Figurations of Childhood

Worldwide neoliberal urban planning and securitisation create childhoods marked by segregation, confinement and isolation. Especially in middle- and upper-class milieus, childhood appears as a spatial crisis in which children are patronised and disempowered in the name of protection. Claudia Mock draws on intergenerational biographies and mental maps from Nairobi and Berlin to reveal how security discourses intertwine with bourgeois values and architectures, reshaping childhoods in these cities in surprisingly similar ways since 1960. By identifying bourgeois lifestyles and adultism as integral to anthropocentric urban crises, she calls for cities to be reimagined through intergenerational spatial justice.

Claudia Mock is a Research Fellow at the Georg-Simmel Centre for Urban Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she lectures in the Department of Social Sciences. Between 2018 and 2025, she held several positions at the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre ‘Re-Figuration of Space’ (CRC 1265) at Technische Universität Berlin, where she completed her PhD in Sociology. In 2018, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, collaborating with scholars at the University of Nairobi. Her research focuses on the sociology of space, children’s geographies and global urban inequalities.