Public Space and Play Habits

Jake’s comment a couple weeks ago about the awareness of public space and the following show-and-tell if you will about our childhood play habits really struck a chord with me. I grew up near a small Midwestern town where the population consisted of roughly 1500 people and whose main claim to fame was that the city bank was robbed by Jesse James in 1871. There was no public space - I mean, technically there was but it wasn’t the same public space that you would find in a big city. There were a couple town parks and playgrounds, but it was pretty unusual to have hoards of families and kids using the same play areas at the same time. So even though those areas were open to everybody, you usually ended up with the playground all to yourself. You never really had to worry about the other kids - all of the swings and monkey bars were fair game, and you could take as much time as you wanted on the balance beam without some obnoxious boy trying to get you to fall off. Sharing the playground was inevitable, even in a town that small, but I would just go to the opposite side of the playground and then it was almost like I had the playground to myself again. When my family moved out to Oregon, I became a lot more aware of what it was like to share a playground in the way that it was meant to be shared - with lots of kids. This isn’t to say that I had never been on the playground with more than five kids. After all, what is recess? But there is something different about being on the playground with the kids from school and playing with complete strangers. With the playground in Corydon, it was a really fluid space (there were more resources/play apparatuses than kids) so movement wasn’t hindered. With the playground in Medford, parts of it contained fluid spaces (for a di
fferent reason) while other areas were very controlled. Sometimes you had to just go with the flow of traffic so as not to get in the way because there were so many kids, or sometimes kids would be very aggressive about what they viewed as their area of the playground. This would affect the rest of the kids using the playground because the ratio of play apparatuses to kids has diminished and it hampers the use of the space. All of this is to say that my idea of public space when I was lived in Corydon was that other people may or may not show up, but until they did it was my private area. Public space only became ‘public space all of the time’ when I moved to Medford. Also when my family moved, there was a decrease in my unsupervised play time. My sisters and I were always watched or had some kind of supervision whenever we were in public areas in Corydon and in Medford, but we lived on a farm in Iowa and I had unlimited amounts of unsupervised play. I don’t even think I told my parents I was going outside most of the time. Our swing set and Playskool house were within eyesight of the house, but a lot of times my sisters and I would go out on ‘adventures’ in the nearby woods which weren’t so visible. It’s a little funny how my home was where I had the most opportunities to get into trouble or get lost, but it was also the place where I had the least amount of supervision. Maybe my parents had more control over the situation than I knew of, but to my eight-year old self my parents could have gone into town to run errands without me knowing (in fact, I think that might have happened once or twice).