Journal of Consumer Culture

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boats behind. One of the participants (Charlotte) produced a set of drawings with ... Charlotte: Sometimes, when it's raining you can see the trolleys and stuff.
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Reconfiguring the Radical Other: Urban children's consumption practices and the nature/culture divide Karen Wells Journal of Consumer Culture 2002 2: 291 DOI: 10.1177/146954050200200301 The online version of this article can be found at: http://joc.sagepub.com/content/2/3/291

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ARTICLE

Reconfiguring the Radical Other Urban children’s consumption practices and the nature/culture divide KAREN WELLS Goldsmiths College, University of London Abstract. This article explores children’s consumption of ‘nature’ in culturally diverse urban places. Analysis of children’s oral, textual and visual representations of city life and observations of children’s spatial practices that were produced for research into the cultural practices of children in an urban context showed that children render nature in the city as a polluting and polluted presence. However, consumption practices that reconfigured ‘nature’ as part of urban culture dissolved the boundaries between nature and the city. I argue that this binary opposition between nature and urban culture echoes other binary oppositions that rest ultimately on the division between the Self and the Other. The ways that consumption practices reconfigure nature’s relationship to the city therefore offer insights into the negotiation of difference in urban everyday life. Key words cultural difference ● forms of nature ● idealized commodities ● working-class children

THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES THE WAYS IN WHICH ‘NATURE’ IS REPRESENTED AND CONSUMED in the city by children in culturally diverse locales. It does so through an analysis of working-class children’s representations of city life, and observation of children’s spatial practices in urban public space. The data are part of a research project on ‘The Cultural Practices of Children in an Urban Context’. The participants’ discourses on forms of nature (birds, rivers, rain, etc.) in local urban contexts invoked a conventional Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 2(3): 291–315 [1469-5405 (200211) 2:3; 291–315; 028225]

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pairing of the urban with the artificial, built, or non-organic environment. This pairing implied that natural forms had no legitimate place in the city where nature was rendered as both a polluted and a polluting presence. The literal consumption (i.e. ingestion) of nature was represented in these data as dangerous to, and polluting of, the integrity of the body. These strongly held and entirely conventional convictions about nature’s place in the city persisted despite the impression of a proliferation of natural forms in the participants’ local environment. The mixed-media accounts the children produced for this research, in particular their photographs and drawings of the local river, marshes and park, displayed the abundant presence of natural forms in these children’s everyday lives. In exploring how this discourse is produced, I suggest that attention should be paid to the association in western thought of urban forms with culture, rendered in opposition to nature. I argue that the abjection of forms of nature is reconfigured through the recognition and constitution of consumption as a signifier of urban culture. I explicate how specific consumption practices find a place for nature in the city. I show how these practices resolve at the level of everyday life, if not at the level of ideology, the opposition between nature and culture. In particular, I suggest, those contexts in which forms of nature can be actively engaged with, and in which they signify their place in, urban culture through the possibilities of consumption are most successful in reconfiguring forms of nature as part of city life. I set out the limits to these reconfigurations through an examination of the aesthetics of children’s consumption of commodities. Here I argue that children’s consumption is characterized by the idealization of the commodity, and that this idealization in the case of fully commoditized forms of nature brings the ideal, hyper-real good into tension with the corporeality of the natural world. I conclude that this analysis has important implications for the more general question of how Other-ness is reconfigured by urban working-class children with diverse cultural identities. METHODOLOGY The research was carried out over 6 months in the winter of 2000. It primarily consisted of three forms of data. Representations of life in the city produced in different media by 60 school students in year 5 (ages 9 and 10), interview transcripts from focus-group interviews with 15 of these respondents, and observation of children’s use of public space in three sites in London. The respondents were accessed through a primary school in North London. This school was chosen for two reasons. First, I wanted to carry out the research in a working-class, culturally diverse locale. The 292

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working-class child’s voice in the literature on childhood is a very subdued one. Working-class childhoods tend to be pathologized for their departure from a normative model of bourgeois western childhood (Steedman, 2000). There is also an assumption that ethnically diverse working-class neighbourhoods are riven with conflict between ethnic groups.1 In selecting a culturally diverse, working-class neighbourhood I hoped to give voice to working-class children’s experiences of living in the city and to understand how children negotiate cultural difference in their everyday lives. The neighbourhood is on the borders of the London boroughs of Hackney and Haringey. The ethnic minority population of the boroughs overall is about 40 percent. Haringey is England’s ninth most deprived borough, measured on the Government’s Index of Deprivation. In 1998, unemployment was registered at 12 percent, the fourth highest in London. Unemployment is particularly high amongst black and ethnic minority households (www.haringey.gov.uk). About one-third of Hackney’s population is from ethnic minorities. The largest ethnic minority group is of black Caribbean and black African descent. Over 40 languages are spoken in school. It is the second most deprived borough in England and has the highest deprivation at ward level in the country. Two-thirds of households have annual incomes of less than £10,000 (www.mpa.gov.uk). In the research cohort of 57 children, about one-third are boys and two-thirds girls. Nearly half of the children are black (including African, African-Caribbean, British and American), one-fifth white, and about one-third Asian (including Turkish, Indian and Vietnamese). The school does not keep records of the children’s socio-economic status, but it would be reasonable to say that the majority of the children are working class. Second, the age group chosen for this research has been relatively neglected in both developmental psychology, which tends to focus on early childhood, and in the sociology of childhood, which is dominated by accounts of late childhood (James et al., 1998: 177). The data collection began with a visit to each classroom. I introduced myself as a researcher with the Open University, who had funded the project. This introductory session involved many questions from the children. They wanted to know why the Open University were interested in their views, whether their names would appear in any publications (most were keen that they did so), and what they were expected to do with the resources I was to give them. I attempted, I think with some success, to stress my independence from their school and the open-ended nature of what I was asking them to do. After this introduction, I asked the respondents to ask each other, in groups of 2 or 3, the question,‘do you like living 293

