Opinion: The D7 Play Streets initiative is about showing what a simple reallocation of public space which puts children first and which returns the street to a source of social life could look like.
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By Emmet Ó Briain, TU Dublin and Seán Shanagher, DCU
"Play streets" are neighbourhood-led initiatives to create opportunities for children to play freely together on their own streets, often closing a street to through traffic at an agreed time. The D7 Play Streets initiative aims to give children in Dublin 7 the experience of street play and greater independence that a lot of older Irish people enjoyed when they were growing up.
On a recent sunny afternoon, a group of children gathered to play on a local street near Dublin's north inner city. Some of them skipped, some kicked a ball around, some drew with chalk in the middle of the road, others sat with their parents, just taking it all in.
The remarkable thing for many of these children was that this was their first time playing on the streets where they live. While we tend to think of play as spontaneous and unstructured, the few hours of street play these children enjoyed was only made possible through the intervention of parents living in the community, as part of a new neighbourhood-led initiative.
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From RTÉ Archives, children in a Dublin suburb demonstrate how to play a game of Jump Sticks for a 1982 episode of Breakaway
Why the need for this initiative?
The importance of play to childhood development is well established. There are the obvious physical benefits, promoting physical activity and the development of motor skills, but there are also important psychological and emotional benefits too. Play creates opportunities for children to develop autonomy in decision-making, for social interaction with other children, as well as encouraging imagination and creativity.
Historically, the street was where children living in cities would reap the benefits of play, but the childhoods of today are very different to those enjoyed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, particularly in terms of children’s ability to play or travel places without adult supervision (what is often referred to as 'independent mobility’). In fact, Ireland has one of the lowest rates of children’s independent mobility in Europe.
Irish children play less, are less physically active and less independent than many of their European peers, but also less physically active and independent than their parents were at the same age. CSO figures show that half of all primary school students in Ireland walked or cycled to school in 1986 but only a quarter did 30 years later. Back then, 24% got a lift to school by car, but that is now about 60%.
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, why 'risky play' is good for kids
The decrease in children’s physical activity and the increase in lifts to school are not unrelated. 50 years ago, Kenneth Browne and Lance Wright’s A Future for Dublin warned of the dangers of urban planning to suit the motor car. This warning went unheeded and our planning in the interim has mostly been built around the idea that every household would or should have access to a car.
Why Dublin 7?
In Dublin 7 and other parts of the city, especially areas between the canals, the problem is a qualitatively different one to that of the outer suburbs. It is not just a question of accessibility, or of safety - the dangers of rat-runs and speeding cars - or of poor provision for pedestrians and so-called "carchitecture", but also a fundamental question of finite space.
In 1985, there were 710,000 private cars under licence in Ireland for 3,500,000 million people, that's approximately one private car for every five people in the country. Now, however, there are close to 2.5 million for a population of 5m, which is one car for every two people. And the cars are bigger too.
This dramatic increase in car ownership creates particular problems for neighbourhoods such as those in Dublin 7. Areas like Broadstone and Stoneybatter were developed before the car was even invented. They were not intended for the volume of vehicles they have to accommodate on a daily basis and the proportions of the streets and the street geometry reflect that.
These are streetscapes designed with "a vision of the city as a series of small scale interactions", an interconnectedness which has been disrupted, unthinkingly annexed, by the private car. The consequence is that there is now no space for play, nor opportunities for the ‘small scale interactions' between children and between adults that play provokes.
Introducing D7 Play Streets
The D7 Play Streets initiative is an attempt to provide a practical demonstration of what a simple reallocation of public space which puts children first - and which returns the street to a source of social life - could look like. The Play Street mentioned above involved nothing more than a few buckets of chalk, a couple of traffic cones and, most importantly, some children.
It brought together children and families who didn’t even know of each other’s existence, despite living around the corner from each other. An older resident of the street who had lived there her entire life commented: "it was nice to see children playing on the street again." These are the ‘small scale interactions’ that are so vital for building communities.
But one-off informal play streets have no legal basis to close roads to make space for play, even in the interests of safety. If one, ten or 100 cars wanted to drive through our next play street, we have no authority to stop them. As such, this type of play street experiment, and the D7 Play Streets initiative, has to be a means towards the creation of a formal process to organise Play Streets on an ongoing basis, or the permanent designation of selected streets as Play Streets, for which there are many precedents around the world.
One-off informal play streets have no legal basis to close roads to make space for play, even in the interests of safety
Unlike the UK, where there is a tradition of temporary road closures for small events, formally closing a street in Ireland for the purposes of play is onerous and costly. Local authorities in Fingal [https://www.fingal.ie/playful-streets] and Waterford are currently working with the social enterprise A Playful City to see how this process could be simplified for local communities.
This would bring us closer to being able to guarantee our children’s protection when they play on their local streets. Until then, you are encouraged to explore how you could make space for play in your neighbourhood, turn your street into a playful street and give local children the gift of play!
Emmet Ó Briain is a social researcher and PhD candidate in the School of Architecture, Building and the Environment at TU Dublin. Dr Seán Shanagher is a member of the DCU Centre for Climate & Society and lectures in Cultural Studies at Ballyfermot College of Further Education. Emmet and Seán are also both parents of seven-year-old children.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
