A Place at the Table @ Cafe au Play

The Family Friendly City - taking back the streets

In my last post that discussed the importance of improvised play for children’s development, I noted that “dense populations and urban environments create special challenges for improvisational learning.” I concluded with a promise to discuss some creative solutions to these challenges in my next post.

If we want to claim space for improvisational play a first priority is to reclaim our neighborhood streets and sidewalks. Streets and sidewalks are ubiquitous, accessible and contiguous. For any city, they constitute its largest and perhaps best maintained public space.  Unfortunately, the advent of the automobile has increasingly restricted use of the streets to the narrow function of efficient transportation. Non-transport uses such as lingering, playing, sitting, selling, and gathering for public debate have been discouraged and in many cases legally restricted. In traditional walking cities, children were a common sight on the street. Within and around the milling adults they played their ball, chase, and hoop games. Merchants also used the streets for display and for engaging the public. Pedestrians did not cling to the sidewalks but shared the roadway with horses, carts and other means of conveyance. My point is not to romanticize the streets of walking cities, because they could be unpleasant and even dangerous, but to help us reassert the idea that streets and sidewalks are public spaces first and that efficient movement of people and goods are only one of their multiple purposes.

In beginning to reclaim our streets and sidewalks, it is helpful to understand that we are part of a growing movement of activists and urbanists who have a similar goal. What is now a common practice of sidewalk seating for restaurants was only a few decades ago unconventional and illegal. Where once food vendors were legally restricted from public spaces, now cities are beginning to discover their important public and social aspects (see Project for Public Spaces) In Portland, City Repair has made it their mission to do “intersection repairs” by painting mandallas, building cob posting stations, and adding many other curb and corner attractions that are intended to reassert the public and symbolic purpose of intersections as places to “come together”. Portland also makes it relatively easy to have street festivals, marches, parades and block parties (click for application).

All of this is moving in the right direction but there are ways that individuals can do more, especially to encourage children to claim their sidewalks and streets. First, we need to get out of our houses, away from our fenced backyards, and onto our front sidewalks and streets. Our neighborhood on has developed a real habit of this. We are lucky to have a narrow street so it is easy and common to engage neighbors up down and across the streets in conversations. And if the adults are outside, invariably the children follow. Soon they will be on their scooters, roller blades, and bikes riding up on down the block. And with adults out front, neighborhood yards become fair game for kid visits. What was formerly a semi-private space, becomes a semi-public space. Dogs chase balls, kids congregate, adults sit yard walls and commiserate. It’s a real community time.

Parents on our block seem to have developed a process of informal exchange. Kids truck off to one person’s house, parents of the visiting children check in to be sure its OK, and, if so, the kids hang out there for awhile. Next time, it’s another person’s house or yard that is the location of play. It’s fun, informal and relatively fair. No need to set up play dates, the kids do that for you. Kids on our street seem to have a system for inviting other kids out. They simply hang out on the sidewalks and look for any action at the neighbor kid’s house. If things work out, someone comes out and the play begins.

On our street, there are lots of “eyes on the street” other than parents. Neighbors seem to have an intuitive sense of “how things should be” and become alert and asking questions if something seems amiss. And kids are not shy to visit. My wife and I are avid gardeners and this gets us out into the yard on a regular basis. For some curious children, this is an invitation to visit and ask questions. These are the best “teachable moments.” I also do woodworking out of my garage and this is another attraction for kids. Because I have lots of scrap wood, the kids sometimes bother me enough to get them hammers and nails so they can build a wobbly chair or box. My inclination is to leave them alone, but if I see them heading toward failure, I usually step in with a little advice. If I limit my instructions to a few hints, this becomes another “teachable moment”. 

