Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg

Author:Eric Klinenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

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Old people, of course, are not the only ones who need easy access to parks and other recreational facilities for their well-being; we all do. Children’s need for open-air play spaces is particularly important: their physical health and social development depend on them. But in recent decades, as research by the renowned environmental psychologist Roger Hart and the scholars he has assembled at the City University of New York [CUNY] Children’s Environments Research Group establishes, children throughout the developed world have been steadily losing their outdoor play spaces. Even playgrounds, Hart argues, have become excessively constraining for developing bodies and minds. The CUNY team identifies several reasons for the decline in accessible spaces for outdoor activities: public divestment from parks and recreational facilities; rising concerns about violence; new regimes of continuous adult supervision; parental pressure for academic achievement; the emergence of professionally managed after-school programs; and, cutting across all classes and regions, the popularity of small-screen culture, with video games, apps, and social media as the dominant sources of youth entertainment. The effects of this loss include higher levels of child obesity and stress, and, Hart argues, diminished skills for participating in civic life.

This concern about the loss of civic skills may be surprising, since we rarely think of spending time on swings and slides or playing in sandboxes as preparation for democracy. But when Hart and his team go to the playground, they focus on behavior that most parents treat as secondary: How does a child decide when it’s time to give up a swing so that another can have a turn? What happens when the wait feels too long? When do kids include strangers in their games and projects, and when do they set boundaries? How do they manage disagreement and conflict? Context matters. Hart and his colleagues are not only interested in what happens in the schoolyard or neighborhood playground where children make regular visits. They believe that social dynamics among children change when they explore new places and encounter different people and groups. Kids are especially likely to develop interpersonal skills that will help them in civic life when they wander into “foreign” places and have to navigate the new social situation on their own. But that’s the kind of thing that happens less often now that parents monitor their children so closely, and they get little opportunity to roam.

One recent paper, by Hart’s colleague Pamela Wridt, draws on oral histories, childhood autobiographies, and archival research to show how access to public space varied among three generations of New Yorkers: those born in the 1930s and 1940s, the 1970s, and the 2000s. For those born in the 1930s and 1940s, the neighborhood sidewalk was the main play area. Victoria, an Italian American who grew up in the East Harlem/Yorkville neighborhood in the 1940s, recounts that on her street “the whole block was full of kids. Almost all the activity was done outdoors….You went outside and on the sidewalk you drew [with chalk] a potsie, those little squares where you used to play jacks, [and] bottle tops.

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