This article offers a critical reading of the main socio-spatial representations employed in scholarly literature to characterize the spatial practices of youths. Four epistemological presuppositions are identified: space as a resource for interaction, as a natural area, as a container, as a category-specific delimitation. While all the authors note the existence of a link between urban youth practices and their socialization desires, the spatial problematic has two epistemological biases: 1) urban space acts as an environment producing background effects; and 2) the relationship to space is the direct product of social action through the projection of its organization onto a spatial signifier. The effect of this shift is to designate urban space with the help of metaphors that reduce spatial reality to an interstice, a territory, a scenery, a material constraint, a container, or a resource.