No Place to Play? Studies of How Adolescents Use Public Space in Dispossessed Communities

Scholars agree that public space is essential for adolescents living in low-income communities. However, design professionals struggle to justify public space in resource-constrained environments such as rapidly densifying urban areas. As competition for space heats up, complex neoliberal processes often push out or squeeze in low-income communities that can be generally described as forms of forced dispossession—the taking of land—to make way for new development. Although development-forced dispossession and resettlement (DFDR) is widespread, the lives of adolescents in these environments have rarely been subjected to systematic and in-depth study. Manila, Philippines and Hyderabad, India represent vivid cases where adolescents experience the most extreme forms of dispossession. Focusing on seven dispossessed communities this dissertation asks: what spaces perform as public space and how do adolescents use them? To answer these questions, I used a two-part, inductive research methodology starting with an environmental psychology approach that relied on intensive interviews with adolescents (n=73) to document their mobility, describe their place use, and characterize their environments. After collecting and analyzing photographs taken and maps made by adolescents as well as 178 hours of audio recordings with adolescents, adults, designers, and officials, I identified the most frequented spaces in each dispossessed community that were “public” in way adolescents used them and developed eight cross-cutting influences on their spatial activity. In part two, I adopted an architectural approach to investigate the broader transferability of adolescents’ spaces to the community and evaluate their accessibility, safety, and environmental qualities. Through two years of field saturation including 250 hours of public space observations and nearly 1,300 detailed behavior maps, I found that urban planning processes of dispossession often oppresses girls’ environmental affordances and spatial mobilities more than any other sub-group. Therefore, architects and planners should work with adolescents, especially adolescent girls, to understand the power structures within each community and design upgrading strategies to improve the safety and accessibility of local public spaces. These findings were validated by using multiple sources of data for triangulation, recruiting diverse participant perspectives, and member-checking transcripts. This dissertation has rich impacts. It extends previous findings on children’s experiences in low-income communities such as Lynch (1977), Chawla (2002), and Kreutz (2015) by shifting the framework toward the economy of space. Additionally, research involving adolescents’ experiences in dispossessed communities is scarce and, as such, this dissertation makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of children’s environments and, more broadly, to the study of dispossessed environments.2023-08-2