Conclusion: Urban youth in a global world

Recent headlines about a rapidly urbanizing world whose growth is most marked in the large cities of the Global South pay little attention either to the place of young people or to the implications of the youth bulge for such cities tomorrow (Davis 2006). Diverging from much recent work, this book's focus on the combination of youth and the city has enabled us to reveal several important dynamics that are crucial to understanding the unique situation of young people. What is more, by linking the urban and the global, we have developed a perspective informed by interdisciplinary research into several overlapping areas of young people's everyday lives in three different cities on three different continents. Taken together, our work showcases Recife, Hanoi, and Lusaka as spaces for both agency and reaction on the part of the young, depending on who they are in age, gender, and class terms, and on their sociospatial positions. Our ability to capture the complexity of globalization through young people's agency in urban space is the result of the interdisciplinary research collaboration on which this volume is based. When geography, media research, education studies, and anthropology together address the urban youth problematic in the development context, rich interpretive potentials arise. This conclusion briefly identifies what is unique about this work and why our observations matter.