Niños, adolescentes y jóvenes interpelando la ciudad: trabajo callejero y espacio público en La Plata

Abstract

The presence of children, adolescents and young people who work and / or live on the streets is part of a figure with presence in all large cities: both developed and underdeveloped countries, with other characteristics and levels of intensity, have people in that circumstances, highlighting issues facing local contexts: poverty and vulnerability, integration difficulties in immigration, access to the labor market, etc. This communication seeks to give the results of an empirical research on the collective, based on the use of mixed methods, in the city of La Plata (capital of the province of Buenos Aires; Argentina). We focus on: a) dimensioning the phenomenon of child, adolescent and youth labor carried out in public spaces in the city of La Plata and mapping their areas / circuits of development in the urban space; and b) knowing and revealing the ways in which workers practice and appropriate the public space, analyzing the particularities that this imprints in the perceptions they have about the work activities they develop and, in the cases that correspond, about inhabiting said space: How many children, adolescents and young people use the public space to work? What uses do they make? What circuits do they go through? What meanings do you build about the city? How does the fact that their work develops in a public environment such as the street impact on them? These questions provide clues to think and problematize about the uses of public space, the tensions that certain uses generate and the exercise of citizenship. We understand that the results of this work constitute an innovation as well as a collection of methodological knowledge for those who are interested in addressing this problem, as well as a diagnosis that allows the delineation of intervention policies.