Children as Cartographers: Lived and Narrated Childhood Experience of Urban Environment in Post-Second World War Helsinki

Abstract

This article examines children’s spatial experience in post–Second World War Helsinki, a period marked by accelerating urban change. The post-war period also saw a growing interest in children’s emotional competences and independent mobility. In the writing competition organized in all Helsinki schools in association with the city’s jubilee year in 1950, children were invited to reflect and share their urban experiences. Using children’s school essays as our primary source material, we explore childhood experiences as lived, narrated and shared. The key concept employed in the article is experiential affordance. The article shows that the role of post-war children as urban cartographers was formed in relation to multiple affordances, in a complex interplay between children’s emotional and sensory engagements with the city, the wider socio-material frameworks that shaped these encounters and through the act of essay writing itself. The article contributes to the history of experiences and childhood by demonstrating how children acted as participants in and producers of their urban worlds and how they actively shaped their experiences within a school context, in peer interaction and by utilizing available cultural narratives and systems of meaning, often in creative ways.