Geographies of Youth Cultures
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Cool Places Music, drugs, clubbing and travel—this is the popular image of what it means to be young. However, young people’s lives are also bound up with the nitty-gritty everyday realities of home, school, work; and are circumscribed by globalising forces of the economy and processes of marginalisation and exclusion. Cool Places explores these contrasting experiences of contemporary youth. In chapters drawing on a wide range of examples—from Techno music and ecstasy in Germany, clubbing in London, global backpacking and gangs in Santa Cruz, to experiences at home of sibling rivalry, loitering on streets and seeking employment, leading contemporary writers from Geography, Cultural Studies and Sociology explore issues of representation and resistance; and geographical concepts of scale and place in young people’s lives. In the four parts which make up this book the authors consider how the media has imagined young people as a particular community with shared interests and how young people resist these stereotypes and create their own independent representations of their lives; the complex ways that youth cultures are played out across different scales; young people’s experiences of everyday geographical locations from the home to the street; and the power of young people to resist adult definitions of their lives and to create new spaces and ways of living. By drawing on a rich vein of empirical material and through employing young people’s vignettes, Cool Places aims to place youth and youth cultures on the geographic map and to stimulate new directions for youth- oriented research. Tracey Skelton is a Lecturer in the Department of International Studies at the Nottingham Trent University and Gill Valentine is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield. COOL PLACES geographies of youth cultures Edited by Tracey Skelton & Gill Valentine London and New York First published 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1998 Edited by Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine The right of Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-97559-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-14920-7 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-14921-5 (pbk) CONTENTS Figures and plates vii Acknowledgements ix 1 Cool Places: an Introduction to Youth and 1 Youth Cultures Gill Valentine, Tracey Skelton and Deborah Chambers PART ONE: REPRESENTATIONS 2 A Question of Belonging: Television, Youth 35 and the Domestic David Oswell 3 Contested Identities: Challenging Dominant 50 Representations of Young British Muslim Women Claire Dwyer 4 Rethinking British Chinese Identities 66 David Parker 5 Rehabilitating the Images of Disabled Youths 84 Ruth Butler 6 Paper Planes: Travelling the New Grrrl 102 Geographies Marion Leonard PART TWO: MATTERS OF SCALE 7 The Spatial Construction of Youth Cultures 122 Doreen Massey 8 Disintegrating Developments: Global 131 Economic Restructuring and the Eroding of Ecologies of Youth Cindi Katz v 9 Youth Gangs and Moral Panics in Santa 146 Cruz, California Tim Lucas 10 Ravers’ Paradise?: German Youth Cultures in 162 the 1990s Birgit Richard and Heinz Hermann Kruger 11 ‘Checking Out the Planet’: Global 176 Representations/Local Identities and Youth Travel Luke Desforges PART THREE: PLACE: GEOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH CULTURES 12 The Home: Youth, Gender and Video 196 Games: Power and Control in the Home Sara McNamee 13 The School: ‘Poxy Cupid!’ An Ethnographic 208 and Feminist Account of a Resistant Female Youth Culture: The New Wave Girls Shane J.Blackman 14 The Workplace: Becoming a Paid Worker: 229 Images and Identity Sophie Bowlby, Sally Lloyd Evans and Robina Mohammad 15 The Street: ‘It’s a Bit Dodgy Around There’: 249 Safety, Danger, Ethnicity and Young People’s Use of Public Space Paul Watt and Kevin Stenson 16 The Club: Clubbing: Consumption, Identity 267 and the Spatial Practices of Every-Night Life Ben Malbon PART FOUR: SITES OF RESISTANCE 17 Between East and West: Sites of Resistance in 290 East German Youth Cultures Fiona M.Smith 18 ‘Dana’s Mystical Tunnel’: Young People’s 306 Designs for Survival and Change in the City Myrna Margulies Breitbart vi 19 Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity: New Age 329 Travellers and the Utopics of the Countryside Kevin Hetherington 20 Modernism and Resistance: How ‘Homeless’ 344 Youth Sub-Cultures Make a Difference Susan Ruddick List of Contributors 363 Index 369 FIGURES AND PLATES FIGURES 4.1 The territory of Hong Kong 74 4.2 Urbanised areas of Hong Kong Island 75 4.3 Map of Lan Kwai Fong 76 5.1 Struggling with representations 85 5.2 Style, fashion and image are used to sell disability aids 88 5.3 Common misconceptions about disabled youth 93 6.1 Net Chick ClubHouse ‘paper doll’ 115 6.2 Net Chick ClubHouse ‘paper doll’ 116 9.1 National problem, local panic? 