Geographies of children, youth and families: an international perspective

This edited collection brings together international experts from the vibrant and growing field of geographies of children, youth and families. The book provides an overview of current conceptual and theoretical debates, and gives a wide range of examples of cutting-edge research from a variety of national contexts across the globe. The theme of 'disentangling the socio-spatial contexts of young people and/or their families' advances debates in geographies and social studies of young people and families by emphasising the context of young people's social agency. The book is designed to provide an introduction to the topic of geographies of children, youth and families and is an invaluable course text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of geography and the social sciences. This interdisciplinary text is also of likely interest to students and practitioners of education, youth work, social policy and social work.

Diversity and difference in the everyday lives of Ugandan street children: The significance of age and gender for understanding the use of space

Childhood is characterised by diversity and difference across and within societies. Street children have a unique relationship to the urban environment evident through their use of the city. The everyday geographies that street children produce are diversified through the spaces they frequent and the activities they engage in. Drawing on a range of children-centred qualitative methods, this article focuses on street children's use of urban space in Kampala, Uganda. The article demonstrates the importance of considering variables such as gender and age in the analysis of street children's socio-spatial experiences, which, to date, have rarely been considered in other accounts of street children's lives. In addition the article highlights the need for also including street children's individuality and agency into understanding their use of space. The article concludes by arguing for policies to be sensitive to the diversity that characterises street children's lives and calls for a more nuanced approach where policies are designed to accommodate street children's age and gender differences, and their individual needs, interests and abilities.

Diversity and difference in the everyday lives of Ugandan street children: The significance of age and gender for understanding the use of space

Childhood is characterised by diversity and difference across and within societies. Street children have a unique relationship to the urban environment evident through their use of the city. The everyday geographies that street children produce are diversified through the spaces they frequent and the activities they engage in. Drawing on a range of children-centred qualitative methods, this article focuses on street children's use of urban space in Kampala, Uganda. The article demonstrates the importance of considering variables such as gender and age in the analysis of street children's socio-spatial experiences, which, to date, have rarely been considered in other accounts of street children's lives. In addition the article highlights the need for also including street children's individuality and agency into understanding their use of space. The article concludes by arguing for policies to be sensitive to the diversity that characterises street children's lives and calls for a more nuanced approach where policies are designed to accommodate street children's age and gender differences, and their individual needs, interests and abilities.

Children's caring roles and responsibilities within the family in Africa

In many Sub-Saharan African countries, the care of chronically ill, disabled or elderly relatives is usually regarded as the responsibility of family members, within a broader landscape of often overburdened healthcare systems, the expense of medical fees, very limited access to social protection and policies that emphasise home-based care. Recent studies have demonstrated that children and youth, particularly girls and young women, take on considerable caring roles for chronically ill and elderly relatives in Africa. This article reviews the available research on young people’s caring roles and responsibilities within families affected by chronic illness and disability in Sub-Saharan Africa. I discuss how children’s caring roles challenge global and local constructions of childhood and suggest ways of conceptualising the socio-spatial and embodied dimensions of children’s everyday care work within diverse household forms. I analyse evidence on outcomes of care and children’s resilience in managing their caring responsibilities and examine the complex array of processes that influence whether children take on caring roles within the family. I argue that relational, intergenerational and lifecourse approaches to researching children’s caring responsibilities within the family have considerable potential for future geographical research and could provide further insights into the ways that care is embedded in social relations, cultural norms and structural inequalities operating in different configurations in particular places.

‘We are managing our own lives...’: life transitions and care in sibling-headed households affected by AIDS in Tanzania and Uganda

This paper explores the ways that young people express their agency and negotiate complex lifecourse transitions according to gender, age and inter- and intra-generational norms in sibling-headed households affected by AIDS in East Africa. Based on findings from a qualitative and participatory pilot study in Tanzania and Uganda, I examine young people's socio-spatial and temporal experiences of heading the household and caring for their siblings following their parent's/relative's death. Key dimensions of young people's caring pathways and life transitions are discussed: transitions into sibling care; the ways young people manage changing roles within the family; and the ways that young people are positioned and seek to position themselves within the community. The research reveals the relational and embodied nature of young people's life transitions over time and space. By living together independently, young people constantly reproduce and reconfigure gendered, inter- and intra-generational norms of ‘the family’, transgressing the boundaries of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’. Although young people take on ‘adult’ responsibilities and demonstrate their competencies in ‘managing their own lives’, this does not necessarily translate into more equal power relations with adults in the community. The research reveals the marginal ‘in-between’ place that young people occupy between local and global discourses of ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ that construct them as ‘deviant’. Although young people adopt a range of strategies to resist marginalisation and harassment, I argue that constraints of poverty, unequal gender and generational power relations and the emotional impacts of sibling care, stigmatisation and exclusion can undermine their ability to exert agency and control over their sexual relationships, schooling, livelihood strategies and future lifecourse transitions.