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in London and why?’ They wrote down their responses and I collected them at the end of the meeting. Following this, there was a great deal of discussion between myself and about 10 of the children about how to distribute the resources for the research. These resources were disposable cameras, writing books and pens, drawing books with pencils, rubber and glue. A third of the participants were to take away each of these resources. The materials were all of good quality and attractive. I hoped that the quality and aesthetic pleasure of the materials, and the dialogue involved in their distribution, would serve to unsettle the association of the research with schoolwork. I thought it might also increase their motivation to do the work and underline the importance that I attached to their accounts. Of course, it is impossible to know to what extent they thought of this research as a school homework project. I gave each participant a brief guide to what to do with the materials. This asked them to use their resources to show: What do you do in London (including Tottenham)? Where do you go? Who do you go with (friends, family, on your own)? What are your favourite places? What do you enjoy about living in the city? What do you dislike about it? Is London interesting/ exciting/boring/beautiful/dangerous/poor/friendly/difficult to get around/easy to get around/fast/ugly/rich/slow/safe/fun? Is it a place for adults or children or both? I collected the completed accounts and cameras after three weeks. Of the 57 respondents who had taken cameras, notebooks, or collage books, 47 returned them. The corpus of data now consisted of 20 sets of photographs, 12 written accounts and 15 collage books. These varied in the amount of material they included. Most respondents had used all of the 24 photographs, although in many of these a similar shot was taken several times, varying the people in the photograph but otherwise keeping the same scene. This was particularly the case for shots of children in the school playground. The collages varied from one or two pages to up to 25 pages of cuttings from magazines, newspapers, comics and store catalogues, postcards, drawings and short pieces of writing – mostly in the form of headlines. None of the writing books went over 20 pages and most were 5 or 6. These were most often in the form of journals with a heading for each date followed by a commentary about what they had done that day. From an initial analysis of this material, I identified the following themes: pollution and purity; special events; city-nature forms; local and global connections; dangers and fears; shopping; transport and communication; 294

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religion; sport; and friends and family. In order to plot the data across these different themes I used them as the horizontal headings on a grid, where the vertical headings were the names of each of the participants grouped into collage, written and photographic accounts. This grid showed a concentration on the following topics: nature in the city (26/47); pollution (22/47); transport and communication (17/47); shopping (16/47); and dangers and fears (9/47). Obviously some text and images were mapped onto more than one theme. This initial analysis was used to inform focus group interviews with 15 of the participants (one group of 6 and three groups of 3). I used the children’s written, photographic and collage productions as elicitation tools (Collier, 2001:45–7, 52–4) in the focus group interviews. I asked them, for example, why they had chosen to take photographs of particular scenes. These interviews were fully transcribed and analysed. The interviewees’ responses showed that my reading as a viewer of the photograph was often very different to their intention in taking the photograph. One photograph, for example, is a picture of clouds gathering at sunset above the tops of trees. In the centre of the photograph, barely visible, is an aeroplane. It was for the shot of the aeroplane, rather than the image of the sunset, gathering clouds and trees, that the respondent had taken the picture. Cognizant of the school context in which the respondents’ representations of the city were produced, I sought to complement these data with observations of children’s use of space in public spaces. I chose three sites in London to observe children’s use of public space: the walkway at the South Bank (Thames riverside cultural complex in central London); the Oval, the town square in Brixton, South London; and the local park. I chose these sites for their free access, in principle, and, to a greater or lesser extent, in practice, to adults and children of diverse ascriptive identities (class, race, gender, age). The South Bank’s presentation as a public space is confirmed by the free access of its walkways and some indoor spaces (exhibition spaces, performances) but is belied by the overall emphasis on consumption spaces (cafes, bookshops, art gallery, cinema). The Oval, Brixton, is a town square bordered by an independent cinema and the public library on one side and by two major roads circumscribing Brixton’s main shopping area on two sides. On the fourth side is a minor road dividing the Oval from a newly landscaped square named Windrush Square. In the square, there is a large tree, several benches, a water fountain and a statue of Henry Tate, the sugar merchant whose fortunes were built on slavery. The statue, the library (also called the Brixton Tate) and the name of Windrush Square are testament to the substantial and longstanding international connections of this 295

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neighbourhood. The third site, also in Brixton, is a large public park some 10 minutes’ walk from the main shopping area. It is typical of city parks in the range of facilities on offer (playground, tennis courts, cafe, etc.). Like the neighbourhood that the respondents lived in, Brixton is characterized by a mostly working-class, ethnically diverse population. Over a period of 6 months I observed the interaction of children and adults in these spaces and mapped the different uses that children and adults made of them. THE LOCAL GEOGRAPHY The local area in which the research subjects live has a rather unusual urban geography. The school which all of these respondents attended is next to a small park that leads onto the towpath of a river. A few minutes’ walk to the south, the towpath is bounded by a large park on one side and marshes on the other. A short walk along this towpath in any direction leads to the relatively large open spaces of Walthamstow and Tottenham marshes. Between these two spaces and a third open space a short walk to the east lies a series of reservoirs. On one side of the towpath is a housing estate of mixed public and private housing. Many of the children lived on this estate. Walking away from the school in the opposite direction a grid of streets, mostly residential, leads onto the main High Street. The High Street links together two quite distinctive shopping areas. To the south it runs into Stamford Hill, which has a significant Hasidic Jewish population of longstanding. It has several small and medium-sized grocery stores and bakeries selling Kosher food. There is also a large supermarket. To the north is Seven Sisters, with a significant African-Caribbean and African population. Like Stamford Hill, this also has a number of grocery stores and bakeries selling African and Caribbean foods and other ‘ethnically marked’ goods (clothes, hats, hairpieces, etc.). It also has a large supermarket. It was in some ways not surprising that initial discussions with the research participants revealed a, perhaps untypical, natural geography, with the park and the river figuring in most accounts of what children said they enjoyed doing, or simply often were doing, in London. They identified parks, more than any other place, as a space for children, alone and with adults. The importance of the park in the social worlds of children is probably commonplace, but the impression of a more general immersion in the natural world is very strong from the visual work of the children, especially the photographs. It is perhaps more surprising that there were very few people in the images that the children produced (collages, drawings and photographs).

