Figurations of Childhood - Re-Figuration Von Räumen by Claudia Mock Paperback

About the Book

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

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Claudia Mock, born in 1987, works at the DFG-funded collaborative research center "Re-Figuration of Space" (CRC 1265) at Technische Universität Berlin, where she completed her PhD. The sociologist has just received a seed funding scholarship from the Georg-Simmel Center for Urban Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she regularly lectures in the Department for Social Sciences. In 2018, she was a visiting fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies and collaborated with scholars at the University of Nairobi. Her research focuses on the sociology of space, children's geographies, feminist geographies and global inequalities.