Guava tree, mulberry tree and ficus tree: a place to meet

Our aim in this paper is to discuss children’s autonomy and creativity to produce their own places in public spaces. The focus of the study is to understand how children live in the city of Brazilia, a city designed in 1957 by Lucio Costa to be liveable for all. The methodological design of the research is based on sociological studies of children’s everyday life involving geographic movement. Briefly, the data generation methods for the study discussed here involved the researcher (Farias) accompanying individual children during their daily journeys to school and other locations for seven consecutive days and tracked their journeys with Google Maps. Following this, each child was interviewed and asked to make a collaborative map exploring aspects of their city using Google Earth. For this presentation, we focus on a single case of one research participant. We pay particular attention to how Jolie and her friends invested meaning in a tree from a public garden in their Superblock to create a place for their own, a place to gather together and share secrets. In conclusion, this ethnographic study of Jolie’s everyday life involving the use of public spaces highlights the importance of a methodology that understands children’s everyday worlds from their own perspectives. What is clear is that this space was private for the members of the neighbourhood but seemingly out of bounds for adults.