Children's street culture

Children's street culture refers to the cumulative culture created by young children. Collectively, this body of knowledge is passed down from one generation of urban children to the next, and can also be passed between different groups of children (e.g. in the form of crazes, but also in intergenerational mixing). It is most common in children between the ages of seven and twelve. It is strongest in urban working class industrial districts where children are traditionally free to "play out" in the streets for long periods without supervision.

Children's street culture is invented and largely sustained by children themselves, although it may come to incorporate fragments of media culture and toys in its activities. It is not to be confused with the commercial media-culture produced for children (e.g., comics, television, mass-produced toys, and clothing), although it may overlap.

Young children's street culture usually takes place on quiet backstreets and sidewalks, and along routes that venture out into local parks, playgrounds, scrub and wasteland, and to local shops. It can often incorporate many found and scavenged materials such as old car seats, tyres, planks, bricks, etc. Sometimes found materials will be combined to create objects (e.g. making guys for Guy Fawkes Night — see Beck 1984). Play will often incorporate crazes (sometimes incorporating seasonal elements that are freely collected, such as conkers, snowballs, sycamore seeds). It also imposes imaginative status on certain sections of the urban realm (local buildings, street objects, road layouts, etc.). In summer children may use scavenged materials to create a temporary and semi-hidden "den" or "hideout" or "HQ" in a marginal area near their homes, that serves as an informal meeting and relaxation place during the summer (see: Sobel, 2001). An urban area that looks faceless or neglected to an adult may have deep "spirit of place" meanings in children's street culture.

...
Wikipedia