Children seem to have been forgotten by cities (urban planners?). This is what the urban philosopher, Thierry Paquot, was led to conclude in 2015, at the end of a series of conferences over three years held in Dunkerque (France) about the place of children in the city. This cycle of conferences ended with an exhibition in the Halle au Sucre of Dunkerque, and the publication of a book, La Ville recreative (2015). In the same year, the on-line revue, Metropolitiques, dedicated an entire issue to children in the city. This issue was edited by two sociologists, Carole Gayet-Viaud and Clément Rivière, and a philosopher of urban spaces and architecture, Philippe Simay. The report is the same: “urban studies have not been interested in children yet”. However, in 1991, the city of Fano, in the centre of Italy, organised a workshop called “The Children’s City” whose work would become a reference for urbanists, associations, councils and children. The experiment was developed and led by a psychologist, Francesco Tonucci.
More generally, children have been marginalized for a long time in anthropological, sociological and geographic studies. However, as the anthropologist Lawrence A. Hirschfield, underlines, “children are strikingly adept at acquiring adult culture and, less obviously, adept at creating their own cultures” (Hirschfield, 2002). They acquire very quickly and very strikingly the faculty to adapt to the cultures that surround them. Judith Harris, writes in 1998: “A Child’s goal is not to become a successful adult, any more than a prisoner’s goal is to become a successful guard. A Child’s goal is to be a successful child… Children are not incompetent members of adult’s society; they are competent members of their own society, which has its own standards and its own culture” (Harris, 1998).
In The Shape of a City, French writer Julien Gracq expresses how much growing up behind the walls of a boarding school, in the centre of Nantes, had “shaped him, as he writes, that is to say, partly encouraged him, partly forced him to see the imaginary world, that I discovered through my readings, through a distorted reality. […] When access to the city is for so long denied you, it ends up symbolizing freedom itself.”
Research on the material culture of childhood has for a long time been interested in toys, children literature, cartoons and video games, have hitherto not engaged in dialogue with urban studies. One of the main purposes of this conference would be to bring together scholars working in the social sciences and literary and visual studies. The City would be approached as a built, lived and imagined space, following Heidegger’s speech in Darmstadt, in 1951, Building Living Thinking.
Contact : Christophe Meunier (christophe.meunier@univ-tours.fr)
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