147 9.2 Santa Cruz, California 149 9.3 Graffiti: representing gangs 150 10.1 Germany, post-1989 165 10.2 Ravers take to the streets in Berlin 173 15.1 Schematic plan of ‘Thamestown’ 252 PLATES 1.1 A neglected image of youth: ‘innocent’ 2 1.2 The popular imagining of youth: ‘party animals’ 3 4.1 Lan Kwai Fong in the iconography of Hong Kong 78 4.2 Fuck the British Movement, by Lesley Sanderson (1984) 80 4.3 Fighting Spirit ‘96, by Yuen Fong Ling 81 6.1 Riot Grrrl zines 105 8.1 The deterioration of public space for youth in New York 136 8.2 Hand pumps in Howa liberated young from water carrying 139 10.1 Computer generated forms of Techno art 163 10.2 Youth at the LOVEPARADE 167 10.3 Youth at the LOVEPARADE 168 10.4 New masculinities on the dance floor 170 10.5 Playing around with femininity 171 viii 10.6 The LOVEPARADE: demonstrating for peace 174 10.7 Technokit: a kind of raver’s suitcase 174 11.1 Collecting places: gazing at Machu Picchu, Peru 181 11.2 ‘Real travelling’: the search for authenticity 185 16.1 The intense sensual experience of the club 272 16.2 The social experience of clubbing 277 18.1 Detroit Summer mural 311 18.2 YouthWorks/ArtWorks: in Massachusetts 314 18.3 Girls’ designs showed a strong concern for safety, accessibility 315 and aesthetics 18.4 Young people’s art goes public, Holyoke, Massachusetts 318 18.5 Holyoke Banners Project 320 19.1 1986, travellers attempting to reach Stonehenge 333 19.2 Protest encampment at Glastonbury Festival site 334 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Alan Lodge for the cover photograph and Plates 16.1, 16.2, 19.1 and 19.2; Graham Allsopp for supplying Plates 1.1 and 1.2; Lesley Sanderson for providing Plate 4.2; Rob Strachan for Plate 6.1, Sonke Streckel for Plates 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6; Gwyn Kirk for Plate 18.1, and Pamela Warden for Plates 18.2, 183. Plate 4.3 is reproduced by kind permission of Yuen Fong Ling. Special thanks go to Linda Dawes for designing and redrawing all the maps which appear in the text, to Deborah Sporton for her translation services and to Kathryn Morris-Roberts for helping with the proofreading. We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce their work: Linda Chui for permission to reproduce her poems which appear in Chapter 4, Angela Martin for her cartoon which appears in Chapter 5 (Figure 5.1). Figure 5.2 is reproduced by kind permission of Disability Now. Every attempt has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made, we would invite copyright holders to inform us of the oversight. Our thanks go to Michelle Keegan of South Nottingham College for organising the production and selection of the lino-cuts for the part-title pages which introduce each of the four sections. The students whose self- portraits feature are: Alan Tien (Part One), Tracy Smith (Part Two), Christian Poxon (Part Three) and Nicholas Wright (Part Four). The final product owes much to the hard work of the Routledge team: Judith Ravenscroft the copy-editor, Rosalind Fergusson the proof-reader and especially Jody Ball the Desk Editor. We are grateful to Tristan Palmer for commissioning this book and Sarah Lloyd for seeing the project through. Tracey would like to thank her Mum and Rob for such positive youth experiences and her two sisters, Tania and Janina, for sharing them with her. Gill would like to thank her Mum and Dad and brother David for x their support and encouragement when she was growing up; and Gregor Russell, Liz James and Louise Say for their enduring friendships. 1 COOL PLACES an introduction to youth and youth cultures Gill Valentine, Tracey Skelton and Deborah Chambers Plates 1.1 and 1.2 portray very contrasting images of contemporary youth.