The rapidly developing urban environment impacts on the children's community of the city on the formation of their habits, communicative skills, social phobias and interactions with space. In order to explore the degree to which the environment influences the individual, the paper attempts to provide an analytical comparison of two generations of Muscovites: the contemporary children and teenagers, on the one hand, and those whose childhood years were in the mid and late 20th century, on the other. The subject of this analysis are characters (types) of yard space that cause them the most negative emotions, in one way or another related to the categories of fear (among them: neighbors, teenagers, janitors, homeless people). As the study shows, the phobias in the contemporary world are largely related to the changed attitudes to old realities, rather than to the emergence of new ones. In addition, these four groups of characters are united by one apparently important feature: for a child they are carriers of different types of "otherness": neighbors another family, teenagers other age, janitors another nation, homeless other social status.