4 - In Loco Parentis

Summary

This chapter emphasizes actions at the regional scale, specifically the West Coast hip neighborhoods of the Bay Area during the 1960s. The runaway crisis of the late 1960s and the People’s Park standoff in 1969 are the focus of this chapter, which explores the role that “the West” and “nature” each played in the counterculture imagination and in the emergence of the popular ecology movement on the streets of Berkeley. This chapter stresses again the more intimate scale of the body and the influence that mobile, sometimes sick, and recalcitrant youth bodies played in the remaking of public space and ideas of autonomy as youth and their adult allies fought for “the right to the city.” The flood of rootless, placeless teens in public space, parks, and new “youth ghettos” forced local municipal renegotiations of young people’s legal status, contributing to broad national changes to the very meanings of youth, youth public health accommodation, and environmental activism during a decade marked by such contests.