From late March 2020 and for the following 20 months, the Andrews Labor government in the state of Victoria responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by declaring two states of emergency and imposing 262 days of sustained lockdown in Melbourne, one of the world’s most multicultural cities with over five million people. The government imposed strict social distancing measures, introduced curfews closed shops, restaurants, bars and offices, shut down state and national borders, and suspended organised activities including sport (Zhuang, 2021). People were not permitted to travel more than 5 km from their house. This was a largely successful policy in the sense that it contained the Covid-19 pandemic (Elphingstone et al., 2023). According to one study Victoria’s public health restrictions from August to November 2021, averted more than 120,000 hospital admissions and prevented 5000 deaths (Delport et al., 2023).

While the lockdowns and curfews, among the longest in the world, affected everyone, they had a particularly negative impact on children. The move to on-line schooling affected children’s opportunity to sustain or build relations with friends and teachers (Baxter & Evans-Whipp, 2022). The closure of school, the uncertainty created by the pandemic, the general breakdown of routine coupled with the loss of social connection and reduced opportunities for play and access to green space, meant many children experienced heightened anxiety and depression (Payne et al., 2023, John et al., 2023).

Those experiences were experienced in inequitable ways given the way social disadvantage was distributed geographically. COVID policies amplified the effects of the unequal distribution of green space throughout metropolitan Melbourne. Pre-COVID research demonstrated that low income and disadvantaged families in Melbourne had significantly reduced access to parklands (Koohsari, 2011). In 2020, approximately 340,000 people had no access to urban parks within a 5 km radius of their home(Lakhani et al., 2020). Other research highlighted the negative spatial association between the people on low-incomes in an area and access to green space. Typically, suburbs with large numbers of low-income households had significantly reduced access to natural green spaces in comparison with suburbs with higher concentrations of middle to high -income households (Shafiri et al., 2021). As Astell and Xiaoqi report, socio-people in economically disadvantaged areas of Melbourne were less likely to visit parklands during the COVID-19 pandemic (Astell and Xiaoqi 2021). Residents in more culturally diverse metropolitan areas also reported they were subject to more intensive policing while using public spaces during the pandemic (Rachwani & Zhou, 2021).

COVID not only amplified existing socio-economic inequities it also increased the stresses already affecting over-burdened and under-funded public services on which many children and their families depended (O’Keeffe et al., 2023). Government responses to Covid-19 added new burdens in an already difficult context marked by poly-crisis (World Economic Forum, 2023). Children were not only disproportionately negatively affected by Covid policies, they were also excluded from relevant policy decision-making forums. This is why we focus primarily on age-based or intergenerational inequality in this article. It’s a focus justified e.g., by the subsequent acknowledgement by officials and academics who point to a ‘large-scale invisibilising of children’ during the Covid pandemic (Spray & Hunleth, 2020: 41, Hollonds, 2023). The invisibilising of children meant their particular needs and interests were either disregarded or taken into account at best in quite perfunctory ways by policy makers (Hollonds, 2023). While we primarily focus on age-based inequality, we do not overlook the ways young people’s lives were entangled in unequal relationships associated with gender, class or ethnicity (Baxter & Evans-Whipp, 2022:4–8). This is discussed later in the article.

The invisibilisation of children did not however mean they largely remained passive bystanders who suffered this official occlusion in silence. As our inquiry reveals while the children in this study never engaged in high profile public political protest against the lockdowns, as many far-right groups and ‘anti-vaxxers’ did, they did engage in spontaneous and well co-ordinated effort to construct and use their own dirt bike jumps in urban public parklands, were resisting official efforts to restrict their activities.Footnote 1 In effect the children involved in building and using bike jumps were saying ‘notice us, we are still here’.

1 Research Questions

In this article we address the following questions.

  • Why and how did children design, construct and use dirt bike jumps during the COVID pandemic in public parklands?

  • How did Victorian local councils and others including police, residents and media respond to their construction of DIY dirt jumps?

  • How were these spontaneous DIY dirt jumps understood by authorities?

To address these questions and better understand children’s construction and use of dirt jumps and their relations with local authorities during the COVID − 19 lockdowns in Melbourne, we adopt an innovative composite method.

2 The Composite Case Study Method

In carrying out our research we decided to use neither a quantitative method relying e.g., on surveys and formal interviews and various metrics, or a systematic formal ethnographic study. Our project evolved in the context of a highly disruptive and relatively unprecedented state of historical emergency. We were mindful that the activities we were interested in were regarded widely by governments, education authorities, some parents and community members as unlawful or dangerous. We decided to use a mixed method ‘composite case’ study approach (Johnston, 2024).

A ‘composite case’ study involves assembling and blending aspects of different sources of data, including personal stories, to create one story that is illustrative of broader patterns and trends. One of its essential defining benefits, is that it anonymises the actors, who e.g., are engaged in illicit or ‘sensitive’ activities that ‘could cause trouble’ for those involved if their identities were revealed (McElhinney & Kennedy, 2022). The goal of a composite case study method that draws in part on first person narratives and other data sources, is to say what happened and why it happened in ways that do not identify those actors. While the elements of the story have been woven together to create a case based on the study of several areas regulated by different local governments, the different elements of the story are true in that they reflect what actually happened.

There are three key benefits of this method. First, it allows researchers to present ‘complex, situated accounts from individuals’ (Willis 2018, p.471) This approach is favoured over presenting evidence and narratives which are fitted into ready-made researcher-oriented categories. In this way the complexities of people’s lives and their activities are presented and explored in ways that are close to their meanings and perspective. Second, it confers anonymity, vital when reporting on sayings and doings, that ‘could cause trouble’ for those involved (Willis 2018). There are many reasons why researchers cannot and should not present evidence they have gathered if doing so would identify those people in ways which might then disadvantage, or even harm them. These groups might include children doing things that are controversial, or even illegal. Such anonymity also extends to teachers, politicians, officials or law enforcement officials enabling them to speak frankly about what they are doing. Thirdly, the composite case study approach can contribute to ‘future-forming’ research, by presenting findings in ways that are useful and accessible to those outside academia.

