Teens in the Streets

What happens when young boys take the streets? In Philadelphia a recent informal “critical mass” event sparked outrage from a local news anchor who even went so far as to criticize their “manliness” due to riding a bike. 

Personally, we love these guys (so long as their staying out of serious trouble). In this episode we touch on teens using streets as their public space, how to keep youth out of trouble through things like after-school programs, and even how the media should be thinking about these kinds of deeper urban issues. 

This is also the first episode introducing our new outro Urbanist Women at Work! We’re looking forward to sharing your advice as women in urbanism on social media by using the hashtag #urbanistwomenatwork, or you can email us your anonymous submission at [email protected]. 

As always, you can keep up with our thoughts and send us your comments on Twitter or Instagram: 

Katrina can be found at @think_katrina

Kristen can be found at @blackurbanist

And if you like these conversations and advocating for human-scale cities, you can donate to our efforts on our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/thirdwaveurbanism. Thank you all for listening!

Here are the references in this episode:

Streetsblog article on the Philly teen freeway takeover: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/04/28/the-backstory-and-aftermath-of-phillys-teen-bicycle-freeway-takeover/

Spoke Magazine's feature on the teens in Philadelphia: http://www.spokemag.co/one-way-philadelphia-pedal-bikers/

Drug prevention in Iceland: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/01/teens-drugs-iceland/513668/

Philly.com teen mob: http://www.philly.com/philly/news/Police-officer-injured-responding-to-teen-mob-in-Center-City.html?utm_campaign=Philly.com+Twitter+Account&utm_source=Twitter.com&utm_medium=Philly.com+Twitter+Account

Critical Mass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Mass_(cycling)

Intro and closing music is “Urban Life” by Gustavs Strazdin used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode