7THE SPATIAL CONSTRUCTION OF

YOUTH CULTURESDoreen Massey

A few years ago I was filming in the Yucatan in Mexico. I was interviewinga group of women in their home. We sat on stones on an earthen floor, thelight from an open fire flickering across the baked walls and thatched roof.The women were making tortillas (corn bread) and talking about theirlives. This was the way bread had ‘always’ been made they said, as theyslapped it from hand to hand before throwing it on to the red hot grill.Outside, the late afternoon faded into evening, and the noises of the nightgrew in intensity among the trees in which the house was set. It seemed apicture of a ‘truly indigenous’ culture preserving its customs, its clothing,its corn bread and its beliefs.

The interview over, we talked on for a while and then walked back toour jeep. As we approached the road our ears were assaulted by a racket ofelectronic noise. In a pool of light from another building—this one wiredfor electricity—a dozen or so youngsters were urgently playing computergames. Machines were lined up around the walls of the flimsy shack andevery one was surrounded by players. Electronic noises, American slangand bits of Western music floated off into the nighttime jungle.

Of course, we filmed the youngsters too. But the question is what tomake of this contrast: was the youth culture of the Yucatan countryside theentry-point for external influences into (maybe the eventual break-up of)this inherited Mayan culture which had lasted so long and endured somuch? Are the cultures of the young more outgoing and internationalisedthan those of older generations? Indeed, how would one define the cultureof these lives which we caught for such a brief moment of evening play? Wasthis a local culture, or were these youngsters part of an emerging globalculture of youth?

The answer to these questions depends on how one conceptualises‘culture’ and this is something which has been a matter of fierce theoreticaldebate. That roomful of computer games was certainly a link between thissmall cluster of houses in eastern Mexico and something that might be

characterised as ‘global culture’ (though already some questions should beregistered: is it ‘global’ or, say, American? Is it ‘global’ in the full sense thateveryone, everywhere, has access to it?). And there were plenty of otherlinks too—the T-shirts with slogans in English, the baseball caps, thetrainers, the endless litter of cola cans. And yet of course the ‘youth culture’here was also quite different from that of, say, San Francisco, or a smallAmerican mid-west town, or Redditch, England, or Tokyo. In each ofthese places the T-shirts and the computer games are mixed in with locallydistinct cultures which have their own histories. The very meaning of the‘global’ elements themselves will change: what is and what is not a statussymbol, how particular slogans or music are interpreted. And they will beembedded in a host of particularities—Mayan family relations, anunderstanding of an ancient cosmology, a particular attitude to the USAwhich comes from being its southern neighbour, a vague consciousness of‘Latin America’. In each place the mix of ‘local’ and ‘global’ will bedifferent. So, in partial answer to some of the questions which were posedabove: local specificity—such as local variations in youth cultures—can beconstantly reinvented even while international influences are accepted andincorporated.

The local youth culture of the Yucatec Maya, then, is a product ofinteraction. It is certainly not a closed, local, culture, but neither is it anundifferentiatedly global one. And such interactions could be exemplifiedin a million ways. The spatial openness of youth cultures in many if not allparts of the world is clear. Across the world even the poorest of youngpeople strive to buy into an international cultural reference system: theright trainers, a T-shirt with a Western logo, a baseball cap with the rightslogan. Music draws on a host of references which are fused, rearticulated,played back (see, for instance, Meegan, 1995). Anti-roads protesters andyoung ecologists link up via the Internet with environmental battlesworldwide (internationalism can mean interconnection without implyingsameness). The youngest generations of diaspora societies wrestleconstantly to find an enabling interlocking of the different ‘cultures’ inwhich they find themselves: it is a struggle indeed to build another,different—‘hybrid’—culture.

And yet the evidence seems to be that all youth cultures—and notjust those more obvious cases such as the children of diasporas—are hybridcultures. All of them involve active importation, adoption and adaptation.And indeed this touches the heart of some recent debates about how toconceptualise culture. Indeed what is at issue is the geographical constitutionof cultures. In a long accepted formulation, ‘cultures’, and certainly ‘localcultures’ were understood as locally produced systems of social interaction

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and symbolic meanings. Cultures which felt themselves to be under threatwould conduct a kind of archaeology in search of origins, a search for whatwas ‘authentic’ and essential to that cultural formation. Imaginedgeographically, such a culture was understood as preserving its authenticitythrough closure. It was not invaded by cultural intrusions (foreignelements) from outside. In such a geographical imagination of a culturethere would be a clear distinction between what was ‘local’ and what camefrom outside. So the authenticity of the Mayan women in that housewould be seen as being under threat from the computer games theirchildren played on endlessly. And quintessential Englishness is interpretedas in danger of defilement by the ‘pouring in‘of ‘immigrants’.

