On many beautiful Saturday mornings this summer, I’ve run a weekly family bike ride I’m calling Pedal and Play in my local neighbourhood. After we meet at a local community landmark, everybody who shows up bikes to one of the nearby playgrounds. Once there, the kids can spend time playing with their friends and parents can catch up and chat (when we’re not pushing our kids on the swings).
We are fortunate in Orléans to have a decent selection of these spaces within a couple of kilometres—well-maintained, relatively modern playgrounds with slides, swings, and splash pads. Yet almost inevitably when we arrive, I am often struck by the quiet. The playground may have one or two families, each having made their own way here on foot/bike or by car, but the surrounding green space or fields are frequently totally empty, and the neighbourhood itself is silent unless you listen for nearby vehicles. This scene points to a fundamental disconnect in how we’ve built our communities. We’ve provided a number of destinations for this kind of unstructured leisure and play, but we’ve failed to build the social and tangible physical connections that allow for a truly social and playful community to emerge.
The reason our playgrounds are often totally empty, even on weekends, is fairly simple for two related reasons. One, for most children in Orléans, the norm is that they have almost no independence, and parents don’t feel safe in letting their kids out into the world. And two, at least partly because of one, kids’ lives are structured nearly to the minute almost all the time. We fill up out kids’ schedules with heavily structured activities, which of course due to zoning policy can only exist outside of residential neighbourhoods. This means almost all activities kids do is fairly far from home, and so kids need to be driven almost everywhere they go.
Our neighbourhoods were designed with the car as the primary mode of transportation, a reality that profoundly shapes our children’s lives. Residential streets, even with low traffic, are often far too wide and lack continuous sidewalks or even sidewalks at all, making them feel unsafe for a child on foot, much less on a bike or scooter. The result is a highly structured, chauffeured childhood, where play becomes a scheduled event requiring parental logistics rather than a spontaneous activity. This contributes directly to the social isolation many of us feel, where families effectively disappear into their homes or cars after school, and the casual, multi-family interactions that build strong communities rarely happen.
One facet of a potential solution to address this means legalizing public spaces (often called ‘third places’) into suburban communities, re-integrating casual social interactions into the fabric of a living community. This begins by making streets and these ‘third places’ very accessible. By retrofitting our streets with safe, continuous walking and cycling paths, we can create a network that allows groups of children to make their way through their community to a local park on their own, and for families to make more trips to nearby places without relying on a car. The Less Car philosophy I’m a big fan of is not about eliminating cars, but about providing a diverse set of transportation options for residents. A trip to the park where you can find dozens of other kids should be a pleasant five-minute walk or bike ride, instead of a ten- or fifteen- minute car journey across Orleans.
Furthermore, we need to allow for public spaces that are more than just outdoor play or leisure spaces. By reforming our restrictive zoning by-laws, we could permit low-impact, neighborhood-serving commercial uses nearby. Small cafés, bakeries, or corner stores within a short walk of a park would transform the community you drive out of into a place full of potential community hubs, encouraging families to linger longer and fostering the spontaneous social connections we all desperately need.
The neighbourhoods we have now are the result of specific policy choices decades ago, which means we can make new choices, especially in the context of changing our zoning by-laws, a conversation that is happening right now, by the way. By advocating for safer streets and more flexible land use, we can transform our quiet joyless streets into the vibrant, bustling transportation arteries of our communities. It’s a critical step in building a New Orléans that is not just a safe place for our children to live, but a truly wonderful place for them to grow up.
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