Young caregiving and HIV in the UK: caring relationships and mobilities in African migrant families

Recent research in Sub-Saharan Africa has revealed the importance of children’s caring roles in families affected by HIV and AIDS. However, few studies have explored young caregiving in the context of HIV in the UK, where recently arrived African migrant and refugee families are adversely affected by the global epidemic. This paper explores young people’s socio-spatial experiences of caring for a parent with HIV, based on qualitative research with 37 respondents in London and other urban areas in England. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with young people with caring responsibilities and mothers with HIV, who were predominantly African migrants, as well as with service providers. Drawing on their perspectives, the paper discusses the ways that young people and mothers negotiate the boundaries of young people’s care work within and beyond homespace, according to norms of age, gender, generational relations and cultural constructions of childhood. Despite close attachments within the family, the emotional effects of living with a highly stigmatised life-limiting illness, pressures associated with insecure immigration status, transnational migration and low income undermined African mothers’ and young people’s sense of security and belonging to homespace. These factors also restricted their mobility and social participation in school/college and neighbourhood spaces. While young people and mothers valued supportive safe spaces within the community, the stigma surrounding HIV significantly affected their ability to seek support. The article identifies security, privacy, independence and social mobility as key dimensions of African young people’s and mothers’ imagined futures of ‘home’ and ‘family’.

Land re-use, complexity and actor-networks: a framework for research

This paper will present a conceptual framework for the examination of land redevelopment based on a complex systems/networks approach. As Alvin Toffler insightfully noted, modern scientific enquiry has become exceptionally good at splitting problems into pieces but has forgotten how to put the pieces back together. Twenty-five years after his remarks, governments and corporations faced with the requirements of sustainability are struggling to promote an ‘integrated’ or ‘holistic’ approach to tackling problems. Despite the talk, both practice and research provide few platforms that allow for ‘joined up’ thinking and action. With socio-economic phenomena, such as land redevelopment, promising prospects open up when we assume that their constituents can make up complex systems whose emergent properties are more than the sum of the parts and whose behaviour is inherently difficult to predict. A review of previous research shows that it has mainly focused on idealised, ‘mechanical’ views of property development processes that fail to recognise in full the relationships between actors, the structures created and their emergent qualities. When reality failed to live up to the expectations of these theoretical constructs then somebody had to be blamed for it: planners, developers, politicians. However, from a ‘synthetic’ point of view the agents and networks involved in property development can be seen as constituents of structures that perform complex processes. These structures interact, forming new more complex structures and networks. Redevelopment then can be conceptualised as a process of transformation: a complex system, a ‘dissipative’ structure involving developers, planners, landowners, state agencies etc., unlocks the potential of previously used sites, transforms space towards a higher order of complexity and ‘consumes’ but also ‘creates’ different forms of capital in the process. Analysis of network relations point toward the ‘dualism’ of structure and agency in these processes of system transformation and change. Insights from actor network theory can be conjoined with notions of complexity and chaos to build an understanding of the ways in which actors actively seek to shape these structures and systems, whilst at the same time are recursively shaped by them in their strategies and actions. This approach transcends the blame game and allows for inter-disciplinary inputs to be placed within a broader explanatory framework that does away with many past dichotomies. Better understanding of the interactions between actors and the emergent qualities of the networks they form can improve our comprehension of the complex socio-spatial phenomena that redevelopment comprises. The insights that this framework provides when applied in UK institutional investment into redevelopment are considered to be significant.

Towards a resolution of ‘the paradox of the plankton’: a brief overview of the proposed mechanisms