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NATURE AS A POLLUTING AND POLLUTED PRESENCE IN REPRESENTATIONS OF URBAN SPACE The framing of the photographic images in which some form of nature (landscapes, skyscapes, animals) was present were largely devoid of urban signifiers. Many of the photographs are dominated by images of forms of nature. Perhaps most striking of these were five photographs of the local river taken, independently of each other, by two girls. Two of these images show the reflection in the river of a blue sky with white clouds and the trees on one side of the river. In one photo the entire frame is taken up with this image. The other three pictures show the river lined with brightly coloured houseboats; a light-blue sky with the edges turning pink dominates the top half of the image. In only one of these photos is there anything that is typically urban – graffiti tags on the warehouse walls. This is also the only photograph with a human subject in it. A ‘series’ of photographs produced by several different children show the same landscape composition, taken in different parks, of grass, trees and blue sky, in the bottom, middle and top third of the photograph, respectively. In only one of these five frames are there any people – a group of young footballers. Other photos, which can be categorized as depicting forms of nature, are close-ups of groups of trees, of cats and ‘skyscapes’. These too are devoid of human subjects. These images strongly challenge our conception of the urban environment, especially the inner-city environment. There is no evidence here of the density of population said to be the defining characteristic of city life (Simmel, 1903; Wirth, 1938). Indeed, one of the most striking features of the children’s photographs is the absence of human subjects. Nor is there any evocation of the ‘felt intensity’ which urban theorists suggest is the product of city living (Allen, 1999; Simmel, 1908). ‘Felt intensity’ is an attempt to articulate the effect on the psyche of city-dwellers of constant immersion in a densely populated ‘world of strangers’ (Lofland, 1973). The absence of a ‘felt intensity’ in these images partly follows from the absence of people in the images. It also follows from the typically rural signifiers that appear in the images and thus, as it were, invites us to engage with the connotative signification of these rural signs (Barthes, 1996[1957]). This local geography of an abundance of forms of nature is also evident in the written accounts and in the collages and drawings. In the following account Chandne2 describes everyday life as a series of encounters with the natural world:

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River Lea is everyday life. It’s running by my house everyday. Fishes, ducks, and swans slowly swimming by with the river. Some of the people feeding the ducks, canoes going by with boats behind. One of the participants (Charlotte) produced a set of drawings with vivid and attractive representations of forms of nature. One of the pictures is a drawing of the sunset from her window. The picture is on A4 paper. An orange semi-circle representing the sun fills one-third of the paper in the centre. Above it is a blue sky and below it a blue river. Mya produced a similar representation of the river. Vivid green grass at the front of the picture with geese eating breadcrumbs, a blue river curves across the paper with fishes and ducks in it. Highly coloured trees and flowers are depicted above the river. A bright sun is in the corner of the picture. The picture is headed ‘my back garden’. Mya also produced a series of collages with the headings ‘I like flowers’ and ‘I like dogs’. The materials for the collages are taken from comics and greeting cards. Like the drawing, they are highly coloured, hyper-real images. These images, like the sunset produced by Charlotte, are joyful, colourful and fun. These textual and visual representations can be thought of as idealized and hyper-real. They are idealized in taking an idea, an abstraction, of nature that draws on conventional signifiers of the rural. This can be seen, for example, in the absence of human figures, of debris, and of buildings. They may be characterized as hyper-real in their use of vivid, highly coloured, pleasant images. Baudrillard’s notion of hyper-reality as ‘a copy, or a copy of a copy’ in which ‘what is fake seems more real than the real’ (Lury, 2001: 69) is useful here. These signs signify other stylized, super-real, signs of the natural world; specifically, those taken from children’s animated films, comics, cartoons and storybooks. They refer to a natural world, but one that is marked by the absence of death and decay, and by its radical separation from all things urban. The representations of their locality as a beautiful, idyllic,‘natural’ space were in stark contrast to how respondents talked about forms of nature in focus-group interviews. Their talk offered a dystopian vision of urban space as a polluted environment. Here, Charlotte talked about the sunset drawing described earlier as an idealistic representation of a river that is experienced as a polluting/polluted environment. Charlotte: My cousin done that . . . She wanted to do the sunset outside the window. She was going to do the water like green, but the

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river near us is dirty . . . it’s black and when it rains it changes colours. Changes brown to purple to all different colours. Claire: [It’s] . . . really dirty. It’s because all the birds are in there and stuff. It’s a sort of dirty green. Charlotte: Sometimes, when it’s raining you can see the trolleys and stuff. Once I was looking out the window on the balcony and I saw a long bit of tree or something. Claire: A log. Charlotte: Yeah. And a duck got stuck in it and couldn’t come out. Claire: . . . See the river there. People went canoeing . . . And everyone got in canoes and they were all paddling. And my dad was saying that if he dropped in there when you come out you’d have to run home and take a bath because the, eh, eh, river. You can catch lots of diseases and get sick from it. So dad say you’d have to quickly run home and have a wash. Charlotte: If you fell in it? Ali: Yeah if you had diseases in your mouth [from the river water] yeah, it might kill you or . . . Contrast these accounts of natural forms in everyday urban life with the visual and textual representations discussed earlier. The images represent how the river would look if it were to conform to a conventional, idealized account of the natural world. When they talked about the river, this idealization disappears, to be replaced by another idealization of what is imbricated in the ‘urban’. The river’s reflection of the sky is taken as a sign of pollution: ‘when it rains it changes colours.’ Each entity which interacts with the river in turn becomes a pollutant so that the river’s attraction for birds renders the birds themselves as polluting:‘It’s because all the birds are in there and stuff.’ The duck, for example, gets caught in a log, which because of its location in the river had become a piece of rubbish, comparable to a shopping trolley. The natural world as polluting quickly emerges as a theme with the discussion of the river turning to a discussion of the diseases contact with the river brings: ‘You can catch lots of diseases and get sick from it. So dad say you’d have to quickly run home and have a wash.’ In another interview, other children took up this theme of the tensions involved in representing the position of forms of nature in the city. Here three of the girls talk about the local river: Shaneid:

I wanna see. In the morning all I see is greenness. I don’t see no blue, nice, shining river.