The take away from this long post is that there is a movement to “take back the streets” and convert them from single purpose uses for car conveyance to the multiple purpose uses they formerly served in the old walking cities. And you can play a part in this process by finding a reason (conversation, gardening, puttering, lingering, playing with your dog) to get out from your private interior and backyard spaces into your front yards where you are likely to engage others. Your presence will be an invitation to interaction, for someone to stop and talk, ask a question, offer a comment. When that happens, you become an event, an excuse for others to gather.  Suddenly the semi-private spaces of front yards become semi-public spaces, for community, for fun, for engagement that blurs the hard boundaries of street, sidewalk and yard into a softer landscape of neighborhood.  And neighborhoods like this are inviting, safe and comfortable spaces for the improvisational play that is known to be so important for childrens' development.

The Family Friendly City - places for improvised play

In the process of course preparation, I was looking for examples of how individuals use personal narratives as a strategy for building consensus.  It being Presidents Day, my web search turned to A. Lincoln who used humor and stories to disarm critics as well as communicate the essence of policy decisions.  As often happens with web searches, what we find is sometimes more interesting than what we were looking for.  Hence this startling vignette about Lincoln's children in the White House.

Gifts poured into the White House after the Lincoln's moved in.  Two of the favorite ones were goats named Nanny and Nanko. The president's sons hitched Nanny and Nanko to carts or kitchen chairs and drove them through the main floor of the White House. One time Tad harnessed Nanko to a chair and drove through the East Room during a White House reception.  Dignified women pulled up their hoop skirts as Tad drove around the room and out the door again.

Amazing! Could we even imagine such a thing today. Perhaps the story is apocryphal, meant to illustrate the well publicized difficulty the Lincoln's had managing their children, but, for me, the point of is how radically things have changed for children.  Such a carefree attitude about children's play and their permission to creatively engage their surroundings is simply unthinkable today.  And recent research suggests that the declining opportunity for creative improvisational play is not a good thing for children's development.

Children's play today is highly regulated, scheduled and directed.  It is focused on toys, passive entertainment, structured games, and achievement directed activities.  What is missing is the freedom for children to explore, to remake their environments, to engage in improvised play in places where parental supervision is at a distance.  In the Lincoln story, Tad was obviously engaged in improvised play, in using what was at hand to engage his environment, to be amazingly free to take risks.

For me, the Tad Lincoln story does not seem so unlikely. Growing up in a small Iowa town in 1950's, I can remember the freedom I experienced. My parents had little fear for my safety and had few expectations from their peers that they should be more watchful than than they were. Kids were expected to take care of themselves, keep busy, stay out of the way. My friends and I were master builders - everything from mud villages to tandem bikes. To build the tandem bike we went to the local repair shop and ask "Speed" Philips to show us how to braze the frames together. "Speed" stopped his work, showed us a few things, gave us safety glasses, tools, and his brazing materials and let us get to work. We took it from there.

When we were not playing, there was plenty of work to do. And the attitude of adults to our competence was remarkable. A few instructions and we were expected to manage from there. What this combination of improvisational freedom and high expectations produced were self-regulating adults who had a sense of their own competence.

I love to tell stories but I am not a romantic about the past. I realize that the freedom I experienced is difficult to recreate in a contemporary urban environment. There are few "wild" spaces, that is, few spaces that are not dedicated to something. Even our "open" spaces are owned for some activity or are restricted in their use. Ballparks are scheduled up, so it’s hard for kids to organize a pick up game. Kids pulling together a makeshift structure of limbs and scavenged material would be hounded by park supervisors for disturbing new plantings and damaging the fragile understory. And then there is our constant paranoia about the safety of our children who might encounter the untrustworthy stranger.

So what is to be done? How do we create spaces where child can creatively engage the world outside of their caregivers homes and just beyond the reach of their immediate supervision. First we should recognize that improvisational play is very important for children's development. Second, we should understand that dense populations and urban environments create special challenges for improvisational learning. Third we should understand that the urban environment is a creation of humans and as such is subject to creative adaptation and reformation. I will be writing about some of these adaptations in the future. In the interim you might want to link to the OPB story, Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills, and learn more about the research on improvisational play.

Charles Heying