In plankton ecology, it is a fundamental question as to how a large number of competing phytoplankton species coexist in marine ecosystems under a seemingly-limited variety of resources. This ever-green question was first proposed by Hutchinson [Hutchinson, G.E., 1961. The paradox of the plankton. Am. Nat. 95, 137–145] as ‘the paradox of the plankton’. Starting from Hutchinson [Hutchinson, G.E., 1961. The paradox of the plankton. Am. Nat. 95, 137–145], over more than four decades several investigators have put forward varieties of mechanisms for the extreme diversity of phytoplankton species. In this article, within the boundary of our knowledge, we review the literature of the proposed solutions and give a brief overview of the mechanisms proposed so far. The proposed mechanisms that we discuss mainly include spatial and temporal heterogeneity in physical and biological environment, externally imposed or self-generated spatial segregation, horizontal mesoscale turbulence of ocean characterized by coherent vortices, oscillation and chaos generated by several internal and external causes, stable coexistence and compensatory dynamics under fluctuating temperature in resource competition, and finally the role of toxin-producing phytoplankton in maintaining the coexistence and biodiversity of the overall plankton population that we have proposed recently. We find that, although the different mechanisms proposed so far is potentially applicable to specific ecosystems, a universally accepted theory for explaining plankton diversity in natural waters is still an unachieved goal.

Spatial and temporal scale issues in determining biomass burning regimes in Bolivia and Peru

ATSR-2 active fire data from 1996 to 2000, TRMM VIRS fire counts from 1998 to 2000 and burn scars derived from SPOT VEGETATION ( the Global Burnt Area 2000 product) were mapped for Peru and Bolivia to analyse the spatial distribution of burning and its intra- and inter-annual variability. The fire season in the region mainly occurs between May and October; though some variation was found between the six broad habitat types analysed: desert, grassland, savanna, dry forest, moist forest and yungas (the forested valleys on the eastern slope of the Andes). Increased levels of burning were generally recorded in ATSR-2 and TRMM VIRS fire data in response to the 1997/1998 El Nino, but in some areas the El Nino effect was masked by the more marked influences of socio-economic change on land use and land cover. There were differences between the three global datasets: ATSR-2 under-recorded fires in ecosystems with low net primary productivities. This was because fires are set during the day in this region and, when fuel loads are low, burn out before the ATSR-2 overpass in the region which is between 02.45 h and 03.30 h. TRMM VIRS was able to detect these fires because its overpasses cover the entire diurnal range on a monthly basis. The GBA2000 product has significant errors of commission (particularly areas of shadow in the well-dissected eastern Andes) and omission (in the agricultural zone around Santa Cruz, Bolivia and in north-west Peru). Particular attention was paid to biomass burning in high-altitude grasslands, where fire is an important pastoral management technique. Fires and burn scars from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM) data for a range of years between 1987 and 2000 were mapped for areas around Parque Nacional Rio Abiseo (Peru) and Parque Nacional Carrasco (Bolivia). Burn scars mapped in the grasslands of these two areas indicate far more burning had taken place than either the fires or the burn scars derived from global datasets. Mean scar sizes are smaller and have a smaller range in size between years the in the study area in Peru (6.6-7.1 ha) than Bolivia (16.9-162.5 ha). Trends in biomass burning in the two highland areas can be explained in terms of the changing socio-economic environments and impacts of conservation. The mismatch between the spatial scale of biomass burning in the high-altitude grasslands and the sensors used to derive global fire products means that an entire component of the fire regime in the region studied is omitted, despite its importance in the farming systems on the Andes.

Spatial offset of test field elements from surround elements affects the strength of motion aftereffects

Static movement aftereffects (MAEs) were measured after adaptation to vertical square-wave luminance gratings drifting horizontally within a central window in a surrounding stationary vertical grating. The relationship between the stationary test grating and the surround was manipulated by varying the alignment of the stationary stripes in the window and those in the surround, and the type of outline separating the window and the surround [no outline, black outline (invisible on black stripes), and red outline (visible throughout its length)]. Offsetting the stripes in the window significantly increased both the duration and ratings of the strength of MAEs. Manipulating the outline had no significant effect on either measure of MAE strength. In a second experiment, in which the stationary test fields alone were presented, participants judged how segregated the test field appeared from its surround. In contrast to the MAE measures, outline as well as offset contributed to judged segregation. In a third experiment, in which test-stripe offset wits systematically manipulated, segregation ratings rose with offset. However, MAE strength was greater at medium than at either small or large (180 degrees phase shift) offsets. The effects of these manipulations on the MAE are interpreted in terms of a spatial mechanism which integrates motion signals along collinear contours of the test field and surround, and so causes a reduction of motion contrast at the edges of the test field.