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Chandne: I also hate it when like if you’re going past the river and you see something’s dead there, inside the water. That’s really disgusting. Kimmi: I saw two mice as well. Chandne: There’s so much dirt in the river that even ducks are dying in there. Kimmi: No not ducks. Ducks don’t go down there. Chandne: Yes. And the geese. I’ve seen a dead goose in there before and I screamed. I screamed because it was so disgusting. Chandne here conveys an image of the river as full of death, dirt and decay. In her textual representations of the same river she conjured up a very different, almost idyllic, image of the river,‘running by my house everyday. Fishes, ducks, and swans slowly swimming by with the river’ (see earlier). In contrast, in the extract from this interview, the river’s capacity to support plant life is taken as a sign of dirt and contrasted to the desirability of a ‘blue, nice, shining river’. As with the visual representations of forms of nature discussed earlier, here the purity of the river is gauged against its closeness to a hyper-real, idealized river. The talk then turned to death and the girls’ horror at seeing ‘something . . . dead’ in the water. In this we can see their representation of the river as a pollutant: all that comes into contact with it is polluted, and dies. Death, that most significant of pollution taboos, is conjured up to convey the deep differences between this river and its rural counterpart which, presumably, would be a haven to bird life, not a threat to its very existence. But there is also in here a refusal to acknowledge that the natural world is a world of death and decay, and in this refusal lies some of the attraction of the simulacra and the hyper-real. In the discussion of consumption and nature I return to the significance of this displacement of the real by the hyper-real. Pollution of the self through contact with nature is another strong theme in these discourses about the natural world. This association of forms of nature as destructive of the integrity of the body was taken up by other respondents who conclude that inadvertently ingesting or absorbing mud (e.g. by sucking their fingers, or through a cut) would result in being, as one girl expressed it, ‘germed for life’. NATURE AND CULTURE I am not suggesting, of course, that these representations of ‘nature’ in the city are wrong, nor that their talk is somehow more real than their textual and visual representations. Rather, I am suggesting that human engagement 300

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with the material world is mediated by a set of cultural discourses. Through my discussion of these respondents’ representations of nature in the city, I have attempted to show how powerful discourses about the boundaries between the rural and the urban mediate their everyday experience of natural forms in the city. In this section, I elaborate on the wider cultural context of these discourses. These children’s discourses about nature and the city are entirely conventional. Few people would disagree with their assessment of nature as not belonging in the city. It is a commonplace that cities exclude nature, that the exclusion of nature is what civilizes the city (Hinchcliffe, 1999: 141). Tuan (1978) asserts that it is its distance from nature that is the definitive characteristic of the city. While early Enlightenment thinkers saw no contradiction between the country and the city, finding ‘no necessary conflict between the natural and the artificial’ (Sennett, 1990: 73), by the 19th century the rapid expansion of urban space ‘made it hard to feel that civilisation, the creation of man, was in harmony with nature, the creation of God’ (Wilson, 1995: 27). This Romantic attachment to nature finds its mirror reflection in a horror, a potent combination of fear and disgust (Warner, 1994) of city life and continues to animate discourses about the city and the place of nature in the city in which the urban pollutes nature. Conversely, abjection felt in response to the mixing of nature and culture is a commonplace of modernity (Kristeva, 1982) and it is this abjection which renders nature as a pollutant in the spaces of the city. This separation of nature and the city is expressed in such everyday comments as ‘You could be anywhere’ – i.e. anywhere but the city or ‘it’s like being in the countryside’ which people tend to make when sitting in their back garden or in a large park. Such comments serve to maintain cultural boundaries at the level of thought or ideology that have been eroded at the level of practice. They maintain the fiction that forms of nature in the city are polluted by their contact with the urban environment. This is a powerful fiction, which conceals the evidence that the urban environment can be a fertile habitat for forms of nature, providing the conditions in which diverse natural forms can flourish; in contrast, ironically, to the increasing uniformity of natural forms in the commercial agricultural life of the countryside (Hinchcliffe, 1999: 148–55). As Wilson comments, nature’s evident penetration of the city ‘goes against the ways, in western thought, nature and the city (the rural and the urban) are positioned as incompatible opposites’ (Wilson, 1995: 146). It is because this insistence on the separation of nature from culture arises from a concern to maintain the integrity of cultural boundaries (Douglas, 1994) that discourses on nature in the 301