This project relied on a composite case study of public parklands where children constructed dirt jumps during the 2020-21 COVID lockdowns. The sources of data relate to several local government areas in Melbourne where dirt jumps where built by young people and where they experienced conflict (for example, where dirt jumps where bulldozed by authorities). Our research focussed on children and their bike jumps as well as reactions from adults and authorities in two primary regions, one in Melbourne’s inner East and one in the outer North-East. Both suburbs were characterised by indicators of significant social advantage.Footnote 2 Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) Index of Relative Socio-Economic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD) both of these regions were marked by significant social advantage. The inner east region had a IRSAD of 91 indicating that it was in the top 10% of the most advantaged of Australia’s suburbs of Australia’s suburbs, while the outer North-East region had a SEIFA index of 92 identifying it as more advantaged than 92% of all other suburbs in Australia (ABS, 2024). These were suburbs where many children had self-employed or professional parents enjoying above average incomes they were not recently arrived African or Islamic refugees, Indigenous children or children in families depending on welfare.

This composite case study was created by blending casual conversations with a small number of young dirt-bike jumpers, with our own observations of dirt jump construction. We also observed and took part in interactions between the children and other participants. We corresponded with relevant local government officials. (Most of those communication (emails, phone calls) took place during the July-October 2021 lockdowns). We also read social media posts from community-based organisations and local government webpages and took photographs and made field notes of observations. We also drew on various mainstream media reports broadcast on television dating back to 2020. (These included nightly news bulletins and current affairs programs) and radio interviews and talkback programs, that invariably positioned young bike riders and dirt-jumps builders as victims of over-zealous council bureaucrats.

We also drew on documentation produced by multiple (11) councils in response to the issue of dirt jumps.Footnote 3 This included minutes of council meetings where dirt jumps were discussed, strategic plans developed by council to govern the use of public spaces, (including places where dirt jumps were constructed), reports developed for council with regard to the use of public space for sports and recreation, surveys administered by councils to understand use of public space by residents, as well as news articles featured on council websites that address the issue of dirt jumps constructed on council land.

While composite narratives have been used in qualitative research on sensitive topics or with prominent public figures (Samuels-Wortley, 2021, Willis 2018), and in education when developing clinical cases (McElhinney & Kennedy, 2022; Duffy, 2010), we have not come across the use of this approach to develop a composite ‘place’.

In terms of our own positionality we were residents in the different communities referenced in this study. We observed the bike jumps building and riding at different parklands in our localities. We noticed similar issues in each of the examples we studied. As researchers committed to promoting children’s right, we also advocated for them which included e.g., contacting the local government authorities to find out what they knew about the jumps and the bulldozing of them.

We also noticed similar issues in each of the sites we studied and formed the view that rather than develop a comparison of them, we would use the composite method and a composite site and incorporated our observations and interactions across these different areas into a single case study that reflects our analysis of these issues.

We used this composite method to document how some children used public space to ‘hang out’, construct jumps and ride on them during the lockdown in a bid to ‘win space’. Our analysis highlights similarities across all these areas: notably, how young people seeking a creative and physical outlet during Covid-19 turned to dirt jumps as a form of play when other opportunities were not available. In turn, councils, in particular, responded by demolishing unsanctioned builds and sought to regain control over the issue by promising to invest in sports and leisure facilities for young people. The composite approach enabled us to draw these observations and analyses together, in ways that avoided identifying specific young people or places. This is a novel approach to analysing interactions with place, and the institutions that govern the use of that space, which allowed us to demonstrate how these conflicts were representative of a broader phenomena that occurred throughout Melbourne in 2020 and 2021 during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

Composite narratives have been used in qualitative research to present findings from interviews from multiple participants as a story (McKinlay et al., 2023; McElhinney & Kennedy, 2022; Samuels-Wortley, 2021, Willis 2018, Wertz 2011). It’s an approach that allows us to weave a tapestry from the material emerging from different informants and other resources. It is not however a simple re-telling or reporting exercise. Rather it involves interpretation by us as we draw on our own knowledge of relevant literature, as we listen and hear stories told by the informants and as we engage in our own reflexivity. The quotes and excerpts we highlight in what follows reflect the composite case study approach that involves drawing material together from multiple sources. Likewise the observations we made and report on, took place across multiple sites before assembling them into a single account.

We note it was a time when many youth work workers were prohibited under the Covid restrictions from engaging in their normal ‘outreach’ that involved them working directly with young people in the field.

We also ‘intervened’ by communicating with the local-state youth peak organisation to ask how they were working local councils around this issue in the context of Covid. We forwarded some of that information on to the local council youth services. These examples are illustrative of the advocacy we did in respect to the bike jumps and young people’s use of public space.

One of us also witnessed council workers bulldozing the dirt jumps, but didn’t see how an immediate interjection at that stage was going to be productive. Those workers were also contractors carrying out a job they were engaged to do and had no authority to cease the work. We note too, as the young people reported, the demolition workers were often relatively friendly and supportive of the young people.

We called this composite space ‘Hawkemount Park’, located in the ‘City of Gumtree’. It represents in a composite way, key features of the actual locations in our research. In addressing our research questions we are also mindful of the long tradition of scholarly work which document the relationships between children and public space.

3 Theoretical Issues

There is a popular view that public space provides children with opportunities for some independence and autonomy, a space to play and to just be. It is away from home and school, where e.g., parents, caregivers and teachers act as authority figures with responsibility to care for them (Hall et al., 1999). Many scholars agree that hanging out in public spaces has been seen as critical in children’s social development, particularly in respect to identity formation, relationship building, socialisation and exploration of their world (Cuervo & Wyn, 2017; Gilchrist & Wheaton, 2017; Nairn et al., 2002). This might imply that children and public space go together.

However, a case can be made that what is usually referred to as public space is more accurately conceptualised as ‘adult space’ (Valentine, 1996; Nairn et al., 2002). Across different Western societies, adults design and regulate public space by establishing the rules, behavioural norms, expectations and values which govern how public space is created and used (Carroll et al. 2018, Nolan, 2003, Matthews et al., 2000). A key idea informing this age-based governance of public spaces (like streets, shopping malls, sporting arenas and parks) is that the presence of children, especially if they were not in the care or control of ‘responsible adults’ represented a present and continuing danger to those young people themselves and to other citizens (Collins & Kearns, 2001).