Spatial coding of touch at the fingers: Insights from double simultaneous stimulation within and between hands

We studied the effect of tactile double simultaneous stimulation (DSS) within and between hands to examine spatial coding of touch at the fingers. Participants performed a go/no-go task to detect a tactile stimulus delivered to one target finger (e.g., right index), stimulated alone or with a concurrent non-target finger, either on the same hand (e.g., right middle finger) or on the other hand (e.g., left index finger=homologous; left middle finger=non-homologous). Across blocks we also changed the unseen hands posture (both hands palm down, or one hand rotated palm-up). When both hands were palm-down DSS interference effects emerged both within and between hands, but only when the non-homologous finger served as non-target. This suggests a clear segregation between the fingers of each hand, regardless of finger side. By contrast, when one hand was palm-up interference effects emerged only within hand, whereas between hands DSS interference was considerably reduced or absent. Thus, between hands interference was clearly affected by changes in hands posture. Taken together, these findings provide behavioral evidence in humans for multiple spatial coding of touch during tactile DSS at the fingers. In particular, they confirm the existence of representational stages of touch that distinguish between body-regions more than body-sides. Moreover, they show that the availability of tactile stimulation side becomes prominent when postural update is required.

The global-scale impacts of climate change on water resources and flooding under new climate and socio-economic scenarios

This paper presents a preliminary assessment of the relative effects of rate of climate change (four Representative Concentration Pathways - RCPs), assumed future population (five Shared Socio-economic Pathways - SSPs), and pattern of climate change (19 CMIP5 climate models) on regional and global exposure to water resources stress and river flooding. Uncertainty in projected future impacts of climate change on exposure to water stress and river flooding is dominated by uncertainty in the projected spatial and seasonal pattern of change in climate. There is little clear difference in impact between RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 in 2050, and between RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 in 2080. Impacts under RCP8.5 are greater than under the other RCPs in 2050 and 2080. For a given RCP, there is a difference in the absolute numbers of people exposed to increased water resources stress or increased river flood frequency between the five SSPs. With the ‘middle-of-the-road’ SSP2, climate change by 2050 would increase exposure to water resources stress for between approximately 920 and 3400 million people under the highest RCP, and increase exposure to river flood risk for between 100 and 580 million people. Under RCP2.6, exposure to increased water scarcity would be reduced in 2050 by 22-24%, compared to impacts under the RCP8.5, and exposure to increased flood frequency would be reduced by around 16%. The implications of climate change for actual future losses and adaptation depend not only on the numbers of people exposed to changes in risk, but also on the qualitative characteristics of future worlds as described in the different SSPs. The difference in ‘actual’ impact between SSPs will therefore be greater than the differences in numbers of people exposed to impact.

Within, but not between hands interactions in vibrotactile detection thresholds reflect somatosensory receptive field organization

Detection of a tactile stimulus on one finger is impaired when a concurrent stimulus (masker) is presented on an additional finger of the same or the opposite hand. This phenomenon is known to be finger-specific at the within-hand level. However, whether this specificity is also maintained at the between-hand level is not known. In four experiments, we addressed this issue by combining a Bayesian adaptive staircase procedure (QUEST) with a two-interval forced choice (2IFC) design in order to establish threshold for detecting 200ms, 100Hz sinusoidal vibrations applied to the index or little fingertip of either hand (targets). We systematically varied the masker finger (index, middle, ring, or little finger of either hand), while controlling the spatial location of the target and masker stimuli. Detection thresholds varied consistently as a function of the masker finger when the latter was on the same hand (Experiments 1 and 2), but not when on different hands (Experiments 3 and 4). Within the hand, detection thresholds increased for masker fingers closest to the target finger (i.e., middle>ring when the target was index). Between the hands, detection thresholds were higher only when the masker was present on any finger as compared to when the target was presented in isolation. The within hand effect of masker finger is consistent with the segregation of different fingers at the early stages of somatosensory processing, from the periphery to the primary somatosensory cortex (SI). We propose that detection is finger-specific and reflects the organisation of somatosensory receptive fields in SI within, but not between the hands.

Spatial housing economics: a survey

This introduction to the Virtual Special Issue surveys the development of spatial housing economics from its roots in neo-classical theory, through more recent developments in social interactions modelling, and touching on the role of institutions, path dependence and economic history. The survey also points to some of the more promising future directions for the subject that are beginning to appear in the literature. The survey covers elements hedonic models, spatial econometrics, neighbourhood models, housing market areas, housing supply, models of segregation, migration, housing tenure, sub-national house price modelling including the so-called ripple effect, and agent-based models. Possible future directions are set in the context of a selection of recent papers that have appeared in Urban Studies. Nevertheless, there are still important gaps in the literature that merit further attention, arising at least partly from emerging policy problems. These include more research on housing and biodiversity, the relationship between housing and civil unrest, the effects of changing age distributions - notably housing for the elderly - and the impact of different international institutional structures. Methodologically, developments in Big Data provide an exciting framework for future work.