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city render it as simultaneously polluted by and polluting of the urban environment. It could be argued that the natural forms that appear in cities are qualitatively different from the natural forms that appear in the countryside, and that therefore we cannot speak of nature, or forms of nature in the city. In the city, the natural world is a human-made token, such as a garden, a park, or a pet dog (Hinchcliffe, 1999: 138;Tuan, 1984). How then can birds, foxes, squirrels, flowers, rivers, grass be described? Is a park a natural environment? While it is true that the way forms of nature live or grow in the city are shaped by the urban environment, it is also true that forms of nature in the countryside are shaped by human interventions in the rural environment. Harvey (1996), reflecting on the ways in which capitalism has organized differentiated spaces of production within an overall unity, comments that there is nothing unnatural about New York City; conversely, there is nothing natural about, say, coffee plantations in the Côte d’Ivoire. Hinchcliffe (1999) adopts the term ‘city-nature formation’ to describe the specific adaptation of non-human species to the urban environment and to undo the conceptualizing of city and nature as discrete formations. Wolch (1996) in a more utopian formulation uses zoopolis to describe a ‘renaturalized, re-enchanted city’. I prefer forms of nature (Kong, 2000), which gives a language for describing nature in the city but retains what is after all a meaningful cultural distinction between nature and the city that cannot be undone by simple academic fiat. In any case, what is important is that these animals, birds and flowers exist in urban contexts and, at some level, unsettle our understanding of what the city is – socially, environmentally and culturally. Despite our discomfort with, or simple eclipsing of, nature in the city, forms of nature flourish in city environments. Significantly, the more successful they are, the more we disparage them. So, children’s conceptualizing of nature as polluting of, and polluted by, urban space takes place in the context of a complex set of historical and social practices that render the urban and the natural as discrete categories. The strength of these discursive practices is such that they resist correction by the actual presence of natural forms in the urban environment. In general, these children ignored or stood aside from forms of nature in the city and expressed horror at its polluting potential. CONSUMPTION AND URBAN CULTURE Notwithstanding the ways that discourses about the boundaries between nature and culture have shaped these children’s engagement with urban natural forms, it is clear that there are contexts in which children do engage 302

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freely with forms of nature in urban contexts. Parks, pets, gardens, zoos, city-farms are all contexts in which children, and others, disrupt through practice the discourse of pure boundaries. This disruption of pure boundaries, I argue, is accomplished by reconfiguring these forms of nature as belonging in urban culture. This reconfiguration involves bringing nature into culture through consumption practices. These consumption practices resignify forms of nature as part of urban culture. The signification of the urban is achieved through the presence of multiple consumption opportunities. The close association between consumption and urban culture has long been recognized in both urban sociology and the sociology of consumption. Simmel (1903) pointed to the need to use commodities, especially fashion, to display identity in a world of unknowns. Christaller (1966[1933]) theorized the role of the city as a central marketplace. Castells (1977) conceptualized the city as a site of collective (i.e. public) consumption (see Fine and Leopold, 1993). More recently, it has been argued that ‘postmodern cities have become centres of consumption, play and entertainment saturated by signs and images’ (Featherstone, 1996: 106). Explanations of gentrification note the effect on the centre of the city of the dislocation of production in the transformation of the locational inner-city into sites of consumption. Whether or not children directly engage with consumption opportunities is less important than their presence as signifiers of urban space. In this way, some forms of nature become incorporated into the cultural life of the urban child. It is the co-existence of opportunities for consumption in ‘natural’ spaces and consumption of ‘natural’ spaces that facilitates the transformation of forms of nature from being polluted (and polluting) displaced entities to being a part of urban space. CHILDREN’S CONSUMPTION PRACTICES AND THEIR AESTHETIC Children’s consumption practices must be more broadly conceived than the buying of commodities, or even the ‘labour of appropriation’ (Bourdieu, 1984[1979]: 100) or re-making (De Certeau, 1984: xii) of commodities. Children in general,3 and working-class children in particular, have less access to financial resources than adults do, and this necessarily has implications for their consumption practices. Their isolation from employment and, largely as a consequence of this isolation, their detachment from decision-making in the household economy means that children have less economic resources than the adults who share their social world. Where children do have financial resources which they, and others, consider to be their own, this is accumulated through gifts, including ‘pocket money’. 303

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Children may go to the shops on behalf of the household but they do not ‘do the shopping’. In general, the consumption decisions involved in ‘doing the shopping’ are made elsewhere and delegated to the child. Where children go shopping on their own behalf, making their own consumption decisions, perhaps spending pocket-money and other gifts, they are in a world of pleasure-seeking. This is the Romantic ethic which Campbell (1995) argues moves along the ‘spirit of consumerism’. The concept of the Romantic ethic is very useful as a description of the idealization of the commodity that characterizes consumption in late modernity. This idealization is accomplished by imbuing commodities, partly through advertising strategies, with the sensual experiences of profoundly pleasurable social moments like sex, childbirth, parenting and love. This idealization of the commodity is not limited, of course, to children’s consumption. What is distinctive about children’s consumption practices, when they are consuming on their own behalf, is that they are saturated in the Romantic ethic of hedonistic pleasure-seeking, almost to the exclusion of other dimensions of use-value. The pleasure that children take in hyper-real, idealized and utopian images and objects is evident in the children’s market for highlycoloured, other-worldly, fantasy toys like My Little Pony, Barbie, the Tweenies, Teletubbies. Television programmes, films, videos and playstation games directed at child consumers are also marked by unreal and hyper-real images and colours, the easy identification of moral dilemmas and their satisfactory resolution (Seiter, 1993). Of course, children are not themselves involved in the production of these commodities and the extent to which they represent children’s culture may be questioned. However, I would concur with Miller’s (1987) argument that while the production of goods is not simply a response to consumers’ desire, nor can it be seen as simply the effect of advertising strategies. Discussing James’s (1979) account of children’s own purchases of ‘inedible’ sweets (strong, artificial colours, modelled on insects, corpses, blood, etc.) he comments that: Here, a social group which is in a relationship of inferiority to the dominant adult world is able to objectify a perspective which asserts clearly the potential opposition of its interests to that world. This suggests a degree of autonomy in cultural production on behalf of dominated groups. While the sweets are produced by industrial processes for mass consumption, and according solely to the demands of profit, it would be equally hard to argue that the result is the responsibility of either some evil genius at the production end, or some demonic child at the consumption 304