‘Adultist’ common-sense, deemed it necessary that children are excluded from public spaces, or only permitted to access it under adult supervision. This expression of ‘chrono-normativity’ assumes a model of life courses in which ‘the child-childhood’, or ‘youth’-’adolescence’ are understood as distinct and different from ‘the adult’ and ‘adulthood’.Footnote 4 Inherent in this child-adult or youth-adult binary is the popular idea that children and ‘youth’ lack the requisite cognitive abilities, ethical capacities, life skills and experience said to define the ‘normal adult’. It is an idea that can be presented as the positive: that each child should be allowed to enjoy being young by being protected from ‘adult’ activities including certain responsibilities, and particular economic, emotional or sexual activities. This it is argued is best done by ensuring that children’s access to adult activities or spaces is denied completely or occurs under supervision.

This chrono-normative framing is one consequence of centuries of state efforts and work by churches, voluntary sector agencies and professional groups to clear young people from public spaces before confining them in adult managed spaces like kindergartens, schools, orphanages and sporting clubs. It is what some scholars referred to as a ‘civilising offensive’ (Powell, 2013). In ‘public spaces’, ‘unaccompanied’ children and ‘youth’ are typically represented as a ‘deviant other’ (Bessant, 2020). They are stereotyped as inherently disrespectful, disruptive and recalcitrant, and disposed to deviance even criminality (Woolley et al., 2011; Nolan, 2003; White, 2001).

We argue that children are subject to stereotyping, misrecognition and exclusion as users of public space. This is not to deny points made by intersectional theorists about how movement through space can be subject to serious and inequitable constraints grounded in relations of inequality reliant on sexist, ageist, gendered, or racist categories. In this way the movement of some groups is privileged over that of others. There is an important literature that offers insights into how young people and others like refugees, Indigenous and migrants, are often subject to intense forms of exclusion from public space, based on racism, immigrant status, or class (e.g., De Martini Ugolotti & Genova, 2023, Daly, 2023, Dijkema 2019, De Martini Ugolotti & Moyer, 2016). There is however an implicit caution in play when Forde (2024) argues that thinking in terms of ‘spatial intersectionality’ enables us to consider how relations of inequality operate spatially, or how intersections of identity shape experiences in public and private space. Forde adds this is especially true of ‘divided cities’, cities caught in the cross fire of war, post conflict settings, systemic violence, or state-sponsored terrorism where urban spatial injustice is accordingly endemic. As we already noted, there are important and continuing inequalities in Melbourne.

Before Covid-19 children engaging in leisure activities like BMX riding, skateboarding and mountain biking were frequently portrayed as ‘anti-social’ delinquents and vandals who poses a constant threat to social order (King and Church, Brown, 2016, Taylor & Khan, 2011). Typically children’s use of public space is considered a threat to adult hegemonic control of public space, and private property rights underpinning ownership of certain kinds of public spaces in capitalist societies such as shopping complexes (Vivoni & Folsom-Fraster, 2021; White, 2001). Rather than enjoying an equal right to use public space, young people are portrayed by adult managers as requiring a mixture of surveillance, deterrence and policing (Carroll et al. 2018, Woolley et al., 2011). Older people’s suspicion of children engaging in autonomous activity outside designated ‘child-youth’ specific spaces (like playgrounds, leisure centres, sporting arenas), serves to marginalise young people as participants in public space (Carroll et al., 2018, Woolley et al., 2011). This can also lead to efforts to criminalise children’s activities whether it be just ‘hanging out’ in public spaces or skateboarding and bike riding (O’Keeffe & Fawdon Jenkins, 2022; Brown, 2016; Taylor & Khan, 2011; Woolley et al., 2011).

While acknowledging that adult managers of public space have access significant resources when policing young people’s activities in public spaces, we cannot simply assume that children are rendered powerless in this relationship (De Backer et al., 2019). In claiming, appropriating and occupying certain kinds of public space, they exercise their power and resistance to such control (van den Bogert, 2021, De Backer et al., 2019, De Martini Ugolotti & Moyer, 2016). This is one way of understanding why some children turned to constructing their own dirt bike jumps before COVID and during COVID.

A small number of scholars have examined children’s spontaneous, independent construction of dirt jumps in urban and peri-urban environments in Britain (King & Church, 2020, 2020) and the USA (Olsen, 2021; Smith, 2021). Some argue that mountain biking is integral to participants’ sense of identity, while also enabling children to overcome isolation (King & Church, 2020). According to this research building jumps and trails provide children with a sense of independence, autonomy and decision-making power (King and Church 2020). This contrasts with young people’s experience of marginalisation in adult-led ‘dig days’ organised by mountain biking clubs, where they were less able to participate in key decisions (King & Church, 2020, King and Church 2020: 291). Conversely, while unsanctioned ‘wild builds’ organised independently by children frequently lead to conflict with landowners, this practice enabled them to participate in an unstructured activity where they had full control and voice (King and Church 2020). Enjoying the use of public space without adult intervention is important to many young people’s sense of independence (Sand & Hakim-Fernandez, 2018; Sand, 2017). This freedom is not possible in structured programs designed and managed by adults, which can unintentionally (and purposefully) marginalise the ‘practices and places that young people develop for themselves’ (Sand, 2017: 288–289).

For some scholars constructing Do-It-Yourself (DIY) spaces is a socio-political process. DIY skate parks are a form of subversive creativity, similar to graffiti and guerrilla gardens, which involve the ‘temporary and illegal appropriation and physical and constructional modification of forgotten spaces in the city (Peters 2018: 207, cited in Hollett and Vivoni, 2021: 3). For skateboarders and bike riders, the ‘making’ of spaces through re-interpreting and augmenting physical environments may be as significant as the play which goes on in the space (Olsen, 2021, Hollett and Vivoni, 2021, Gilchrist & Wheaton, 2017).

