My favourite line from Chapter 4 on assimilating children into the uses of sidewalks is not by Jacobs but from a 1928 report on city recreation by the Regional Plan Association of New York. The excerpted report tellingly describes one of the main challenges of keeping city children in parks and playgrounds, where planners would prefer they stay in their leisure time: “The lure of the street is a strong competitor.” The carnival of the street and its gritty sidewalks, in the eyes of the report’s authors, are clearly a dangerous and dissolute place to be avoided by and spared from children. What good could possibly come from children playing on sidewalks?
The answer, of course, as Jacobs reveals in her observational-evidential style, is plenty of good. Little eyes on the street beget bigger eyes on the street. As children play on sidewalks, they naturally engage the attention of surrounding adults. It doesn’t matter whether the attention is watchful or incidental, adoring or disapproving, from a porch or through store window, just so long as the people giving the attention are there in the first place and “take a modicum of responsibility for each other.” The right sidewalk is a lively and protected place for even a city’s most vulnerable population—kids under the age of 15—while secluded, underpopulated parks and planned playgrounds are easily more threatening or illicit.
The problem with applying this to the behaviour of kids these days is, well, kids these days. They are no longer just squeezed out of street life by planners and engineers as Chapter 4 rightly tells us, but their leisure time is also much more heavily programmed, scheduled, and cybernated. The lure of the street now has a troupe of new competitors for kids’ time and attention in the form of lessons, sports, clubs, and social media.
Sisters Screen Time by Jeremy Hiebert
