Where and How Girls Play When They Are Too Old For Playgrounds? Young girls and the space of the Greek neighbourhood in urban, suburban, and rural childhood memories
Overview
Gendered experience of public space during childhood and adolescence, both in the global North and in the global South, creates asymmetries and inequalities between girls and boys in terms of levels of autonomy, opportunities for play and socialising, and sense of social safety. Young Architecture students, who grew up in a variety of settlements in Greece, were asked questions about the neighbourhood they lived in when they were 12 years old, an age that coincides with the end of middle childhood and the beginning of adolescence. The submissions included texts and/or maps, images, and free-hand drawings, describing everyday spaces and destinations, favourite journeys, places, and experiences. This paper focuses on the answers of girl students. The essays and visual boards (n = 50) reveal the matrix of different girlhoods, in conjunction to five different typologies of neighbourhoods: downtown districts, dense urban residential neighbourhoods, low-density urban residential areas, suburbs, and rural environments. Four main determinants, in terms of physical design, emerge as contributing to happy girlhoods: mixed uses on the ground floor, including commercial; traffic-calmed streets; availability of unprogrammed spaces close to home; and contact with nature.
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/13552074.2024.2348398ISBN
1355-2074How to cite this resource
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