Such a view of cultural authenticity, and especially of an authenticitywhich depends on purity and closure is now increasingly argued to beinappropriate (see, for instance, Hall, 1995). For ‘Englishness’ did notsomehow grow out of the soil but rather is a complex product of all thepeoples who over the centuries have settled that part of the British Isles, ofall their contacts and influences. The quintessential cup of tea could not besipped without plantations in India, Opium Wars in China and— if youtake sugar—a history of slavery in the Caribbean (Massey, 1991). Andthose women in the Yucatan?—on the earthen walls was pinned a pictureof the Virgin of Guadaloupe, and the language we were chatting in aroundthat fire was not Mayan (though Yucatec Mayan is still used) but that ofthe Spanish who conquered Mexico 500 years ago. Appreciating thismeans reimagining the geographical constitution of cultures: here they arenot closed but open, not ingrown (‘pure’) products of relative isolation butthe outcome of incessant processes of social interaction. Here it is muchmore difficult to distinguish the local from the global. This is a reworkingof the geographical imagination of culture which has been well captured inthe formulation, from ‘roots’ to ‘routes’.

•There are three points which can be drawn out of the argument so far.

Firstly, while youth cultures certainly leap geographical scales in thesearch for influences and references to tap into, this openness ofcultural formations is not specific to the young. ‘Hybridity’ is probably acondition of all cultures. So the young Maya may be adding anotherelement to an already mixed brew.

Secondly, if it has been necessary to rethink the geography of culturesthen this process in itself has encouraged a challenge to the manner inwhich we think about space. One of the ways, both in popular discourseand academic analysis, in which it is customary to represent theorganisation of space is by making use of the concept of scale. It has indeed

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on occasions been claimed that ‘scale’ is one of the central concepts ingeographical thinking (see, for instance, Smith, 1993). Thus manyanalyses work—implicitly or explicitly—with a spatial framework which isorganised into a nested hierarchy of different levels, or scales. Smith, forinstance, has suggested the sequence ‘body, home, community, urban,region, nation, global’ (1993:101). The list itself, as Smith agrees, isimmediately open to debate and challenge: why are the ‘scales’ of thecontinent or the workplace excluded? Some of the ‘scales’ (such ascommunity) are not necessarily specifically spatial; a ‘region’ ofLuxembourg is of a very different size (scale?) than a region of China; andso on. But the analysis of (youth) culture above raises even morefundamental doubts about what is meant by the concept of scale and howit can be used in geographical analyses.

What emerged from the discussion of changing conceptualisations ofculture (from roots to routes) was a notion of space as organised, not intodistinct scales, but rather through a vast complexity of interconnections. Aso-called ‘local’ youth culture was argued to be not a closed system ofsocial relations but a particular articulation of contacts and influencesdrawn from a variety of places scattered, according to power-relations,fashion and habit, across many different parts of the globe. Social spacesare best thought of in terms of complicated nets of inter-relations in whicheach particular culture is differently located, but as networks which arecertainly not tidily organisable into distinct ‘scales’. Moreover, as was alsoargued, the different ‘scales’ influence each other— the ‘global’ is insidethe ‘local’, for instance (indeed often itself has ‘local’—e.g. American,Caribbean—origins), and the ‘local’ affects the character of the ‘global’.Finally, the geographies of cultures themselves cut across many of the mostcommonly accepted hierarchies of scale. The interconnections which bindtogether and internally differentiate a diaspora culture, for instance, cutacross regions, nation states and continents, linking local areas in, say, aBritish city to a Turkish region of Cyprus, to a particular island in theCaribbean or a village in India. Such links take no notice at all of the neatpackaging of space into a hierarchy of scales. What they suggest is that thesocial relations which constitute space are not organised into scales somuch as into constella tions of temporary coherence (and among suchconstellations we can identify local cultures) set within a social space whichis the product of relations and interconnections from the very local to theintercontinental. This is a view of social space which recognises itsenormous complexity and which refuses prematurely to tame it into anyhierarchy of neatly ordered boxes labelled urban, regional, national. Weshall return to this issue later.

