Play Streets for Kids Are Magic—For Adults
Play Streets for Kids Are Magic—For Adults
In the summer of 2009, Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson, two mothers living on Greville Road in Bristol, a midsize city in southwest England, found themselves in a strange predicament: They saw entirely too much of their kids. The friends decided to run an experiment. They applied to shut their quarter-mile road to traffic for two hours after school on a June afternoon—not for a party or an event but just to let the children who lived there play. The results were breathtaking. The dozens of kids who showed up had no problem finding things to do. Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside.
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there is a lot to noodle on here.
as someone that lives near three playgrounds but next to a street that connects two major roads (and thus a lot of non-stop-sign-stoppers), the idealism of this article is about sweet and also distant from reality.
a lot of solution-ing for today's ills point to the past. but that raises some insurmountable hurdles and denies some of the challenges of the past as well.
looking forward, i wonder if we would find different problems to tackle to achieve similar outcomes.
- self driving cars might be trusted to stop at stop signs more than busy drivers
- self driving cars might even take kids to the nearest train / playground
- parents are busier. not just with kids but also work (that doesn't end in the office anymore). maybe having kids self-play will buy back some time, but there seems to be another driver of less time in this productivity-focused society
- city monitors / play ground monitors feel like another possible connectivity tissue (just like the school crossing guard).
overall, it's fun to imagine play for our kids today like we used to have it, but perhaps it can look different, acknowledging a new world, but still eek out some of these enticing outcomes: building a community that is not fearful of the unknown.
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