Changing Cities: Climate, Youth, and Land Markets in Urban Areas
INTRODUCTION: YOUTH AS MEMBERS AND PRODUCERS OF THEIR SPACES
Although young people are becoming an increasingly dominant subset of the population in Latin American cities, they often lack resilience in spite of their numbers, surfacing as an indelibly vulnerable group within urban areas. Due to their inability to vote and lack of individual voice outside the context of the adults surrounding them, they have very few venues to contribute to the spaces where they reside, yielding their marginal stakeholder status within their respective communities. In turn, this manifests itself as confounded notions of belonging among youth, which for the purpose of this paper I term “citizenship.” Lawy and Biesta define citizenship among youth as “a social practice that is embedded within the day-to-day reality of (young) people’s lives, instead of a fixed outcome of a linear socialization trajectory,” while De Visscher and Bouverne–De Bie further assert that “citizenship-as-practice suggests that young people learn to be citizens as a consequence of their participation in the actual practices that make up their lives” (cited by Hardoy et al. 2010, 379). Considering these two definitions, we establish citizenship among youth as a highly active process, one in which day-to-day interactions, high levels of engagement in their communities, and strong structural and intrapersonal relationships are extremely critical to their success as citizens. This not only establishes the importance of continuity in building citizenship for young people but also shows how present-day contexts and policy measures can have profound effects on the future of youth as contributing adult members in their community. To better comprehend the importance of youth community involvement in low-income areas writ large, throughout the paper, I build the discourse around the following questions: Do policy measures or programs that ultimately build a more comprehensive meaning of citizenship for youth in urban areas of Argentina aid in decreasing deviance and violence among such groups? Do subsequent outcomes represent larger strides toward improving the general livelihoods of young people within their respective communities? Monetary and infrastructural resources can be provided, but at what point can we empower youth and foster a sense of belonging that generates the same sentiments—and, as a result, stake and responsibility—that come along with citizenship? | 58 |