Making Child’s Play a Priority

When a group of UCLA architecture and planning students on a class assignment last year asked residents of the Nickerson Gardens public housing project in South-Central Los Angeles what design problem they would like them to address, the answer was near unanimous:

“We told them something must be done for the children,” said longtime resident Nora King. “They are our future, our hope.”

King noted that nearly half of the project’s 5,000 residents are under the age of 12, and that if they are to avoid the gangs and drugs that had consumed many in the preceding generation, their needs had to be addressed and their energies focused.

“The parents didn’t want some grandiose architectural scheme that would be unbuildable,” said student Shirl Buss.

“What they were telling us . . . was that somehow within the constraints of the harsh realities of Nickerson, they wanted a better environment for their children.”

The more specific answer that evolved from a series of resident surveys and workshops was a proposal to redesign, renovate and provide quality supervision for 15 tot lots in the project.

All had fallen into disrepair, due in part to poor maintenance, lack of supervision, unimaginative design and siting, and vandalism.

“It certainly isn’t the highest item on the (Los Angeles city) Housing Authority agenda,” King said. “They have a lot of fixing up of apartments to do. But we feel the children need a place of their own where they can feel secure, be challenged by the equipment, have proper supervision and enjoy themselves; where they can be kids.”

So far, the residents--working through the nonprofit Nickerson Gardens Community Development Corp. and with the help of UCLA--have gotten about $50,000 in grants (from the Housing Authority and Arco, among others) to start work on the first two lots.

A total of about $500,000 is needed for the 15.

According to a report of the residents’ council in support of the project, the tot lots are “part of a much larger vision encompassing grass-roots residential involvement, better supervision of children, job and job training options, and maintenance of the overall public housing grounds.”

However, the residents understand well that the key to their goal of increased “community interaction and empowerment” is the concern for the children. They see the children as their legacy; that they as parents might not be able to rise above their present circumstances, but given the proper protection and opportunity their children might.

This concern for the children in Nickerson Gardens is heartening, given the myriad problems of poverty and powerlessness that afflict the low-income housing project--and the seemingly lack of concern most elsewhere to better shape the cityscape for children.

There is no question that as Los Angeles continues to grow, its environment has become more and more hostile to children.

Witness the many parks that have been abandoned to the homeless and drug dealers, and the playgrounds that have been left to decay or been closed because of meager municipal funds and the fear of litigation.

Gone also--for housing and parking lots, for makeshift garbage dumps or simply fenced off to keep out whomever--are the vacant pieces of land that for generations in the past were makeshift adventure playgrounds.

Here in these cracks and crevices of the cityscape, children with a sense of freedom and some scrap and imagination, could create their own world.

Then there are the streets that because of the crush of traffic no longer can serve as impromptu playing fields, the sidewalks that have been mauled by street widenings and curb cuts for driveways and parking lots and the alleys that have been turned into nasty shortcuts for careening cars. Pushed aside in the process have been the children.

Indeed, when a new housing proposal is being reviewed by a city, the focus usually is on how many parking spaces are needed. Rarely have I heard in planning commission debates questions on how many children might live there, and where would they play.

That uncovered parking and setbacks for garbage cans and dumpsters are considered in most zoning codes as “open space” makes a farce of the phrase.

No wonder there is a graffiti problem, known on the street as “tagging.” Besides being an exercise of sorts of freedom and adventure, tagging, I am convinced, is a statement by the youth that the streets and alleys also belong to them; that they are not altogether invisible, as much as the adult world would like them to be.

What they are saying, in effect, with their spray cans is that “I tag, therefore I am.”

“The bland, monotonous, if not brutal environment of many of our cities and towns represent a form of sensory deprivation for children, with little to engage their fantasy, curiosity or affection,” observed urbanologists Henry and Suzanne Lennard in a recent issue of their Making Cities Livable Newsletter.

“Could it be . . . the very powerlessness of children makes it easy to fail to provide the conditions for their mental and emotional development?” ask the Lennards in the newsletter (published by the Center for Urban Well-Being in Carmel).

The Lennards also deplore the neglect of children in the planning process, noting that “traffic kills and maims thousands of children, but the creation of traffic reduced zones and the promotion of less hazardous forms of transportation receive little interest.”

They and others such as urbanist William Whyte and UCLA planner Jacqueline Leavitt urge the shaping of an urban environment that, besides providing attractive and engaging parks and playgrounds, would allow children to safely explore and enjoy their neighborhoods and cities.

They contend that a city, in effect, should be thought of as an outdoor playroom.

These thoughts reflect a similar spirit that flourished too briefly in planning and design circles 20 years ago. There was then quite a bit of experimenting in open and community school concepts, fanciful playground equipment and generally a public realm that embraced children, be it in a shop-front school in a mall, a water fountain to romp through or closing streets for a few hours or on weekends to create play areas.

Unfortunately, the efforts in time were crushed by timid school and park administrators, prosaic parents and officials, and the drying up and diversion of public funds.

But as evidenced in the tot lot proposal for Nickerson Gardens, the recent formation of a regional parks confederation, the rumblings in the venerable Sierra Club for a more active urban open space program, the proposal for the Children’s Museum downtown to be expanded into a Children’s Plaza, and generally in the talk among concerned parents, there is the hope for a more child-friendly environment.

As Nora King said, the children are our future. To which I add that this is their city too, and that we should be at least as considerate of our children as we are of our cars.