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But before that there is a third point which it is important to draw outfrom the opening argument. This is that all these relations which constructspace, since they are social relations, are always in one way or anotherimbued with power. That is to say, such relations are not just neutral‘connections’ between one cultural constellation and another, or others;they reflect in their form and their direction geographical differences(uneven development) in cultural influence, fashion, economic power, thespatial structure of the media industry, the traces of migrations perhapscenturies ago, trade routes, the access to ownership of computers, thedominance of Hollywood—and a host of other phenomena. What’s more,these relationships deeply affect the meanings of cultural influences andcultural contact. When, say, young people in Guatemala sport clothingmarked clearly as ‘from the USA’ (or—ironically—with an ‘American’logo and trademark emblazoned upon it but in fact quite likely made inGuatemala, a T-shirt quite likely sewn up by the mother of theGuatemalan kids themselves) they are tapping into, displaying theirknowledge of, their claimed connection with, that dominant culture to thenorth. The social relations (both cultural and economic) embedded in thisflow of cultural influence (and thus in the particular moment of thewearing of this T-shirt) are complex but they are clearly to do with thesubordination of the Guatemalan culture and economy to the greaterpower of the United States of America. For, say, a middle class whiteyoungster in those United States to wear the brightly coloured textiles ofGuatemala (a wrist-band or a jacket perhaps) has a very different meaningand embodies and expresses very different social relations. It may be thatGuatemalan textiles are seen as ‘exotic’, as tapping into the otherness of a(perhaps rather romanticised) vision of ‘unspoilt’ indigenous culture. At itsworst this can be read as the children of the relatively wealthy ‘West’brightening up their lives by tapping into less powerful and less ‘modern’cultures—the ‘Third World’ as exotic decoration. And yet again it couldbe far more than that. Many lines of cultural connection around the worldare expressions in one way or another of solidarity or of a desire to belongto something believed in. An awareness of Central America among US youthmight extend to solidarity with its people’s resistance to persistent USintervention. (Accusations of US involvement with right wing Guatemalandeath squads has long been a political issue.) The colours of Rasta, sportedby millions on both sides of the Atlantic, from Boston to Rio, fromLondon to Cape Town, were a deliberately visible sign of belonging,maybe even of commitment. Or again, on the banks of the Niger in Malimusicians are borrowing music from Cuba to weld into their own, wellaware that some of that music is itself a long historical development of

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instruments and melodies first taken across the Atlantic in the oppositedirection, in the slave ships which left West Africa some centuries ago.

It would be a fascinating exercise to try to map even just a few elementsof this complex of cultural influences and the different kinds of socialrelations and social power which they involve and express. A map of theworld would certainly reveal some parts of the world as foci of morepowerful influences than others. More modestly, the exercise might betried for a particular youth culture, in order to capture the geography ofinfluences (both inward and outward), their evolution over time, and thepower relations which they embody.

•And yet, if it is important to begin by conceptualising space in terms of acomplexity of interacting social relations, it is also important to recognisethat within that open complexity both individuals and social groups areconstantly engaged in efforts to territorialise, to claim spaces, to includesome and exclude others from particular areas. At the political level thecarving up of the world into nation states (a relatively recent, and alreadyembattled, phenomenon) is probably the most obvious example. What it isimportant to recognise is that the boundaries of nation states, and theintegrity of the territories which they enclose/ define/claim, are socialconstructions—they cut across a far more open intermeshing of the socialrelations which construct space. An excellent critique of how politicalscientists assume nation states as natural (that is: take them as given totheir analyses) has been written by Walker (1993). It is a critique whichcan be applied much more widely to the ways in which we think aboutsocial space.

Our attempts to territorialise space can have a range of differentmotivations. At one level, representing space as essentially organised intocompartments—at the extreme as organised into nested scalar hierarchies—seems simply to be an attempt to tame the unutterable complexity of thespatial: it is a way of gaining some control—even if only in our heads—byconstructing an ordered geographical imagination through which to frameour worlds. In more material practices, fencing off particular areas may bepart of wider strategies to protect and defend particular groups andinterests. Fencing off space may also, on the other hand, be an expressionof attempts to dominate, and to control and define others. What is clear isthat such strategies of spatial organisation are deeply bound up with thesocial production of identities. (A general discussion of these issues can befound in Sibley, 1995.)

The construction of youth cultures, certainly in ‘Western’ societies,exhibits many of these phenomena. The design, definition and control of

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spatiality is an active ingredient in the often contested social processes ofsuch construction.

On the one hand, a range of ‘authorities’ in wider society invent andimplement rules for the spatial ordering of the population in terms of age.So teenagers are not allowed into children’s playgrounds (which arereserved for people younger than them) or into certain clubs, drinkingplaces and cinemas showing certain films (these places being reserved forpeople older than them). Such rules have a number of evident rationales -the protection of toddlers (assumptions here about the potential behaviourof teenagers in children’s playgrounds), or the protection of teenagersthemselves from contact with influences they are deemed not yetsufficiently mature to cope with. Even such ‘ordinary’ rules are bound upwith assumptions about identity and attempts to construct sociallyacceptable identities. And indeed the very drawing of age lines and thedefinition of the spaces where particular age groups are allowed, is part ofthe process of defining an age group in the first place. The control ofspatiality is part of the process of defining the social category of ‘youth’itself.

