Designing modern childhoods: history, space, and the material culture of children Gutman, Marta

Table of Contents:


PART ONE: Child Saving and the Design of Modern Childhoods

1 Connecting with the Landscape: Campfires and Youth Culture at American Summer Camps, 1890–1950
ABIGAIL A. VAN SLYCK

2 A (Better) Home Away from Home: The Emergence of Children’s Hospitals in an Age of Women’s Reform
DAVID C. SLOANE

3 Sick Children and the Thresholds of Domesticity: The Dawson-Harrington Families at Home
ANNMARIE ADAMS AND PETER GOSSAGE

4 The “Myers Park Experiment” in Auckland, New Zealand, 1913–1916
ANÉNE CUSINS-LEWER AND JULIA GATLEY

PART TWO: The Choreography of Education and Play

5 A Breath of Fresh Air: Open-Air Schools in Europe
ANNE-MARIE CHÂTELET

6 Molding the Republican Generation: The Landscapes of Learning in Early Republican Turkey
ZEYNEP KEZER

7 Nomadic Schools in Senegal: Manifestations of Integration or Ritual Performance?
KRISTINE JUUL

8 Adventure Playgrounds and Postwar Reconstruction
ROY KOZLOVSKY

PART THREE: Space, Power, and Inequality in Modern Childhoods

9 The View from the Back Step: White Children Learn about Race in Johannesburg’s Suburban Homes
REBECCA GINSBURG

10 Children and the Rosenwald Schools of the American South
MARY S. HOFFSCHWELLE

11 The Geographies and Identities of Street Girls in Indonesia
HARRIOT BEAZLEY

PART FOUR: Consumption, Commodification, and the Media: Material Culture and Contemporary Childhoods

12 Coming of Age in Suburbia: Gifting the Consumer Child
ALISON J. CLARKE

13 Inscribing Nordic Childhoodsat McDonald’s
HELENE BREMBECK

14 “Board with the World”: Youthful Approaches to Landscapes and Mediascapes
OLAV CHRISTENSEN

15 Migrating Media: Anime Media Mixes and the Childhood Imagination
MIZUKO ITO

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.

(http://www.rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/978-0-8135-4464-9-Designing-Modern-Childhoods,2822.aspx?skuid=3319)