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end. Rather, we have the emergence, over a considerable period of time of a children’s culture. (Miller, 1987: 168) While toys, videos, films and playstation games form a core part of children’s consumption worlds, children’s consumption practices are much broader than buying goods. Other dimensions of buying – choosing, comparison, social/peer advice, knowledge of what counts as ‘cultural capital’ – may all be brought into play without objects being purchased. If ‘What happens to material objects once they have left the retail outlet . . . is part of the consumption process’ (Douglas and Isherwood, 1996: 36), so is what happens before a purchase is made, or even in the absence of a purchase being made. Given that these are objects of mass consumption, children may even get to do the ‘labour of appropriation’, perhaps at other children’s houses, at school, or in other social settings, without themselves owning the object. This expanded conception of consumption acknowledges the ways in which children’s (lack of) access to financial resources shapes their practices. Often a child’s consumption will be finalized by another agent who pays for the good. In this way, the cost of goods is hidden from the child’s view, and the relationship of this cost to other dimensions of the household economy and the wider economy of production is obscured. This separation between the world of consumption and that of production is not of course unique to children. The emptying of goods of the human labour and exploitation involved in their production is the essence of the commodity fetishism that characterizes capitalist consumption. However, the construction of western childhood as a time for play and learning in the family and at school involves the ideological, if not always the actual, separation of the child from the world of production and everyday consumption. Adaptations of Piagetian theory to economic socialization suggest that children understand the economy as a series of separate, unrelated processes. Lunt (1995) remarks that Leiser et al. (1990) ‘report a dissociation in young children’s minds between the exchange of money for goods and the exchange of money for work’. One does not have to subscribe to Piaget’s theory of stages of development to acknowledge that children’s distance from production is unlikely to generate a clear association between production and consumption. This obscuration serves to embolden the Romantic ethic in the child’s consumption practices since there is for the child no external materiality that challenges the idealization of the commodity. Finally, children’s consumption is often not related to the acquisition of material objects, but of activities and spaces – swimming, football, etc. I now turn to children’s consumption of space. 305

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CONSUMING SPACES The material just discussed analyses participants’ representations of life in the city in relation to conceptions of nature. I now want to discuss my observation of children’s spatial practices in the city. It appears that children’s use of space is characterized by active, corporeal engagement in demarcated and small-space locales that are devoid of features that might attract the interest of adults. This echoes other work that suggests that children are attracted to the liminal spaces of the city. In The Child in the City, Ward (1978) particularly noted children’s interest in derelict buildings and wasteland. Areas in which small parts of the city had, so to speak, returned to nature. However, for these participants the abjection of nature and the fear of empty spaces, especially of naturalized empty spaces, rendered wasteland and ‘uncultured’ spaces unattractive. Similarly, I found in observations of adults’ and children’s use of space that children tended to make use of spaces that adults displayed little interest in. In my observation of spatial practices at the South Bank, London, I found three spaces that are particularly noticeable for the extent to which children have transformed them into children’s places. These are: a circular area outside the National Theatre (NT), a space beneath the Royal Festival Hall (RFH), and the centre of a shopping square between Waterloo Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge. The area between the river and the NT is a paved circle about 10 metres in diameter. It is formed by two stone walls that each mark out one-third of the circle. The walls are about 1 metre deep and have a gradual incline rising to 1 metre. Since this internal space is simply a circle of concrete it tends, as a result, to be more or less bypassed by adults unless they are with children. Children, on the other hand, seem to derive great pleasure from using the space. Children of different ages use it for cycling, running, climbing and skateboarding. For young children, it provides a space in which they can exercise a degree of autonomy from the gaze of their parents or carers. For older children also, its containment is apparently part of its attraction. This is, I would suggest, because it demarcates the boundaries of a space that can be successfully claimed as a child space. This claim is made through the opportunities for constant activity (running, climbing, etc.) that the space affords. In addition, the design of the space makes it unattractive to adults. When adults do make their own claim to this space, children tend to shrink their spatial claims until the adults move on. On one occasion, for example, a man rode his bike up and down the walls for 2 or 3 minutes, during which time the children playing in the space began to leave it, returning as soon as the cyclist left. 306

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The antibiosis in children’s and adults’ spatial practices is also evident in the second area that children have successfully claimed for themselves. In this space, beneath the RFH, children also used constant movement within a clearly demarcated zone, which is unlikely to be attractive to adults, to establish their spatial claims. This area is a roughly circular pit about 15 metres in diameter that has sloping walls about 2 metres high and two flights of steps that link it to the river-level walkway. It is used as a skateboarding venue by a shifting population of skateboarders, almost without exception boys, aged between about 12 and 16. Unlike the space discussed earlier, this area requires access to a space that is used by adults – the riverside walkway. In order to pick up enough speed to jump into the skateboarding area, the skateboarders start their run at between 2 and 5 metres from the circle. These children, who are on average older than the children who make use of the NT space, directly compete with adults for the occupation of space. It seems likely that both their size and their occupation of a liminal social position between childhood and adulthood creates the opportunity for a successful competition for space with adults. This is in contrast to the earlier case where young children simply conceded space to adults, only resuming their activity when the adults moved on. It is interesting that, as with the younger children, these spatial claims are made, and won, through constant activity and orientated around a clearly demarcated locale. These features of demarcated space, constant activity and adult indifference are also present in the third space. This space is a square, lined on all sides by restaurants and gift shops. There are narrow spaces between the restaurants on two sides, the side that fronts onto the river walkway and the side that backs onto the road, and these form the entrances and exits to the square. In the centre of the square is a large stage and, behind that, an area of roughly 25 square metres that has 10 or so wooden rocking ‘horses’ in it. These toys – which are for sale and retail at about £400 – signal this as a potential child’s space. As with the other two spaces, the children press their claim to the space (which includes the stage) by running, jumping, climbing and shouting. Here, as with the first space, young children gain a degree of autonomy from the watchful gaze of their parents and carers who, perhaps reassured by the apparent confinement of the area, tend to drift to the edges of this ‘child space’. How do these general observations inform our understanding of how children interact with or use natural space in the city? I have suggested that, based on my observation of children’s and adults’ spatial practices, children’s use of space is characterized by active, corporeal engagement in demarcated and small-scale locales that are devoid of features which might attract the 307

