Yards Are Not Enough: The Importance of the Public Realm
Just before the recent snap of cold weather landed in Texas, I zipped my son into his sweatshirt and marched him to the car. It was time for our daily “outside time,” and I had decided that today would be a little different from our normal walk around the neighborhood. Ten minutes of driving later, we parked just beyond downtown Waco. I pulled him from his car seat, crossed two streets and walked through the entrance to the village at Magnolia Silos. A few yards in, I put him down, knelt to his eye level and gestured outward: “See all the people?” I asked.
This might sound like an exercise in irony: the mom who loves cities and urbanism takes her son to a pseudo-village for play. It isn’t. I’ve written about Magnolia Silos before; I understand there are limits to this kind of placemaking. But for now, it’s providing a type of social space that I can’t find in our neighborhood, one that uses design to bring people together instead of keeping them apart in the name of privacy.
Historically, children ruled neighborhood streets, but their reign ended with the arrival of the car and car-oriented norms of behavior. Most American parents responded to this shift by teaching their children to fear and acquiesce to the car and its driver, as well as by embracing and idealizing the private yard as the ultimate children’s space. As a private amenity, yards are nice. But as a primary third place for children, yards fail to achieve what social third places do so well: introduce children to the rhythms of the community, the variety of human activities and the idea of participation as a mode of being.
Third places are able to fulfill these roles not through some grand programming agenda, but simply through their design. You might say this is the secret superpower of design: The way we allocate our land, build our buildings, and arrange other amenities and uses eventually comes together to form a lesson in being in that space. Put simply, urban design teaches us how to inhabit space and how to relate to each other without saying a single word.
As adults, perhaps we are less aware of this instructional element of the city — at least until we travel to other places and realize how shifts in design lead to shifts in behavior. But for children, the lesson is always unfolding. Every day, I watch Levi take in the pattern of our city, both in terms of how it’s built and in terms of the activity it inspires. I watch him make associations, draw connections, and learn boundaries and rules. I watch him learn a lesson of what the city is and who it is for as expressed through the design choices that characterize Waco.
To be honest, I’m not thrilled with what he’s learning. This came home to me recently, when I took a morning walk and realized that driving is the primary activity he sees in our neighborhood — an activity that both fascinates and frightens him. Occasionally, he will see a neighbor or catch the sight of children playing outside, but those are rare moments. The movement of cars, though, is a daily occurrence and one that I know is shaping what Levi associates with the concept of “the neighborhood.”
One way Jane Jacobs described the city was as “a container for human life.” I bet she came up with that metaphor while watching a New York City street full of human activity: delivery men bustling about, moms dragging children home from nursery, children playing tag, storekeepers sweeping their doorways. Such a description would have been natural in that kind of urban environment.
Not so today: The design decisions we’ve made in the U.S. over the past century have deprived us of that kind of vitality, replacing it with an extreme emphasis on privacy, the noise of automobiles, and the silence of people withdrawn from the public realm — because there is no public realm in most of our single-family neighborhoods. Such a realm should be a space where, like Jacobs, children can see the various human activities that make up life and that make life meaningful. It should also be a place where they can begin to practice the art of social participation and learn what it means to be part of a greater community.
There are signs of hope. Look at the rise of car-free neighborhoods like Culdesac in Arizona. Think of village-style developments like Indigo in Texas, which has car-free green streets designed partly for children to be able to walk safely. Or consider the Wheeler District, a community in Oklahoma City organized around the principle of walkability.
I’m not saying that master-planned developments are the only solution here. I’m sure there are plenty of smaller-scale placemaking interventions that can return safety and conviviality to our neighborhoods: reforming zoning to allow small businesses back in residential areas, slimming down streets to discourage high-speed traffic, creating intentional play spaces like the school streets in Paris, or even reclaiming underutilized space and converting them into “town square” kind of environments. Just asking café and coffee shop owners to create kid-friendly zones in their businesses would be a move in the right direction.
I’ve found little spaces like that here in Waco. Our neighborhood coffee shop has toys and books for children. The farmer’s market is a vibrant experience on weekends. Walking around Baylor’s campus is a nice antidote to the constant fear of cars in our neighborhood. And yes, there’s the “village” at Magnolia Silos: an imperfect but valuable exercise in creating human-centered spaces.
So that, dear reader, is how I found myself kneeling in front of my son at Magnolia, directing his attention to the people. He stood still at first, his eyes wide at the site of children playing, dogs lounging and parents playing a pickup game of dodgeball. Slowly, he began to wander, constantly watching, once approaching a group of children who were tussling over a soccer ball.
And then, finally, he knelt and began to run his hands through a patch of dirt, making the pivot from observer to participant. On that pleasant Saturday afternoon, the village was a container of human life and now he was part of it too.
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.