“Erano altri tempi”. Parents' diachronic look at children's experience of public spaces in two European metropolises

Urban research has shown how the decrease of children’s presence in urban public spaces has been an international trend in western countries for the last decades. Many  quantitative studies have been conducted, as well as qualitative ones: interviews with children grown in urban areas between the 50’s and the 70’s confirm this progressive retreat from public spaces and a greater supervision by parents over time (Valentine and McKendrick 1997; Karsten 2005). Nevertheless, these important findings can be improved as they only address the scale of the neighborhood, which tends to reduce the focus to the “parochial realm” at the expense of the “public realm” (Lofland 1998).   Therefore, the stranger as a classical urban feature is the one parents mainly distrust for the sake of the safety of their children. Considering their own experience as a child and then as a parent, what do the contemporary parents have to say about the evolution of children’s experience of public spaces at both the local and the urban level? Mainly based on in-depth interviews with parents of children aged from 8 to 14 (n=80), my doctoral research concentrates on parental supervision of children urban practices in two socially mixed areas of Milan and Paris. The study confirms that they tend to consider their own experience of public spaces as a child as much safer and cooler than the one of their own child(ren) in both metropolitan contexts.   Classical (and important) explicative factors such as the increase of the number of the cars and the changes in the domestic and familiar spheres are not sufficient enough in order to understand this trend. Parents’ diachronic look at children’s experience of public spaces in focus is indeed a fruitful way of studying empirically the influence on urban practices of the public discourses on crime and pedophilia.