;Porter et al, 2011;Skelton and Gough, 2013). Several of the papers in this special issue, in particular Thorsen (2013) and Kristensen and BirchThomsen (2013) add to our knowledge of the interconnections of young people between rural and urban areas in search of employment opportunities.…”

Qualitative Methods in Transport Research: The ‘Action Research’ Approach

“…This has most usually been with the specific aim of encouraging the active engagement of previously excluded, marginalised or disempowered populations (such as children (e.g. Porter et al, 2010), people with disabilities (e.g. Danieli and Woodhams, 2005) and minority ethnic or faith groups (e.g.…”

“…It has only recently emerged within the literature as a transport survey method (e.g. Uteng, 2009;Porter et al, 2010). The method is specifically designed to support and actively engineer behaviour change as an integral part of the research process (Robson, 2002).…”