Steven Miles - Resistance or Security? Young People and the Appropriation of Urban, Cultural, and Consumer Space

However, there is a compelling argument that space plays a crucial role in the construction of youth identities.

The suggestion that young people are amongst the most vulnerable if social groups is not without foundation: young people are indeed subject to the ups and downs of socio-economic change.

In many ways young people are an index of social norms, and their patterns of consumption constitute the playing out of such norms.

Young people’s relationship with subcultures and thus the forms of urban expression in which they partake have in the past twenty to thrity years been radically alrered in a in a world in whichi young people’s feelings of oppression are least partly offset by ready access to urban consumer culture. In other words, young people simply no longer appear to feel the need for mutual organization and defence.

There are a number of important reasons why these teenagers gravitate to the urban centre. It not only constitutes space in whichi they feel free from parental jurisdiction but it also provides them with a means of finding and creating a different spatiality, more exciting than that offered by the impoverished landscape of the neighborhood. (Toon, 2000:144)

For young people then, the urban is a centre of sociability where chance encounters and unexpected events add a dimension to their lives that their locality cannot.

Young people need urban space that is their own.

As such, consumption represents the primary force in the conduct of social life in urban contexts at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Often it seems to be the case that the opportunity to deam about consuming, to hang out at shopping centers  for example, was more important than the act of consumption itself, precisely because the ability to dream about consumption was grounded on communal ideals about what constituted a consumer culture.

            

It’s worth explaining what a teenager means by “shopping.They may eventually make a purchase, but most of the time they’re just looking around, sizing up one thing against another, asking their mate’s opinions, deciding just how much they want to buy it….They also get a lot of pleasure first by simply browsing around shops…the kids felt free to poke around, see what was for sale, try out the testers…’It’s trendy to go a place like Virgin Records on a Saturday morning – all the punks sit around outside so I really enjoy going there…’ Fisher and Holder 1981,:170

But these are simulated spaces which are there for consumption. They are barely places that people any longer come from, or live in, or which provide much of sense of social identity…such spaces are speficically designed to wall of the difference between diverse social groups and to separate the inner life of people from their public activities.

Young men and women alike elaborate ‘a vibrant cultural capital based on the streets’(Aitken, 2001:159). In other words, there should not be an assumption that young people relate to the streets in prescribed ways.