In brief, longitudinal and cross-continental studies offer the opportunity to chart the
dynamically evolving temporal and spatial parameters of the adolescent experience.
Young People's Perceptions
1.2.4 Young People’s Perception of their Local Environment in UK
In Britain, interest in adolescence studies is more recent than for instance in Australia and
New Zealand. Few studies have explicitly examined the place use and behaviour of young
teenagers in Britain. Instead, attention has focused on children from 5 to 11 years old.
Hugh Matthews (1995) stresses that older children are invisible in the urban landscape, an
argument that offers a more radical insight into the problematic position of teenagers in
modern society. By failing to take into account young people’s ‘way of seeing’, they
become a significant outsider group. He suggests that there is a need to investigate the
environment as young people understand it, as only in this way can they become fully
integrated users of large-scale places. In this respect, it can be argued that older children,
particularly those between 14 to 18 years old, are not only virtually absent from
environmental planning and excluded from public space – as discussed above – but have
also been ignored, until recently, from research.
However in the mid-nineties, the absence of such research on young people was widely
noticed. Academics from different disciplines - environmental and developmental
psychology, geography, criminology, anthropology, sociology and even landscape
architecture and housing – have realised the importance of studying young people’s
experiences and perceptions of their local environment. In 1996, the Economic and Social
Research Council (ESRC) announced a new research programme “Children 5 – 16:
Growing into the 21st Century” consisting of twenty-two different projects with a common
theme: looking at children as social actors (see www.hull.ac.uk/children5to16programme/intro.htm).
Among those projects, there were some that focused, in particular, on young people’s use
and perception of their local environment. For instance, the Centre for Children and Youth
at Nene College of Higher Education carried out a large-scale study in Northamptonshire
on investigating the environment as young people (9 to 16 years old) ‘see it’ and how they
make use of place (Matthews, Limb and Taylor 1999;
www.hull.ac.uk/children5to16programme/intro.htm). The main argument of the study was that young
people are seemingly invisible within the ‘fourth environment’, those public spaces beyond
home, school and playground, provided only with ‘token spaces’, often inappropriate to
their needs and aspirations (Matthews 1995; Matthews, Limb and Percy-Smith 1998;