Children and City Society, Rachel Andrews
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In the afternoons, I walk with my daughter from our house at the top of the
St Luke’s area of Cork into the city centre. It is a walk of about half an
hour, although it can take more, if the curiosity of an almost two-year-old is
peaked into unexpected diversions down laneways, through a churchyard or into the
grounds of the local hospice.
Along the way, I notice how she engages with her surroundings, so familiar
to me but still so feverishly fascinating for her. She mounts and descends the
steps that led up to once fine houses, but now bring you into doctor and dentist
surgeries, or blocks of bedsits and flats.
She stands and swings from the iron barriers, there to protect us from the
road alongside. She opens the gates of private residencies and grabs up handfuls
of the pebbles carefully arranged as part of landscaped entrances. She
collapses into mounds of leaves, shed on footpaths from autumn trees. She thumps her
hand against bins and postboxes. She walks with the sleeve of her jacket rubbing
against walls. Her urban landscape is a sensory object, to be felt, caressed, savoured.
On some of these afternoons, as I consider her interaction with this setting, I
am reminded of the urban visionary Jane Jacobs’ assertion that lively
sidewalks have positive aspects for city children’s play.
‘Children in cities,’ she wrote in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, ‘need an unspecialised outdoor home base from which to
play, to hang around in, and to help form their notions of the world. It is this form
of unspecialised play that the sidewalks serve and that lively city sidewalks
can serve splendidly.’
On those occasions, I think again, as I have often done, of what has been
lost in this country by our insistence, through the building of standardised
houses on the outskirts of localities, on a homogenous way of life for our citizens,
and most particularly, on such a life for our children.
We have forced our young people from our cities, into estates and back
gardens and the sanitised spaces of shopping malls or leisure centres. What if,
instead, we had listened to Jacobs and had created city societies of mixed-use ,
mixed-income neighbourhoods, residences on the stoop, wider footpaths, and
pedestrianised streets?
It is such a city society I wish for my daughter as she grows. In the
afternoons, as we walk, I am wistful for what might have been.
Rachel Andrews
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