Like the ‘wild builds’ studied by King and Church (2020), the construction of DIY skateparks during the Covid pandemic involves a reimagination of ‘forgotten spaces’, which are often overlooked or left behind by adults (Hollett and Vivoni, 2021). As De Martini Ugolotti and Genova (2023) highlight with regard to young people participating in parkour in urban areas in Italy, using ‘forgotten’ or abandoned spaces allows people to become invisible. This reduces potential of interference and intervention from members of the public, as well as authorities. This reflects the value of forgotten spaces for young people, that Edensor identified with regard to industrial ruins:

Ruins serve as an uncanny space amidst a familiar realm. But precisely because they are regarded as forbidden or dangerous spaces, they can become space of adventure, places in which unspeakable and illicit acts occur, places of unhindered adventure. Ruins posses an allure for those who want to escape the increasing official surveillance in urban areas and the watchful gaze of neighbours and parents (Edensor, 2005:25).

The production and reimagination of public spaces can also be understood as making a claim to belong. Scholars have argued that children and young people create a sense of belonging courtesy of what Duff calls ‘intensities of affect’ achieved e.g., by exuberant displays of physical prowess (Duff, 2010: 892). Belonging itself is a relational metaphor invoking connection and relationships between people and place (Cuervo & Wyn, 2017: 222). Some link the ethics of care to belonging: we develop our sense of self less as an abstracted rational individual act and more in terms of our connections to people and place (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Thinking relationally about belonging as a political phenomena highlights the role of drawing boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (Vieten, 2006).Footnote 5 Children are able to negotiate power relations in public space by engaging in ‘visible and invisible minor acts’ (De Backer et al., 2019: 246). Like bike-jump riders, street skateboarders also ‘claim their right to the city’ through their engagement with, and capacity to challenge and reinterpret the use of public space (Glover et al., 2021: 44). This involves the appropriation and reinterpretation of public spaces designed for adult uses as autonomous play zones, often through unsanctioned modifications (e.g., Glover et al., 2021; Vivoni, 2013). Practices such as street skateboarding shift the representation of cities as sites of production to a site of play, allowing for the playful reimagination of mundane landscapes (Vivoni & Folsom-Fraster, 2021; Nolan, 2003).

The actions by some children after the onset of COVID and lockdowns to construct Do-it-Yourself (DIY) dirt bike jumps in some of Melbourne’s urban parklands provides an opportunity to assess the value of some of these theoretical frameworks.

4 Urban Parklands

The Hawkemount Park is a large area of parkland containing mixed clumps of European and Indigenous trees and shrubs with open patches of grassland running alongside Yarra River. The park is in a local government area we call the City of GumTree. It is surrounded by residential suburban housing on all sides. There are bitumenised car parks at one end of the parkland and a small play ground, and ovals and tennis courts at the other end of the park. There is just one main unpaved wide walkway running through the length of the park for several kilometers which cyclists, joggers and walkers use.

During the COVID lockdowns we saw a tremendous increase in the use of the parkland, especially by people out walking. Apart from the main walkway, there has been little construction in the parkland. At one end is of the parkland is a popular area where men can always be seen frequenting the pathways hidden by bushland looking for sex with other men. Interestingly we observed no police presence to uphold social distancing regulations in this space and no local concern expressed publicly about this, a practice quite that was different to young bike jumper’s experience. Adult mountain bikers had also carved out single track paths that run through thick trees close to the river. The parkland floods easily when there is heavy rain and in summer it is a fire hazard and home to many tiger snakes, kangaroos and other non-human ‘creatures’.

The areas the children chose to use for their bike jumps is some distance from the main walkway and is close to a major bridge over the Yarra river which towers above the parkland. Prior to COVID this area was not widely used by children in comparison with the walkways and playgrounds in the park. During COVID his part of the park became a major site for the construction of bike jumps.

5 ‘School’s Out’: COVID and the Lifeworld of Young Bike Riders

Most of the young riders and dirt jump builders were in upper primary and early secondary schools. Most of the children we saw and interacted with were aged between 10 and 14. Girls were either noticeably absent or in a minority. We never intended to ‘count’ the number of children building or using the dirt jumps. At various points we saw as many as a dozen to eighteen children engaged in using the dirt jumps. The ever-changing changing membership of these groups suggest a larger number of children were involved. While we did not ask the boys about their ethnicity all had Australian accents and appeared to be variously Anglo-Celtic, Italian or Greek).

As the boys made clear, constructing dirt bike jumps was a simple, easy and fun response to being in lock-down, and forced into on-line learning. Nearby public parklands provided opportunities and space ‘of their own’ to spend time outside with friends, develop their own identity and explore their world beyond the immediate control of parents, teachers and authority figures. In this sense their jump building, and the ‘daily rituals’ of bike riding, and just ‘hanging out’ in public space affirms the literature mentioned above about public space as being critical for children’s social development and relationship building (Hall et al., 1999; Cuervo & Wyn, 2017; Gilchrist & Wheaton, 2017; Nairn et al., 2002). The same might be said about their often subtle and occasionally overt resistance to the idea of public space as adult space in the context of policing a (pandemic) crisis echoes the classic work of Stuart Hall (Hall et al., 1999).

School closures meant a rapid shift to home-based remote learning after March 2020, with students having a little more flexibility and control over their learning schedule throughout the day. The ‘COVID school day’ typically started with an online meeting with fellow students in their class and the class teacher. This was usually followed by online classes lasting for about 45 min, as well as a series of online activities. Younger students were expected to be supported by their parents, who may have been working from home, to complete these activities. This often contributed to a stressful home environment, where many parents were trying balance paid work and home-schooling.

For older students in upper primary and early secondary school, it was reportedly as being ‘super easy to finish each school task quickly’. This meant the ‘school day’ often ended early, around mid-day. It also meant they had time to leave home and head off to the nearest local public parkland to meet up with other children, construct or repair damaged jumps and ride their bikes. We note too that in this lockdown context other possible venues for ‘hanging out’ like shopping centres, the streets and public transport were not an option as they were all closed. One stipulation imposed on the public during the lockdowns was that people could not travel far from their home and doing so would lead to fines. This created the impetus for the children to focus their activities on local places within the 5 km radius imposed by the State Government regulations and which were easily accessible by bike.

Because not all the children had a phone, they used a mix of media, including phones, tablets or computers and platforms like TikTok, SnapChat or House Party, SMS or emails to contact each other, to arrange their rendezvous and generally communicate. In instances, where they did not have access to technology, they organised to meet in specific locations at set times (for example, some groups would arrange to meet at a local playground at a specific time, with instructions to ‘bring a shovel’). As many of the dirt jumps were continually being worked on by the children, some meetings were less organised, with the children simply arriving at the site when they had time.