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attention of adults. The unspoken consensus among children that such spaces are child spaces creates the conditions in which they can achieve critical mass. Such an achievement makes it particularly likely that they will be able to successfully defend their spatial claims. In relation to using unbuilt and uncultivated spaces, or wasteland, we could expect that children might be attracted to these spaces because of the combination of containment, adult disinterest and possibilities for active engagement that they offer. However, against this has to be set the general abjection of forms of nature in the city, discussed earlier, and the fear of empty spaces, especially naturalized empty spaces which is so characteristic of urban discourse. These levels of fear and abjection mitigate against the possibility of possession which seems to be so closely related to the potential for pleasure. If active, corporeal engagement is a precondition for children’s enjoyment of places and objects then, in general, nature in the city offers little in the way of active engagement. Indeed, children are discouraged from active engagement with forms of nature in the city: they are admonished for picking flowers and warned against the diseases nature carries (‘wash your hands, you’ve been in the park’). The importance of possession for the exercise of pleasure can be aligned with children’s consumption of market goods. Gunter and Farnham (1998) comment in their psychological analysis of young people’s consumption that ‘children gradually learn to identify with those objects which they can explore and control and come to view them as theirs . . . Possessions thus draw a boundary between what is self and what is other’ (p. 45). Where the possibility of possession does arise, in particular when forms of nature are transformed into commodities, this in turn renders nature’s presence in the city as less ‘unnatural’. This conceptual transformation is an alternative to the construction of pure boundaries evident in the discourse on nature in the city as a polluted and polluting presence, discussed earlier. Since the abjection of nature works against the possibility for active engagement in the natural world, reconfiguring nature as belonging in the city in turn opens up the possibility for an active engagement with, or possession of, nature. This reconfiguration cannot be achieved at the level of thought but follows from shifts in practice. It is through the act of commodification of forms of nature that the consciousness of nature’s place in the city is reshaped. One of the most obvious instances of this commodification of nature in children’s social practices is, of course, the park. Before elaborating on how children’s use of parks naturalizes the place of nature in the city, it is perhaps necessary to justify the claim that parks are commodities. It would be impossible to claim that the park is a full 308

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commodity. In many ways, parks are outside of market relations. There are, however, three reasons for treating them as quasi-commodities. First, within all but the smallest parks there are several consumption opportunities; these may include a cafe, an ice-cream van and sports facilities. In larger parks, a part of the park may be accessible only to ticket-holders on certain days, e.g. for festivals and circuses. Second, many of the activities which children do in the park make use of commodities, e.g. wearing sports gear. Third, the urban park is a context in which children who are in otherwise unconnected family, friendship and school networks exchange ideas about what are, and what are not, desirable commodities. The importance of opportunities for consumption of, and in, these spaces to rendering them interesting and accessible is highlighted by some of the respondents in this research. Most girls commented that the park no longer held any interest for them. The exception to this was the positive view of a middle-class girl whose parents paid for her and her brother to have tennis lessons, while the parents had coffee in the park cafe. These opportunities for consumption both within the park and in preparation for going to the park bring this naturalized space into the sphere of urban cultural practices. In doing so, they make it appear both more and less unnatural; more unnatural in the sense that it no longer belongs to the construct ‘nature’ and less unnatural in that it finds a place for forms of nature in city life. However, the opportunities for active engagement in this space are highly gendered and aged. Young children (under 7 years) of both genders have a very obvious presence in parks, particularly in the playground. Environmental educationalists assert that children prefer ‘natural settings’ to the ‘synthetic settings of asphalt and play equipment’ (Moore, 1997: 207), and that children have a ‘predilection for recreation in nature’ (Kong, 2000: 267). My observation of the playground in Brixton’s central park contradicts this view. If children’s spatial practices are used as a marker of preference, then children here displayed a strong preference for playing on playground equipment rather than for being in the greener, more open and naturalized spaces in the park. Older girls have very little presence in parks altogether, unless they are looking after younger siblings. Older boys and men had a significant presence in the park through their appropriation of relatively large spaces for playing football in. Notwithstanding this gendered, classed, aged and racialized appropriation of space, forms of nature which are in settings which facilitate children’s appropriation of space through movement and active engagement are most attractive to children, and figure strongly in children’s social worlds. In these settings, the presence of venues and objects that are recognizable 309

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as commodities invite active, corporeal engagement and render nature ‘safe’. The possibility of possession that this commodification facilitates reconfigures the Other as part of the Self. IDEALIZED COMMODITIES AND HYPER-REAL FORMS OF NATURE It might be expected that fully commoditized forms of nature would therefore be most successfully incorporated into urban culture. However, the more fully commoditized an object is, the less available it is for possession (and so for active engagement) and simultaneously the more it is idealized. That it is less available for possession, at least for working-class children, is simply a function of their limited access to financial resources. That they are idealized is a function of consumption practices in late capitalism. The importance of the idealized, pleasure-seeking Romantic ethic to the ‘spirit of modern consumerism’ (Campbell, 1995), the replacement of the real by the hyper-real and the substitution of the simulacra for the thing (Rodaway, 1996) is a feature of post-modernity which has often been observed. This idealization can be seen, for example, in the earlier discussion of children’s idealized and hyper-real representations of nature. However, this idealization exists in tension with the corporeality of the natural world. The idealization of pets, for instance, as safe, sweet, soft and gentle is in tension with their propensity to bite, scratch and shit. Indeed, such behaviour can lead to the swift expulsion of the idealized object from the world of culture and return it to the polluted world of nature, as the following extract suggests: Ali: When I was 3 years old, yeah, I had a rat, yeah. Interviewer: What, as a pet? Ali: Yeah. But he keep on biting me for no reason. Once I got diseased by him. Then after that we gave him back to the shopkeeper: it make people diseased when he bites it. This time I buy a rabbit. Forms of nature in the city can be classified by their degree of commodification (see Figure 1). For those forms that have been fully transformed into commodities there is a tension between the idealization of the object and the corporeality of nature. This tension constantly threatens the successful reconfiguration of nature as being part of urban culture. At the other end of the scale, forms of nature which remain outside of market relations do not form part of a sign which could be used to signify urban life. What I have called quasi-commodities offer the possibility of active engagement in a naturalized space that presents opportunities for 310

