Street life: youth, culture and competing uses of public space

Abstract

This paper examines city streets and public space as a domain in which social values are asserted and contested. The definitions of spatial boundaries and of acceptable and non-acceptable uses and users are, at the same time, expressions of intolerance and difference within society. The paper focuses in particular on the ways in which suspicion, intolerance and moral censure limit the spatial world of young people in Australia, where various regulatory practices such as curfews are common. The author reflects on the failures of the two main strategies that have been used in Australia to control the presence of young people, and concludes with some thoughts about the construction of streets and public spaces as diverse and democratic places.