Dreaming Young People’s Right to the City Through the Methodology of Autobiographical Performance

This chapter discusses the use of autobiographical performance as a playful ethnographic research methodology for exploring how young people perceive their right to the city. Specifically, autotopography is explored as methodology that integrates young people’s lived experiences of the everyday, with the speculative and the imagined, in their efforts to envisage the city of their desires. The chapter focuses on “aesthetic play” and the “theatre of the (un)real” as characteristics of a methodology that experiments with the limitations of “faithful” representation and looks to fiction to examine what is most “real” in the lives of young people with regards to their relationships to place. Autotopography emerges as a modality that invites young people to think through their desires for the city in ways that are at once speculative and deeply situated. Attending to real and imagined connections to place is of central concern to youth studies researchers seeking to understand what young people deem most worthy in how they ascertain belonging and connection in relation to their rights in cities. The chapter attends to performances of the “desired city” from Toronto middle and high school drama students (between 11 and 18 years old). Sensory memory, speculation, attunement, and whimsy characterize these students’ understandings of belonging in, and connection to, place and space. The chapter concludes that it is through the integration of the “lived” and the “invented” in an autotopography methodology that researchers can understand how young people imagine their rights to the city according to a framework of desire.