In some cases, the groups developed through their members’ associations with particular schools and year levels. For example, one group in West Alice Primary School regular meetings at their local Hawkemont dirt jumps and at another place they called ‘our secret jumps’. This group consisted mostly of boys who attended the West Alice Primary School in years 5 and 6 and the local secondary school years 7 and 8. They generally involved around 10 young people who saw themselves as ’locals’ and used TikTok to organise the dirt jump builds. Two girls were occasionally involved.

In other examples, dirt jumps were built by more disparate groups of young people. Two or three ‘builders’ would initiate the construction of a new jump and then others would see these new jumps and either make their own additions or start to use them. In these ways, young people continually communicated with each other about the changes to their ‘works’ and the landscape.

They also re-developed dirt jumps that existed prior to the pandemic sometimes favouring more private locations that were out of sight.

6 Building Jumps

Building a bike jump involved design skills. It entailed finding a good location, then designing and constructing the jumps. Someone in the group would start by being the leader and then swap that role later. In instances where jumps were designed and constructed by an organised group of young people, each member would contribute their labour as part of the collective effort. They reported feeling a sense of competence and confidence, of improvising and finding new ways of making the jumps and enjoying the ‘hard work of it all’. Building the bike jump involved laying out tracks through the bushland, and then building physical obstacles, or erecting humps or ramps made from dirt, old logs and other material they scavenged.

Given the localised nature of the sites, proximity to home meant it was easy to bring tools such as picks and shovels. The materials were largely to hand: mud was plentiful and used to build up the ramps. In the case of the Hawkemount jumps a nearby river provided helpful resources, although some of the children were deterred by the presence of garbage in the waterway. Bits of wood scavenged from home and even some fallen tree branches were also used. Through the group effort, some children started displaying skill in certain areas, such as one boy who others identified as ‘a really good builder’.

Once the group was satisfied with the jumps, the boys would gather regularly most afternoons for sessions lasting for three to four hours. There was huge enthusiasm and excitement at having a chance to engage in activities which they initiated and organised. They spoke of the joy in getting away from the ‘boredom’ and frustrations of home and or ‘getting out’. What they were doing at the bike jumps contrasted markedly with what they described as the depressive experience of being ‘locked-indoors ‘at home all day for years’.

Some spoke of making a ‘safe place’ for themselves during a painful pandemic as they reimagined and made temporary jumps in some public spaces. It was a little sanctuary. Some of that joy came from being with friends, many of whom were also ‘doing it tough’ and it was a chance to make new friends. For some, the sense of sanctuary was a welcoming experience, in which they felt like they belonged to something, or were part of something, that was bigger than themselves and important to them and their friends.

For most it was just fun. Everyone just ‘did it’. They reported positively on being free from the constraints of locked down in their house and simply being out in the natural environment. It was fun and creative and a chance to do something exciting ‘outside’. Many commented on how they experienced a novel and positive sense of freedom, that it felt like they were escaping from ‘being locked up’. Many were tired of spending ‘so much time inside’. ‘We enjoyed being there in nature’ even though some said they didn’t like seeing snakes. They reported being respectful of the bush area they were in and used bins to put our rubbish in. They also said ‘our parents knew where we were’.

The act of riding bikes up and around elaborately carved out tracks through the bushland, climbing up ramps and flying through the air and landing safely on the other side had its own attractions. Typically one of them would film the action, which was sometimes later edited to highlight the best jumps or most spectacular falls which would be uploaded on TikTok.

Using conventional gendered criteria there was plenty of room for high risk masculine performativity interlaced with jokes and banter, bravado, cheers for especially brilliant displays, and commiseration for those who had a fall or a wound to be dealt with. Competitive boasting was grounded in displays of high levels of skill and understood as heroic. The boys especially valued displays of virtuosic ‘tricks’, special manoeuvres, engaging in stunts and then landing wheels first, or falling, all the while developing their skills. There were no set rules. The aim was to enjoy the adventure and find ‘new spots’ to ride.

Looking back after COVID the children reflected with some nostalgia:

It all stopped after the lockdown. We still go to the jumps but not like before. It was so good to catchup up with out friends during COVID. Now after COVID it’s much easier to catch up.

7 Adverse Responses from Older People

Not everyone took an enthusiastic or positive a view of the children’s use of parklands to build dirt jumps. Some older members of the public, out for a walk or a ramble though the urban bushland took exception to the presence of the young people and their bike jumps. They were what the boys referred to as ‘old people who were so annoying’. In this way we saw the well documented adultist ‘civilising offensive’ in full action, informed by ageist misrecognitions that ‘they’ are inherently disruptive, disposed to delinquency, and paradoxically, vulnerable and in need of protection. For those reasons it was imperative that they not be ‘unsupervised in public space (Powell, 2013; Woolley et al., 2011; Nolan, 2003; White, 2001).

The only problem was that the COVID lockdowns presented a novel situation - there were no adult managed youth spaces like schools, recreation centres, sporting clubs that were open where children could be corralled for the purpose of managing and securing their ‘civility’.

In our case many older people involved assume positions of power, defending the ‘natural order’ which casts children as guests in public space and not as active citizens who are able to re-shape landscapes to accommodate their needs. According to the children, in some instances, older people confiscated their shovels, surveilled them gathering evidence of their supposed wrong-doings:

Older people also used to take lots of photos of us. Sometimes we would tell them to stop. We’d say, you do not have our consent, but they still took the photos anyway.

Occasionally the intent may have been more innocent: ‘Once there were two ‘ladies who took lots of photos and movies and said they would email it to us. And they did and also made an Instagram of us’.

According to the children, police were another source of ‘trouble’. There was a police presence in the parks from the onset of the lockdowns mainly to enforce COVID regulations and to communicate clear messages about fines for those disobeying the restrictions. The children reported they were told by police they would be issued with infringement notices for being ‘too close together’. One child recalled ‘The cops came down and told us to go home and that what we were doing was against the law. We were only allowed to ride in twos after that’.

