Figurations Transcript Verlag Figurations of Childhood

How class, urban space, and security shape childhoods – and why intergenerational spatial justice matters.

Worldwide neoliberal urban planning and securitisation create childhoods marked by segregation, confinement and isolation. Especially in middle- and upper-class milieus, childhood appears as a spatial crisis in which children are patronised and disempowered in the name of protection. Claudia Mock draws on intergenerational biographies and mental maps from Nairobi and Berlin to reveal how security discourses intertwine with bourgeois values and architectures, reshaping childhoods in these cities in surprisingly similar ways since 1960. By identifying bourgeois lifestyles and adultism as integral to anthropocentric urban crises, she calls for cities to be reimagined through intergenerational spatial justice.