Designing Modern Childhoods

by Gutman, Marta; De Conick-smith, Ning; Fass, Paula S.; Gillis, John R. (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780813541952
• ISBN10: 0813541956
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-28
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

With the advent of urbanization in the early modern period, the material worlds of children were vastly altered. In industrialized democracies, a broad consensus developed that children should not work, but rather learn and play in settings designed and built with these specific purposes in mind. Unregulated public spaces for children were no longer acceptable; and the cultural landscapes of children's private lives were changed, with modifications in architecture and the objects of daily life. In Designing Modern Childhoods, architectural historians, social historians, social scientists, and architects examine the history and design of places and objects such as schools, hospitals, playgrounds, houses, cell phones, snowboards, and even the McDonald's Happy Meal. Special attention is given to how children use and interpret the spaces, buildings, and objects that are part of their lives, becoming themselves creators and carriers of culture. The authors extract common threads in children's understandings of their material worlds, but they also show how the experience of modernity varies for young people across time, through space, and according to age, gender, social class, race, and culture.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction: Good to Think With-History, Space, and Modern Childhood	p. 1
Child Saving and the Design of Modern Childhoods
Connecting with the Landscape: Campfires and Youth Culture at American Summer Camps, 1890-1950	p. 23
A (Better) Home Away from Home: The Emergence of Children's Hospitals in an Age of Women's Reform	p. 42
Sick Children and the Thresholds of Domesticity: The Dawson-Harrington Families at Home	p. 61
The "Myers Park Experiment" in Auckland, New Zealand, 1913-1916	p. 82
The Choreography of Education and Play
A Breath of Fresh Air: Open-Air Schools in Europe	p. 107
Molding the Republican Generation: The Landscapes of Learning in Early Republican Turkey	p. 128
Nomadic Schools in Senegal: Manifestations of Integration or Ritual Performance?	p. 152
Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction	p. 171
Space, Power, and Inequality in Modern Childhoods
The View from the Back Step: White Children Learn about Race in Johannesburg's Suburban Homes	p. 193
Children and the Rosenwald Schools of the American South	p. 213
The Geographies and Identities of Street Girls in Indonesia	p. 233
Consumption, Commodification, and the Media: Material Culture and Contemporary Childhoods
Coming of Age in Suburbia: Gifting the Consumer Child	p. 253
Inscribing Nordic Childhoods at McDonald's	p. 269
"Board with the World": Youthful Approaches to Landscapes and Mediascapes	p. 282
Migrating Media: Anime Media Mixes and the Childhood Imagination	p. 301
Epilogue: The Islanding of Children-Reshaping the Mythical Landscapes of Childhood	p. 316
Notes on Contributors	p. 331
Index	p. 335
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