Fear of Young People

The Globe:

“In an effort to make playgrounds safe, planners recommend not including the sandbox that could harbor dirty needles and basketball courts that could attract the older teenagers who might carry weapons or have drugs. Even a bench can be used to climb a fence or as a place for teenagers to gather. Instead, some planners say, playgrounds for tots invite fewer troublemakers.“

Are dirty needles in sandboxes like razor blades in candy? The whole thing seems implausible to me, but I haven’t got any data. Could be an issue.

But the thing that gets me here is that they’re suggesting that people avoid creating places that are inviting to teenagers. I feel like our society has an irrational (ok, maybe not so irrational) fear of teenagers. So we do things like try to keep them away from public places. But where are they going to go? In many cases, it doesn’t much matter whether you build the park for older kids or younger kids. The older kids will show up at nightfall, and if they don’t have a basketball court they’ll hang out on the swings and the slide. You can’t get rid of them– you can to a certain extent move them around, supervise them, channel them. But you can’t make them go away, or stop doing stupid or dangerous things.

In general I think that groups like the Trust for Public Land are doing some of the most important work in this country– making sure that kids have somewhere safe to play, that there’s enough green space to balance concrete and help to clean the air. But people expect too much from them and from the design of the public sphere.

A place can be safer or less safe, but it can never be perfectly safe. It can discourage crime or provide really easy places for crime. But it won’t eliminate it. At best it will shift it around. People are infinitely devious and will find ways to misuse anything you give them, and if you blame a public planner, landscape designer or an architect for the high crime rate in a public park, you’re laying blame in the wrong direction.