In addition, one of the goals of the revival of the ‘GUIC’ was to afford comparisons
between children’s experience in the past and present at two sites from the seventies that
were revisited in the nineties: an old working-class district in Warsaw and an industrialised
suburb in Melbourne. For instance, in the case of Sunshine in Melbourne, the results of
the present study supplemented the findings of the initial study, showing that young
people, then and now, value places in similar terms (Owens 1994). Many places that the
original study recorded are still frequented by teenagers and their activities there are not
much different than they were twenty years ago. However, other places identified in the
recent study, such as streets, stoops and waste places, were not included in the previous
studies. According to Louise Chawla (2001), the director of the reinitiated GUIC project,
even if twenty-five years have passed from the original project and eight nations have
been involved, similar constants emerged in terms of the criteria by which children judged
their environments as satisfying their needs or failing them. All of the features that
determined good environments in which to grow up in the seventies re-emerged in the
nineties:
• a feeling of social integration and acceptance;
• varied, interesting activity settings;
• peer gathering places;
• a general sense of safety and freedom of movement;
• a cohesive community identity; and
• where available, green areas for informal play and exploration as well as organised
sports.
There were also constants in the features that children associated with alienation and
dissatisfaction:
• social exclusion and stigma;
• boredom;
• fear of crime or harassment;
• heavy traffic; and
• uncollected rubbish and litter.
While geographic isolation was a major concern for children in the seventies, racial and
ethnic tensions as well as complaints about crime and environmental pollution were
expressed more frequently in the nineties.