Hawkemount council workers were another source of ‘grief’ according to the children. In one case, council workers, ‘…came down to work near our bike jumps. They were logging trees. They knocked down our jumps – drove their machine right through them’. The children in the Hawkemount parkland recalled seeing the council bulldozing the jumps they had laboured on for days ‘all down in front of us all’. On another occasion council workers interrupted children building jumps that they had been working on for weeks, using heavy machinery to the flatten them as the children watched on.

This appeared unnecessary as the jumps were not large or even in a parts of the park that were regularly used by walkers or others. Noe the less it was a process repeated numerous times, as the children recreated jumps only for them to be bulldozed again. In one instance, large stones which had sat in the park for years as a form of seating and that young people had incorporated into their jumps, were removed by the council to deter further jump building. On some occasions council workers were friendly towards the children. As one of the children reported: ‘when the workers were cutting down trees, they said we could have the logs for our jumps’.

These accounts affirm and add new insights to the literature on young people, age based prejudicesFootnote 6 are subject to policing and practices of exclusion from public space in ways that those recognised as ‘responsible adults’ are not (De Martini Ugolotti & Genova, 2023; Daly, 2023, Dijkema, 2019, De Martini Ugolotti & Moyer, 2016). In these ways while there were (are) major inequities in Australia, and Melbourne more specifically, as other researchers have attested, some of those inequities were compounded for young people during the Covid pandemic (Tomaszewski et al., 2023, Doery et al., 2023, Gordon et al., 2021, Agamben 2005).

8 ‘Moral Panic’?

Beyond confiscating tools and collecting evidence of the children’s apparent transgressions in public space, some adults who were also using and-or surveilling these spaces turned to social media representing the children as ‘folk devils’. Those representations echoed popular public discourses about children roaming wild and untamed in public spaces harking back to ‘the larrikins’ of the 1890s, the ‘bodgies and widgies’ of the 1950s, or the goths of the 1980s.

This preoccupation with the idea of ‘youthful pathological behaviour’ on the part of some local residents and councils entailed talk of ‘anti-social behaviour’. This seems to have reinforced the impetus by local government to emphasise the illegality of the DIY dirt jumps, insisting they posed a risk to public safety. However, for reasons worth addressing briefly the attempt to represent the DIY dirt jump builders as ‘folk devils’ on this occasion did not progressed to a full ‘moral panic’.

In his account of moral panics Stanley Cohen described a moral panic as:

…a condition, episode, person or group of persons [which] emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests: its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media. The moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or more often resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorate (1972:9).

As an interactionist account of deviance, Cohen’s model highlighted the deviance labelling activities, especially by mainstream media. Yet this factor was not a consideration during Melbourne’s Covid pandemic. In spite of the efforts of many adults to represent the children as ‘folk devils’, as we later explain the mainstream media refused to play ball.

Certainly there were enough alarmed adults around the Hawkemount Parklands prepared to turn to social media to convey their concerns. One local Gumtree Facebook group began posting warnings:

Recently, police have observed an increase in youths on bicycles who have gathered in big groups in the GumTree east area, Charlesworth Park, Hawkemont BMX track and West Alice Primary School. These youths rarely wear helmets, and sometimes ride on motorised bicycles that are illegal and create danger for others in the vicinity, as well as the riders.

Referring to ‘youths’ in disparaging ways, emphasised the alleged recalcitrant behaviour of the children using the jumps. Claims about illegal motorised bicycles highlighted the idea they were all engaged in dangerous ’anti-social’ conduct. The fact that none of the children who built dirt jumps actually owned electric bikes did not get in the way of telling the story. That Facebook group was alarmed at what they called ‘vandalism’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’:

These youths have committed acts of vandalism, and often engage in anti-social behaviour. Their recklessness has not only put themselves in danger, but also has put community members in the area at risk of serious injury. The way that these youths have congregated in large groups is also a breach of Covid-19 directives that are intended to curb the spread of the virus in the community.

The GumTree ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ newsletter featured the following item in its ‘crime prevention’ section:

‘BMX track danger’

Recently, a concerned local resident saw a group of boys in Mossy Top using shovels to cut down small trees to clear the way for a mountain bike track they were making. The resident took photos of the boys and the damage they caused, and forwarded these to the police. To members of the public, should you encounter situations like this, with the offending parties still present, call 000 immediately for support. Avoid confronting the perpetrators, particularly if they are armed with implements that can be used to cause injury. If the offenders are not present, take photos of the damage and send details of the location to Crime Stoppers.

The advice to call emergency services (000) relied on the notion that the children would become violent towards anyone approaching them. Given that most of the children were primary school age this seems like an over-reaction. Local residents near Hawkemount were doubtless reassured to learn that in early September 2021, police had mounted a ‘major operation’ to disrupt the bike jumps. It seemed that the bike jumps were a threat to community safety:

Police from the Gumtree and Mt Fantastic Highway Patrol and Police Airwing have carried out an Operation to counter this damaging and anti-social behaviour. These youths have been confronted by police, who have acted to penalise any offenders breaching the Road Safety Act, as well as Covid-19 restrictions on use of public space. All people found to be committing offences by these Operations, which will be ongoing, will be prosecuted. The actions of these youths, and the threat that they have posed to community safety, will not be tolerated.

Yet one key component of a ‘moral panic’ was missing.

Mainstream media like commercial talkback radio stations, commercial television networks and tabloid print media such as the Herald Sun have long been implicated in ‘moral panics’ around supposedly deviant and disruptive groups of young people and other ‘folk devils’(e.g., Poynting et al., 2001, Gaffey, 2019). However, on this occasion these media sources surprisingly and counter-intuitively largely supported children building dirt jumps across Melbourne.

Melbourne’s news media challenged what they represented as overly-interventionist and authoritarian local governments unfairly demolishing the jumps built by innovative and industrious children. For example, a commercial television news bulletin reported on that:

Lockdowns have left children with nothing to do, leading to serious mental health concerns. A small group of industrious teenage children did something about it – they cleared up a disused site on public land out of sight from the general public and built a BMX park. A heavy-handed Council decided to intervene and end their fun. As one of the riders said: “There was nothing here at this spot, except some weeds and rubbish. We built the jumps, worked on them together. We haven’t had problems with anyone, except a few older people who told us to stop. Then one day we come here and it has all been flattened”.

