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 youtha€?s relations to and with nature can change adultist perspectives and help create more ecologically and socially just cities. As a key contribution to childrena€?s 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 childrena€?s needs and perspectives in mind.

Ann Marie F. Murnaghan is Research Associate, at the Centre for Research in Young People's 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.