Ann Marie F. Murnaghan - Children, Nature, Cities

Why does the way we think about urban children and urban nature matter? This volume explores how dichotomies between nature/culture, rural/urban, and child/adult have structured our understandings about the place of children and nature in the city. By placing children and youth at the center of re-theorising the city as a socio-natural space, the book illustrates how children and youths relations to and with nature can change adultist perspectives and help create more ecologically and socially just cities. As a key contribution to childrens studies, the book engages and enlivens debates in urban political ecology and urban theory, which have not yet treated age as an important axis of difference. With examples from ten localities, the chapters in this volume ask how we can subvert both romanticized and modernist conceptualizations of nature and childhood that conflate innocence and purity with children and nature; the volume asks what happens when we re-invent urban natures with childrens needs and perspectives in mind.

Ann Marie F. Murnaghan is Research Associate, at the Centre for Research in Young Peoples Texts and Cultures at University of Winnipeg, Canada, and Laura J. Shillington is faculty in Geosciences at John Abbott College and Research Associate at the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre at Concordia University, Canada.

Urban political ecology has opened up the ways we understand the interconnected socionatural relations that produce uneven cities. This wonderful collection contributes much to these efforts by pushing us to take seriously the ways urban nature is embodied through childrens needs and perspectives. Taking this book seriously will make us better scholars and better people.

Nik Heynen, University of Georgia, USA

This edited volume nicely deconstructs dichotomous ways of conceptualizing children and cities. In so doing, the book challenges the anti-urban discourse that dominates within childrens studies. It is made clear that both children and nature belong to the city and the book offers multiple ways that help to accommodate growing up in urban-nature environments in a more just way.

Lia Karsten, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

First published 2016

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2016 selection and editorial matter, Ann Marie F. Murnaghan and Laura J. Shillington; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Ann Marie F. Murnaghan and Laura J. Shillington to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Murnaghan, Ann Marie F., compiler. | Shillington, Laura J., compiler.

Title: Children, nature, cities / [compiled by] Ann Marie F. Murnaghan and

Laura J. Shillington.

Description: Farnham, Surrey, UK, England ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate

Publishing Limited, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015034225 | ISBN 9781472453174 (hardback) |

ISBN 9781472453181 (ebook) | ISBN 9781472453198 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: City childrenSocial conditions. | Public spacesSocial

aspects. | Cities and townsSocial aspects. | NatureSocial aspects.

Classification: LCC HT206 .C4525 2016 | DDC 307.76083dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034225

ISBN: 9781472453174 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781315571553 (ebk)

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Laura J. Shillington and Ann Marie F. Murnaghan

Frederika Eilers

Laura J. Shillington and Ann Marie F. Murnaghan

Michelle Palma

Nadia von Benzon

Stuart C. Aitken, Li An, Steven Allison, and Shuang Yang

Jason A. Douglas

Matthew Kelley

Mireia Baylina, Anna Ortiz, and Maria Prats Ferret

Amanda Rees, Becky Becker, Camille L. Bryant, and Andrea Dawn Frazier

Keitaro Ito, Tomomi Sudo, and Ingunn Fjrtoft

Laura J. Shillington and Ann Marie F. Murnaghan

Dr Stuart C. Aitken is Professor of Geography and June Burnett Chair at San Diego State University, where he directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Young People and Space. Stuarts research interests include critical social theory, qualitative methods, children, families, and communities. His recent books include The Ethnopoetics of Space and Transformation: Young Peoples Engagement, Activism and Aesthetics (2014), The Fight to Stay Put (2013), Young People, Border Spaces and Revolutionary Imaginations (2011), Qualitative Geographies (2010), The Awkward Spaces of Fathering (2009), and Global Childhoods (2008). Stuart has published over 200 papers in academic journals and edited book collections. He is past co-editor of The Professional Geographer and Childrens Geographies. Stuart has worked for the United Nations on issues of childrens rights, migration, and dislocation.

Steven Allison lived in China from 20062012 and studied Chinese there. He completed his Master of Arts in Geography at San Diego State University in 2014. His contributions to the Impacts of Ecosystem Service Payments on Coupled Natural and Human Systems Project, funded by San Diego State University and the National Science Foundation, included fieldwork in and around the Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve. He spent his time divided between participatory mapping combined with interviews and vegetation surveys. His favorite part was meeting the families in the Reserve (well, eating with them, really!). His work on this project complemented his own research on place attachment and participatory mapping, that culminated in his thesis entitled A Hole-in-the-Wall: Mobility Through Individually Owned Foreign Restaurants in Suzhou, China . He and his wife currently run a tea and spice company that offers products from around the Fanjingshan area.

Li An is Professor in the Department of Geography at San Diego State University, and Adjunct Professor at Research Center of Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD from Michigan State University in 2003. His research projects are broadly distributed over the globe (Nepal, Ghana, USA, and China), emphasizing complexity in coupled natural and human systems. With research interests in spatial analysis, geocomputation, landscape ecology, and complexity theory, An has published his research in the Annals of Association of American Geographers, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Economics , and Science . He is on the editorial board of Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Ecological Modelling , and the International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research .