Thinking through Place, Space and Mobility: Domains for Understanding Children’s Well-Being and Lived Realities

This paper will focus on a discussion of place, space (spatio-temporal) and mobility as domains of children’s well-being, quality of life and accounts of diverse lived realities. How children (and youth) maintain, sustain or expand their activity choices, and action and interactional spaces and places has implications for their rights as citizens, their inclusion, development, participation, and well-being. Innate and biographical as well as proximal (family) and distal (institution and community) influences will shape and direct children’s activities, interactions, networks, and livelihood and survival strategies. This will mediate in the choice of activities available for children to participate in, when they travel, rest, socialise, go to school or work, how they do this, can they do this in terms of independent mobility, immobility or infrastructure, who they do this with, what they do it for and how often they it do. This paper will draw from the results of a broader study on children’s (re)imagining, (re)interpretation, and (re)negotiation of their everyday interactional and activity spaces and places in an urban locality. An exploratory, qualitative study will be undertaken with learners attending secondary schools in Northdale a Northern Suburb of the Msunduzi Municipality in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Using mainly semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions will be conducted with young people aged 15 to 16 years. The participants will also be asked to freely write and provide accounts on specific themes related to the broader topic. The adopted approach values and gives due weight to young people’s knowledge, voices, agency and autonomy. The broader study aims to demonstrate that there is considerable potential and opportunities to expand this research space and consider the wider implications of the derived assumptions for children’s well-being and quality of life in urban areas in South Africa post-apartheid and including developing and African countries.