It is also part of the process of defining what is to be deemed as acceptablebehaviour on the part of that group. Recent decades in Britain have seen anumber of hotly contested struggles over this. Perhaps the most widelyanalysed have been attempts by the Conservative government to controlwhat was evidently—to them—a disturbingly high degree of mobility andlack of desire to ‘settle down’ on the part of significant numbers of youngpeople. The battle over the Criminal Justice Act, with notions such as‘aggravated trespass’, is a classic case in point. A host of issues coincidehere. There was clearly in play a conservative resentment of people notgrowing up to respect, and to conform to, what conservative supporterswanted to see as ‘normal’ lifestyles and ambitions. These young peopleapparently did not want to own their own ‘nice home’ in some salubriousavenue (or, at least, not yet); they appeared to reject the strivings of thealready established. Attempts to forbid behaviour which is different havealways been part of the armoury of those who insist on establishing theirown behaviour as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’, and therefore by some leap oflogic to be conformed to by everyone. Moreover in this case the attempt tocontrol and define hinged centrally on spatiality. The anxiety over mobilitywas evident. By politician after politician, New Age Travellers werecontrasted with the rest of society (‘the public is fed up with New AgeTravellers’; ‘they disturb ordinary people going about their normalbusiness’). Such statements serve to define not only New Age Travellers(not part of ‘the public’, not ‘ordinary people’) but also ‘ordinary people’

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themselves: the implication is that the ordinary public does not (shouldnot) wander about the countryside. And indeed, as Sibley shows, thenature of the countryside and what kinds of behaviour were to be deemed(in)appropriate to the countryside were central stakes in this battle. Here,then, control of spatial behaviour was part of a social struggle over whatare/are not acceptable forms of youth culture. (A host of other instancescould be cited: benefits legislation aiming to keep young people in theparental home, arguments over whether or not homeless people—andparticularly those living up trees on roads protests—should have the vote,come immediately to mind.)

But the attempts to territorialise or regulate space are not all one way.The very mobility of so many young people in the 1980s and 1990s was anattempt to undermine the dominant assumption of settledness as thebetter option. And youth cultures claim their own spaces too, and may beas excluding and defensive about them as any nation state. The gangcultures of graffiti, sworn loyalties, and heavily marked and boundedterritories, are probably the most celebrated examples, but similar processesgo on in much more ordinary, day-to-day, ways. From being able to have aroom of one’s own (at least in richer families), to hanging out on particularcorners, to clubs where only your own age group goes, the construction ofspatiality can be an important element in building a social identity

In her book Goliath, Campbell (1993) discusses the TWOCers whosebehaviour caused such media fury for a few years in the 1980s/1990s.TWOCing was ‘taking cars without the owner’s consent’. Campbell writesof one group of young men on a particular estate who used such cars todemonstrate their driving skills to their admiring peers. From 10 at nightthey transformed what was otherwise thought of as the square near theshopping centre into an arena of dramatic performance. Outrageousspeeds, handbrake turns, sudden stops, dramatic exits. After 10 at nightthis space belonged to them; everyone else kept well clear. And theclaiming of this space was integral to the identity the young men werestriving to establish: the fact that other sections of the community wouldstay away was part of the point. After 10 this was young men’s territory.

And yet it was not simply a closed space. For that space near theshopping centre after 10 at night was also the meeting place ofcultural references drawn from a wide range of other places. Some of thecars were (at least in part) foreign made; the clothes that were worn madeall the correct up-to-the minute references to a wider youth culture; thefact that this kind of activity was getting coverage in the national mediacannot have been unimportant; and so on.

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In this apparently local arena, then (just as in that small Mexican roomcrowded with electronic games), the different sides of the spatiality of theconstruction of youth cultures (indeed, perhaps, any cultures) cometogether. On the one hand, the apparently endless process of the carvingup of space and the claiming of it for one’s own, and on the other handthe undeniable interconnectedness of any space, or any culture, withothers even on the other side of the world.

REFERENCES

Campbell, B. (1993) Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places, London: Methuen.Hall, S. (1995) ‘New cultures for old’, in D.Massey and P.Jess (eds) A Place in the

World?, Milton Keynes and Oxford: The Open University and OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 175–213.

Massey, D. (1991) ‘The world of food production’, Unit 1 of Society and SocialScience: A Foundation Course, Milton Keynes: The Open University.

Meegan, R. (1995) ‘Local worlds’, in J.Allen and D.Massey (eds) GeographicalWorlds, Milton Keynes and Oxford: The Open University and OxfordUniversity Press, pp. 53–104.

Sibley, D. (1995) Geographies of Exclusion, London: Routledge.Smith, D. (1993) ‘Homeless/global: scaling places’, in J.Bird, B.Curtis, T.

Putnam, G.Robertson and L.Tickner (eds) Mapping the Futures, London:Routledge, pp. 87–119.

Walker, R.J.B. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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