Young people and the struggle for public space in Australia

Public Space is important to the overall health and wellbeing of children and young people in allowing them to explore their local and wider community, meet up with friends, get some exercise and feel included in the society in which they live. A problem exists in the capacity of modern, urban public space to genuinely accommodate children and young people’s need to experience excitement and fun in what has been termed “unprogrammed space” (Lynch 1977:71), or simply to ‘hang out’ in unstructured social space, with control by civic authorities a key concern. For many children and young people, their experiences of attempting to use public space are sometimes marred by the denial of everyday rights and courtesies, in youth ‘unfriendly’ spaces and this is often the case in shopping centres in Australia as expolored in this paper.