Unstructured socialization and territorialization. A street-ethnographic take on urban youth in a medium-sized town in Denmark.

Unstructured socialization and territorialization. A street-ethnographic take on urban youth in a medium-sized town in Denmark.

In 2013, the municipality in Horsens, a medium-sized provincial town in Denmark, bestowed the city's children and young people a skater / parkour / ball-cage facility right on the city's central squares. The facility serves as a territorial meeting place for a number of conflicting groups of adolescents with different codes of behavior based on their cultural orientation and sense of belonging to certain districts of the city. Through positioning battles of various kinds the groups fight for space and place for their unstructured socialization processes with their peers. Officially, the municipality donated the facility to give local children and young people an opportunity to use their bodies and participate in diverting and edifying cultural activities within the urban space. But not all children and young people subscribe to these municipal agendas, and thus conflicting relationships also occur between the municipality and (particu-larly) some groups of young people, whose forms of capital, activities and cultural life is not consistent with the normative basis in the city’s self-understanding.

The basis of our analysis is grounded in an anthropological field study and a series of follow-up interviews. In our presentation we examine how young people occupy, use and negotiate the facilities, and to what extend the urban site plays a role in the way the adolescents create, cultivate and maintain their cultural everyday life and social relationships.

Key-words:
Urban youth, place, space, unstructured socialization, peer culture