Community Life in the Playborhood

Despite the barriers to community presented by suburban sprawl, the distraction of digital devices, and a pervasive culture of individualism, people do regularly collaborate to create pockets of togetherness. Mike Lanza’s Playborhood is an important reminder that ordinary people do have the ability to incrementally realize more communal lives for their children.
 
Although I briefly encountered Lanza’s work as I was doing the research for my first book, Technically Together, only recently did I give it a careful read. Lanza is a staunch advocate of encouraging and supporting free play: getting kids more often away from screens and out of overly structured activities (the endless shuttling between sports and piano lessons) and letting them decide for themselves how to spend their (relatively unsupervised) time. He champions carving out space in neighborhoods for children to structure their own outdoor play spaces and recounts how he and his wife have done so on their own Bay Area block, installing water features, sandboxes, and trampolines in their yard and giving local kids permission to use them whenever they want.
 
Lanza’s book and motivation no doubt stems from nostalgia for the childhood he enjoyed in a Pittsburgh suburb in the 1960s and 70s. But Playborhood doesn’t simply dwell on a lost past but focuses on what groups of motivated citizens are doing today, covering efforts in New Urbanist neighborhoods, in cohousing arrangements, and elsewhere.
 
In contrast to a New York Times profile on Lanza’s work, I did not find any evidence of mom-bashing or unawareness of his own privilege in Playborhood.[i] Lanza is a relatively well-to-do white guy. When he describes how he has prepared his sons to ride to school by themselves, he admits that sometimes their nanny rides with them. Any limitations in his perspective comes from the fact that he writes from his own personal standpoint: his own middle-class childhood and those of his young sons. The failure to say enough about how girls and others fit into a playborhood is more a sin of omission than commission and a fairly understandable one at that.
 
That is not to say that Lanza doesn’t include diverse cases. One of his main examples is Lyman Place, a road in the Bronx that turns into a car-free play street every summer. While to many readers, one case study may not be enough to convincingly demonstrate that playborhoods are not likely to remain limited to more affluent residential areas for the near future, it at least shows that Lanza is making the effort to cast a wide net.
 
Yet one should not have unfair expectations for works like Playborhood. The book serves as a sort of how-to guide and provides inspiration for concerned parents. It is not a systematic sociological study of free play. While it is clear that Lanza has read widely on the subject—he references Ray Oldenburg and Jane Jacobs—readers looking for insight on the broader structural changes that would make things like playborhoods more the norm rather than the exception will prefer Adrian Voce’s Policy for Play or my own Technically Together. No doubt there is a lot to say about making free play and more communal child rearing feasible for a greater portion of humanity, but I don't think we should expect books like Playborhood to do that kind of work.
 
Surveying my own street, I find the prospect of a street-level playborhood for my two-year-old son both exciting and discouraging. The closest thing to an already existing playborhood in my town is “Faculty Hill”, a pocket of largely unaffordable homes tucked next to my University’s golf course. Purchasing a home that was walking distance to work and also within my price range meant buying on a road dominated by college student rentals. Yet my street is also relatively free of car traffic and my corner lot backyard seems likely to be compatible with whatever plans my son and local youth would eventually dream up.
 
Still, part of me wonders if the broader barriers will loom too large. Perhaps my street simply lacks the sufficient density of children. Maybe other parents won’t be persuaded by my case for the value of free play. Already having been warned by one of my neighbors to keep my kid “out of the street”—ostensibly to save my neighbor the trouble from having to watch out for little ones when driving his big truck down it—foreshadows future conflicts.
 
Yet one never knows what latent needs and desires may lie just under the surface. When looking at any suburban street, I always wonder: What percentage of houses have lonely people in them at this moment, people sitting in their homes wishing they enjoyed more local togetherness but not knowing how or too discouraged to seek out a community beyond their front door. Books like Playborhood remind us that often the biggest barrier is belief. Small groups of dedicated people can sometimes overcome all the barriers and change their neighborhoods for the better. All it takes is someone to get the ball rolling.


[i] I regret taking this profile at face value in Technically Together. It seems to have exaggerated Lanza perspective, if not wholly distort the position he lays out in Playborhood