There was no consultation with the locals, Instead, council acted like a bully towards the children who just wanted to play outside and keep the blues away. The council, known locally as the ‘fun police’, claimed that the jumps were not safe and endangered conservation.

As parent of one of the children said, “The council must have bigger issues to deal with than pushing these boys around”. One rider said that “We started by building jumps in a park across the street from our school, but the council kept bulldozing them. So we chose this place as it was away from people” Another spoke of how dirt jump “experts” had come to look at their work, saying that “you boys have done an amazing job with the jumps, they look super-safe”.

Similarly, one tabloid newspaper reported on the demolition of the dirt jumps, with a headline that read ‘Children devastated by council demolition of BMX park’:

Young BMX riders looking to escape the boredom of lockdown were heartbroken to find that their dirt jumps has been destroyed by a over-bearing local council. As children suffered through yet another lockdown, this group of riders painstakingly built a BMX park on vacant public land, armed with only their shovels and their ingenuity. “We worked really hard”, one of the children said. “We met here each day to build the jumps, and then we came here one day last week and there was a bulldozer knocking them all down”.

The council erected signs warning the public of the building jumps, which they described as ‘vandalism’. Meanwhile the children’s parents supported their efforts and were dismayed at the council’s attempt to end the fun.

They were really struggling with lockdown, and this was just a great thing for them to do after finishing home-schooling. The council just don’t seem to care, and have not only destroyed the jumps but also have destroyed their dreams.

In a significant and surprising turnaround the legacy media reports about dirt jumps being demolished by council, represented this local government response as over-bearing and callous. Rather than portraying the children as deviant, rule-breaking and out-of-control, as has frequently been the case in most media-driven ‘moral panics’ concerning young people, these reports positioned the children as heroic, ingenious and self-reliant. This response was especially characteristic of the way the legacy media in Melbourne including the Herald-Sun, The Australian, and local suburban newspapers in the Leader group and various TV outlets including SkyNews.

Much of this media reportage was produced by the News Corporation network, owned by the conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch (Muller, 2022). Rather than represent the children engaged in bike jumps, as ‘little hooligans’ they were treated as resilient, creative and as dissenters pushing back at the Victorian Premier and leader of the Labor government Daniel Andrews which these media outlets represented as ‘Dictator Dan’ (Graham et al., 2020; Muller, 2022). This response was part of the way these media outlets promoted populist libertarian campaigns protesting against state overreach throughout 2020-21. We suggest that this antagonism from the conservative Murdoch media towards the Andrew’s government and its Covid policies seems to have informed their decision to support the young people, by representing them as victims of an overbearing ‘authoritarian state’ and not to have engaged in what we might otherwise have expected: a fullblown ‘moral panic’ about ‘unruly youth’.

9 Local Government: Social Media Panic and Excluding Young People

Despite the on-going formal affirmations by local government authorities of their commitment to youth participation, councils were not happy when youth participation of the kind we document in this article was initiated by young people themselves. The children involved in DIY dirt jumps were excluded from relevant formal decision-making processes. Even our own attempts to find out what was happening in the local councils and with police and to advocate for children and young people in decision-making about dirt bike jumps were frustrated.

In the initial conversations we had with local government we asked e.g., whether Youth Workers were aware the council was bull-dozing the jumps. On 6th and 15th September 2021 we made inquiries to the local council and spoke with a local government senior youth worker about the bike jumps. On this occasion they said they did not know that was happening. We also asked if they knew that the children were coming into contact with police in those sites and expressed our concern about both matters. We soon learned that the council was indeed demolishing these jumps, due to:

…the risks to the public caused by the jumps, and potential for injuries resulting from their use. We are also concerned about damage caused to the native environment by the jumps, including loss of recently revegetated sites.

In that first conversation we were also informed that some children had reportedly been violent and that there was much activity about this on social media that the council was sensitive to. The council worker also claimed that local residents had raised these concerns with the police. Soon after that first contact with the council youth services we received advice from them back that they had recommenced outreach work as well as their ‘youth participation’ program. The latter included young people’s involvement in the design and building of public ‘recreation areas’.

On many occasions we attempted to speak with local police about these allegations, yet the messages left with community safety officers were not returned.

Alongside our own inquiries, one of the young riders spoke to their concerns during question time at a Council meeting during this time. The children argued for retention of DIY dirt jumps, as stated in this composite extract:

Hi, I’m Damien and I am in grade 6 at West Alice Primary School. Me and my sister live near Charlesworth Park. We have been going there since we were little to look at the river, climb trees and ride our bikes. In lockdown, we have met up with our friends to ride our bikes over the jumps. Sometimes we bring a shovel and help build them. We know most of the people there. They go to our school. My sister asked her friends to come along one time too. They made a cubby house with sticks and branches. The other day we went to ride our bikes on the jumps and they were gone and there was a fence around our track. We want you to please stop knocking our jumps down, they are our favourite place and we are sad that we aren’t allowed to play there anymore.

A representative of the Council responded, stating that while they appreciated the effort made by the children to create the jumps, the council needed to make sure that things weren’t going to hurt people or cause problems. The councillor then assured them that the council intended to develop a strategy on using open spaces to support activities like building and climbing.

10 Community Engagement?

Most official contact with young people during the lockdowns was conducted by Victoria Police ‘Youth Resource Officers’. This was because council youth workers were not permitted to meet face-to -face due to Covid-19 restrictions. It was not until well into the lockdown period that Gumtree Council was able to send ‘outreach youth worker’ to the sites. As we were told by one council employee:

Youth outreach staff were allowed to visit multiple sites on public land, to meet with approximately 30–40 young people to talk about dirt jumps. The staff also spoke with young people about incidents involving anti-social behaviour that have happened around these sites. By all accounts, these discussions were fruitful. We intend to maintain this presence in public land and continue these conversations.

This effort to ‘engage’ with children to discuss ‘incidents of anti-social behaviour’ was also reported by the local council which claimed that:

Our intention is to continue to engage with young riders that have developed these tracks, to gauge their interest in consulting with council about their thoughts on recreational facilities and events. We intend to conduct further outreach activities that will involve coordinating consultation on these matters.