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Non-commodity

Quasi-commodity

Commodity

Urban wasteland

Parks

Pets

Nature reserves

City-farms

Zoos

Gardens

Nature theme parks

Figure 1: The commodification of forms of nature

consumption. Consumption, as a signifier of urban culture, thus allows nature to be reconfigured as part of urban life. RECONFIGURING THE OTHER This analysis has implications for understanding how children reconfigure the Other. The binary opposition of nature and culture prefigures other binary divisions, which rest, ultimately, on the opposition between the Self and the Other. In the case of human subjects, these polarities are structured in domination. Strong versions of environmentalism and ecofeminism (Warren and Erkal, 1997) would argue that this is equally true for the opposition between nature and culture (or, in the terms of this article, the rural and the urban). I do not want to draw an equivalence between the domination of human subjects and the ‘domination’ of forms of nature. If domination involves both exploitation and oppression (Walkerdine, 1996;Young, 1990) then while both natural and human subjects can be exploited, human consciousness and sensibility would seemingly have to be present for ‘oppression’ to carry meaning. I do want to suggest, however, that understanding how cultural practices generate a reconfiguration of nature’s place in the city has implications for understanding how ‘Others’ in urban life are reconfigured as belonging to the urban milieu. First, it suggests that the simple presence, direct or mediated, of the Other is not sufficient for its incorporation into the child’s construction of the Self. Discursive practices about who or what does or does not belong are determinate in shaping cultural boundaries. This challenges the widely held assumption in progressive theories of multiculturalism that the presence of the Other, either direct or mediated, is in itself sufficient to 311

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reconfigure cultural boundaries. In the analysis of nature and the city offered here, I have suggested that the reconfiguring of this particular Other is accomplished through the consumption of natural forms and consumption in naturalized spaces. The importance of consumption in reconfiguring nature as belonging in the city arises because consumption is a crucial signifier of the city. As such it brings non-urban entities through the process of commodification into the field of everyday urban culture. This use of commodification to reconfigure the Other as part of the Self has long been recognized in other contexts, e.g. in the treatment of music in the sociology of race (Back, 1999, see esp. pp. 222–5) and in what Hall (2001: 3) has called commercial multiculturalism. This focus on consumption is a postmodern echo of earlier, Marxist, analysis which, expanding on the Marx of The German Ideology (Marx and Engels, 1989[1846]), stressed the importance of production in shaping consciousness. These reconfigurations of the Self and the Other are often taken to be the portent for a new multicultural consciousness, which celebrates difference albeit in a context of social and other inequalities. The analysis offered here is rather more pessimistic and suggests that, while these reconfigurations of the Self and the Other can be achieved, they are unstable, fragile, inarticulate, and temporally and spatially bounded. At particular times and in particular places – and in the contexts of specific configurations of events – dominant discourses of belonging are dissolved and the Other is reconfigured as belonging with the Self. Indeed, these spatially, temporally bounded configurations of events in which dominant discourses of exclusion are dissolved make up much of the fabric of everyday life for working-class Londoners living in contexts of cultural diversity and themselves having complex cultural identities. Nonetheless, as the disjuncture between these children’s representations of the natural and the urban and their practices of engagement display, cultural boundaries remain overdetermined by historically and socially embedded discourses of belonging which are structured in dominance. CONCLUSION I have argued in this article that urban children’s abjection of forms of nature is an exercise in cultural boundary setting congruent with a western discourse that insists on the separation of the urban and the rural. The power of this discourse renders nature in the city as a polluting and polluted entity, despite the flourishing of forms of nature in these children’s locale. However, forms of nature are reconfigured as belonging in the city when they are reconceptualized as (quasi) commodities. This, I argue, is because consumption is a signifier of urban space, and because it provides 312

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a context for active engagement which is apparently a sine qua non of children’s spatial practices. However, I suggest that when forms of nature are fully commoditized, as with pets and zoo animals, this obviates the possibilities for active engagement or possession, in the absence of financial resources. Furthermore, the idealization of the commodity, characteristic of children’s consumption practices in late modernity, lies in tension with the corporeality of the natural world. Thus when the Other (in this case ‘nature’) reasserts its difference, as with Ali’s pet rat, it is once again expelled from the Self. Notes 1. For an elaboration of the complex ways in which ethnicity and class are mediated by young people in urban space, see Back (1999). 2. All real names have been substituted by pseudonyms chosen by the respondent. 3. I am suggesting here that the isolation of children from work affects their consumption practices. This implies that, in contexts where children routinely participate in paid work and contribute directly to the household economy, their consumption practices are likely to be structured differently.

Acknowledgements I presented an earlier version of this paper to the BSA Consumption Group Seminar on Consumption and Generation, Leeds, June 2001, and the data presented in the article are part of a research project funded by the Open University’s National Everyday Cultures Programme.

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Walkerdine, V. (1996) ‘Subject to Change without Notice: Psychology, Postmodernity and the Popular’, in S. Pile and N. Thrift (eds) Mapping the Subject. London: Routledge. Ward, C. (1978) Children in the City. London: Architectural Press. Warner, M. (1994) Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. London: Vintage. Warren, K. and Erkal, N. (eds) (1997) Ecofeminism:Women, Culture, Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wilson, E. (1995) ‘The Rhetoric of Urban Space’, New Left Review 209: 146–60. Wirth, L. (1938) ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology 44: 1–24. Wolch, J. (1996) ‘Zoopolis’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 7(2): 21–48. Wolff, K.H. (ed.) (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: The Free Press. www.haringey.gov.uk, accessed 10 June 2002. www.mpa.gov.uk, accessed 10 June 2002. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Karen Wells is a Research Associate with the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has a doctorate in international relations from the London School of Economics. Her research interests are in childhood cultures, cities, and transnational relations. Address: Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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