Adolescence in the flow: the cultural and social reconfiguring of Teen’s lifestyles in post-modern cities

Abstract

Contemporary adolescent trajectories appear to lead towards phenomena of transience and “dispersal”, constant movement and flow, which are difficult to relate to significant places of identity and belonging. Teenagers’ use of educational places, both formal and informal, across the urban territory, is characterized by a metropolitan “nomadism” that expresses the need for continuous movement and short time-frames. Groups are no longer fixed in one place or reliant on local recognition but display fluid modes of belonging and identification. The paths followed by the adolescents of the early twenty-first century are similar to the social networking model. Groups develop around attractive features “emerging” from the territory, which serve as focal points for the production of “fleeting” experiences, characterized by events-based forms of entertainment that are temporary and transitory in nature. This leads us to interpret the specific ways in which adolescents move through the territorial spaces of their city and inhabit its timeframes, as an effect of a complex dispositive that at the urban level contributes to producing a consumerist subjectivity.