Coming of age in Planville: A study of the 'spatial literacy' among adolescents in a middle-class, planned community

My dissertation examines how middle-class adolescents (ages 14-18) come to identify themselves in relation to their physical surroundings, cultivate public places to conduct social activities, and negotiate adult authority in a master-planned city I call Planville. The study combines a two-year ethnography with focus group sessions and semi-structured interviews to explore three research questions: (1) How do teens carve out meaningful places for themselves in the public domain of Planville? (2) How do different types of places provide opportunities for and pose constraints on teens' activities, and how do teens respond to these opportunities and constraints? And (3) What are the links between the strategies and locales identified in RQ1, the social and normative variation identified in RQ2, and core aspects of youth social psychology?; This study approaches the daily activities of suburban youth from the broad perspective of spatial sociology, and focuses on the relationship between the social and spatial organization of a community as it shapes and is shaped by adolescents. The first empirical chapter (Chapter 3) deals with street skating, and identifies three forms of spatial regulation over youth, namely containment, exclusion, and displacement. I find that the teen skateboarders exhibit general tendencies of compliance and avoidance to the regulation. The next chapter (Chapter 4) focuses on the way the youth appropriate commercial place for hanging out. By conceptualizing the construction of place as an interactive process, I show that the different types of teens hang out in prime, adapted, or marginal places, depending on their desired activities. The last empirical chapter (Chapter 5) explores the meanings and significance of a spatial label, "bubble," used pervasively among Planville teenagers to refer to the community. I argue that the label functions as symbolic boundaries for the teens to distinguish themselves from the outsiders, as well as among themselves.; At the most general level, my dissertation demonstrates the analytic utility of using spatial sociology, with its interactionist and urban sociological underpinnings, to analyze the interplay between middle-class youth and space. The last chapter (Chapter 6) explores the theoretical contributions and policy implications of my dissertation.