Riccardo Lucchini - Children in Street Situations: A Concept in Search of an Object

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The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was adopted 30 years ago by the UN General Assembly, in 1989. Riccardo Lucchinis work on children in street situations started at the same time. This book presents his principal research findings, along with those of Daniel Stoecklin , who wrote his PhD thesis under Lucchinis supervision, in 1998.

I first came across Riccardo Lucchinis work while trawling through a dusty library in Jakarta in 1996. I happened upon three unpublished manuscripts, typed on A4 paper, written by Riccardo Lucchini and translated from French into English by Daniel Stoecklin. I have no idea how they ended up in the archives of a library in Jakarta, but I was supposed to find them. The manuscripts were a revelation to me and my light bulb moment after a year of conducting research with street children in the city of Yogyakarta, trying to make sense of their geographies and identities. I had spent endless hours reading the global literature on street children published at that time. Much of it categorised street children and youth as either victims or heroes, as the late Judith Ennew and Mark Connolly wrote in their introduction to the seminal special issue of Childhood on Children Out of Place (Connolly and Ennew 1996). For me, the keystone paper in that special issue among a long list of eminent authors was Lucchinis unpretentiously named piece, The street and its image. Building on the outstanding work of Lewis Aptekar s (1988) Street Children of Cali and Jill Swart-Krugers (1990) Malunde , Lucchini was a pioneer in what Judith Ennew called a paradigm shift in street child research. The paradigm shift signalled an acknowledgement that street children are not victims or delinquents in a specific place but children with multiple identities who survive across different social domains and through a constellation of relationships (Lucchini 1996, p. 169). This paradigm shift also developed the idea that children have careers on the street (Lucchini 1996). As a childrens geographer, my research was significantly influenced by Lucchinis work, which considers issues of space and time to inform understandings of street-connected childrens lives, including street girls. His work led me to interrogate childrens lives and identities, in diverse street situations, through participatory approaches and the triangulation of data, in ways which had not yet been explored in Indonesia.