Tracing notions of sustainability in urban childhoods

Abstract

This chapter explores shifts in constructions of childhoods in the contemporary urban setting of the city of Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand. The study is grounded in children’s private and public daily experiences, perceptions, and relationships, analysed through images and visions that they portray of their own twenty first century urban childhoods. The analyses capture and illustrate the changing local and globalised natures of urban Auckland childhoods, and changing notions of sustainability for the youngest, under 5 year old, children. This chapter arises out of a project that aims to influence orientations towards childhoods, and to inform policy and practices by which urban childhoods are governed and lived, in urban Auckland. Through the lens of new materialism, which involves a vast range of diverse approaches, and an intricate, distinctive and nuanced web of disciplines, thinking and being, that are political, ethical-epistemological, and ontological in nature, urban childhoods are at the heart of these notions, where through their mundane acts, children perform and re-imagine sustainability in relation with their environment.