Paranoia over so-called "teen takeovers" ignores the fundamental problem: that our cities have left young people with nowhere to go, writes Christopher Martin.
America this summer acquired the phrase "teen takeover". Large gatherings of young people, organised online, appearing in downtowns, malls and parks.
Some involved violence and yes, plainly these incidents require a response. But the phrase itself is revealing.
Perhaps before asking what is wrong with these gatherings, we should ask a more uncomfortable question
Takeover. As though young people appearing en masse in the centre of their own city constitutes a territorial incursion.
London had its own version this spring, and across Europe, anxiety about youth alienation, political disengagement and unrest is growing.
A recent academic paper calls the way cities respond to young people the "patronising city", highlighting that young people are tolerated in public space principally when supervised, consuming or behaving according to adult expectations.
So perhaps before asking what is wrong with these gatherings, we should ask a more uncomfortable question: where did we expect young people to go?
Disappearing youth clubs, the library that no longer opens late, the cheap cafe that is now a chain, the recreation ground, the shopping arcade, the public bench, and the ordinary bit of city in which nobody particularly minded if you spent an afternoon doing nothing. All gone.
These "third spaces" – neither home, nor school or work, but the informal spaces between them – are where relationships form and social life happens. For young people, they are particularly important because home and school are not really theirs. They generally do not own property, are too young for bars and often lack the money required to participate in an increasingly commercial urban culture.
The contemporary city has become remarkably intolerant of people without obvious economic purpose
Axios reported this summer that the disappearance of malls and affordable hangouts, combined with public spaces that frequently feel hostile to teenagers, is leaving American teenagers with fewer places to gather.
The resulting mass meet-ups are then treated as evidence of the problem rather than, perhaps, evidence of the demand. We remove the places where young people can gather in small groups, then panic when they gather in large ones. There is a wonderful circularity to this.
The contemporary city has become remarkably intolerant of people without obvious economic purpose. Pavements must move pedestrians. Kerbs must load or charge something. Squares need events. Walls carry advertising. Parks acquire cafes. Railway concourses funnel passengers past retail with more enthusiasm than they guide them onto trains.
Connected to this is the issue we have, as adult society, with loitering. There are few words in the municipal vocabulary more suspicious than loitering. Nobody describes an elderly couple sitting outside a cafe in Rome as loitering. They are participating.
Loitering is what other people do. More precisely, it is what people without obvious economic purpose do.
Artist Nils Norman began documenting the architecture of this anxiety in the 1990s. His Contemporary Picturesque recorded the studs, barriers and small devices appearing in increasingly managed and privatised city centres. While the original picturesque gave us ruins, grottoes and serpentine lakes, the contemporary version gives us stainless-steel knobs attached to a granite ledge so that a 15-year-old cannot grind a skateboard along it. One civilisation built follies. Ours builds anti-follies.
We worry about screen time while removing the reasons to leave the screen
And the skateboard stud is more interesting than it looks. Its entire purpose is to prevent somebody finding an unintended pleasure in an object.
Skateboarders read architecture incorrectly. A staircase becomes an event. A handrail becomes recreational equipment. A ledge becomes a playground. They refuse the instruction manual set out by future generations, precisely as young people should.
This built environment, hostile to young people, is exactly what is being questioned by groups like Bristol-based campaigners Playing Out, saying Yes to Ball Games.
We worry about screen time while removing the reasons to leave the screen. We fret about social skills while closing third spaces. We complain that teenagers organise their lives through Snapchat and TikTok, then treat their physical arrival in the city as a public-order incident.
Apparently, we would like young people to spend less time online, provided they don't turn up anywhere. This is where the public realm stops being a discussion about paving materials and becomes something considerably more important.
The Council of Europe's new charter on youth participation says young people require the "means, space and structures" to participate in society. Space is not metaphorical. Democracy does not begin when somebody turns 18 and receives a polling card.
If we want young people to participate in society, society needs to find somewhere for them to participate
It is rehearsed through years of occupying shared places, encountering strangers, negotiating behaviour and discovering that other people are both fascinating and tremendously irritating. The public realm is where we learn to live with people we didn't choose.
This makes London's transformation of Oxford Street timely. One of the world's most commercial streets is now beginning its most significant reinvention in generations. Through this, Oxford Street can demonstrate that commercial success and civic generosity are not opposites; that one of Europe's great shopping streets can also provide something increasingly scarce in prosperous cities: space with no entry price and no instruction manual.
It matters far beyond London. Cities everywhere are worried about young people's alienation, their relationship with democracy, their social skills, their mental health and the amount of their lives disappearing into screens. Perhaps we should stop treating these as entirely separate problems.
If we want young people to participate in society, society needs to find somewhere for them to participate. A city that makes room for its young is not surrendering control. It is investing in its future.
Christopher Martin is co-founder and managing director of Urban Movement.
The photo was released by Tampa Police Department.
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