We see here the operation of a ready-made narrative which represented any child making or using bike jumps as necessarily engaging in ‘anti-social behaviour’. For policy-makers and local government officials anything children’ did outside government sanctioned and regulated activities was deemed to be anti-social activity (O’Keeffe and Fawdon-Jenkins, 2022).

This premise informed one report issued by Gumtree Council:

Many illegal dirt jumps have been created by BMX riders on public land, which have been developed without seeking prior approval from council. These unauthorised structures create risks to the community, created conflict between riders and members of the public, led to maintenance problems and also negatively impacted the local ecosystems. We have had no option but to remove these jumps, and acknowledge the effort that has gone into their creation. The council remains committed to engaging with community on this matter, to determine the demand for recreational facilities and identify new opportunities for professionally designed facilities that meet health and safety requirements (Composite extract, based on multiple documents).

Subsequently, Gumtree council conduct consultation with members of the public about the use of public land. This included a survey which asked residents about existing recreational facilities and identifying opportunities for potential new BMX park developments, to be led by council. The Gumtree council then developed the ‘Gumtree Council Recreation Plan, 2023–2028’, which identified potential sites for new cycling facilities, including a multi-purpose space that featured a BMX pump track, Mountain Bike trails and open-air cycling velodrome. However, this report did not specify how children would be included in the design and implementation process for these potential facilities.

11 Conclusion

During the COVID lockdowns, while many national, state and local government officials and other authorities regularly publicly expressed concern about children’s well-being, the policies directly affecting children were invariantly made as if they either did not exist, or were completely invisible. The generational asymmetries of power between children and adults enabled this practice of excluding children from processes of deliberation and decision-making that effected them to proceed as a normal way of doing things. That practice reflected long-standing discourses about children’s deficits and vulnerabilities and the idea that adults were naturally responsible for protecting ‘children from themselves.

In addressing our research questions, we considered the spatio-temporal political nature of young people’s everyday lives (Kallio, 2016; Gray & Manning, 2022). In this way our article contributes to long-running debates about whether unregulated urban spaces are ever going to be ‘appropriate’ places for children and young people to spend their time. There is a considerable body of European and North American scholarship on young people’s use of public space that has regarded their activities in urban spaces as ‘risky,’ ‘pathological’ or ‘deviant’ (Jones & Barker, 2000;Löw, 2016). According to these accounts urban public spaces are not appropriate spaces for the socialization of young people (Hörschelmann, & Van Blerk, 2012).

We do not value pursuing such a moralizing perspective. Indeed we regard such accounts as deeply problematic. Well before COVID, some scholars understood that the political-geography of ‘hanging out’ e.g., demonstrated the ways in which public spaces – absent adult mediation – were well able to meet young people’s needs to gather in places where they could see and be seen and to confront an ‘adult world’, and negotiate how they wanted to be represented, by adults in their communities (Gray & Manning, 2022: 1402, Colombo et al., 2023).

The advent of COVID, meant children and young people were not able to access conventional urban spaces like shopping malls, shops, game arcades, cinemas or the streets. The urban parklands in which they gathered in 2020-21 were in many ways unlike those more traditional public spaces: they were away from crowded streets or busy shopping malls affording well hidden, bushy spaces that would not attract a lot of adult surveillance. During the COVID lockdowns, these urban parklands became new and important sites for maintenaing valued social networks and engaging in various styles of expressive play and displays of high status skills.

At the same time, manifestations of spatial conflict and exclusion that we examined in the contested relations between the boys, local authorities and others, was sustained and reproduced in the mundane routines of everyday life instanciated in this case by DIY bike jumps (Di Masso, 2012; Masso, 2015). To explain why children designed, built and used dirt bike jumps during the COVID pandemic one answer is because it was fun, and because ‘my friends were doing it’ and an opportunity to spend time with them. In the pre-COVID period many researchers argued that hanging out in public spaces was crucial to children’s social development, identity formation, relationship building and exploration of their world (Gilchrist & Wheaton, 2017). Many boys spoke of how they experienced a novel and positive sense of freedom, saying that it felt like they were escaping from ‘being locked up’ and free from the constraints of locked down in the house. It in these ways they were political in that they were contesting their invisible civic status by engaging in performative play in open spaces?

Children’s geographers have long called for a broader or more generous conceptual understanding of politics as it pertains to children and their everyday lives. This account of politics was exemplified in the ways the children variously contested and negotiated how they were represented when they used public spaces (Christensen et al., 2017; Hadfield-Hill & Christensen, 2021).

Paradoxically while all this was taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic, local government officials in the City of Hawkmount continued publicly valorising youth participation. The problem was that when participation entailed, as it did in this case, children taking the initiative, and ‘hanging out’, this kind of ‘youth participation’ was not welcome. Indeed, many government officials and local residents at the time only saw the children involved in bike jumps as ‘anti-social’ mischief makers, who engaged in illegal activity by breaching COVID rules, or who caused ‘criminal damage’ by building ‘unauthorised structures’.

Our work confirms the research of scholars who have long observed the precarious position of young people in public spaces, and how their presence in, public spaces has been heavily regulated. This older research highlighted the paradoxical positioning of children as ‘at risk’ (in danger) and ‘risky’ or dangerous when they are out in what are typically adult spaces without supervision (Monahan, 2006; Rudner, 2012).

Our findings indicate that earlier theoretical work (e.g., Dixon et al., 2006) was right to regard public spaces as the sites of ideological or political tensions between freedom and control, which are evident in attempts to position certain ‘kinds of people’ as ‘out of place’. While many policy makers and professionals concerned children’s well-being seemed unaware of what the bike jumpers were actually doing, they ‘knew’ that these children were ‘out of place’.

Above all we can confirm that as researchers in the pre-COVID era also understood, many young people were not passive in the face of attempts to regulate or even exclude them from public spaces. Children and young people have long engaged with and contested spatial regulation in ways that rework and sometimes undermine attempts to regulate their use of public spaces (Gray & Manning, 2014) The children who built and used dirt jumps during COVID contested ‘adultist’ representations of them and resisted official attempts to deny them use of public space (White, 1993, O’Keeffe, 2022).