A future tragedy of our commons?
Civitas, 1 June 2010
Yesterday, Libby Purves wrote in the Times of the free-range child as endangered species, writes Zenobe Reade. Purves’ eulogy touched upon the demise of dens, boating, unattended bramble scratches and nettle stings. Yet, as she acknowledges, this has long been the preserve of the wealthy, rather than the rural child.
Urban middle class parents are, after all, able to allow their children access to similar forms of creative self-expression to those Purves’ cites – sports clubs, country holidays, art, music or drama groups. Urban space is less amenable to more casual colonisation: when bands of siblings occupy territory, as the children in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons tales did Wild Cat Island, enjoying grog, casual piracy and code names, we cry gang warfare. In a seminal study called Utopia on Trial, Alice Coleman analysed which features of modernist housing estates made them particularly susceptible to high levels of crime and anti-social behaviour. She came to a surprising conclusion: a high ratio of children to adults.
For policy makers, local councils and community groups, the question of how to occupy young people in cities is ever pertinent. We know that groups of young people who hang out on the street or in parks are not only viewed as threatening but more likely to commit anti-social behaviour if they have little else to do. A central pillar of the UK’s Olympic bid was its emphasis on legacy: regeneration to be realised by new homes, job and a dazzling array of sports facilities for its East London locality – provision which could provide a platform for youth engagement. 75% of the Olympics will take place in Newham, a borough where outcomes for young people are low – they receive the equivalent of 3.5 fewer passes at GCSE than the UK average.
As organised activities for young people go, sports-based projects are particularly effective: they afford young people independence and ownership of their own success. Manhattan has a basketball court for each square mile, and Los Angeles has late night basketball leagues, initially targeted at those involved in gangs. In the UK, ‘midnight football’ leagues have been a popular way for local authorities to occupy young people after dark.
It is worrying therefore that there are signs that the cost of the Olympics, in excess of £930 million, has necessitated reliance on private finance which looks set to pay dividends in the form of shopping centres and private developments, rather than public spaces which local communities deem useful. The Stratford City development, home to much of the Olympic village, has been acquired by the Westfield group, whose eponymous mall in Shepherds Bush has done little to regenerate its surrounding area; it plans to occupy 190,000 square metres of the Olympic site with retail development.
The anthropologist Marc Auge has written about how today’s cities are increasingly made up of ‘non-places’, such as stations and shopping centres, transient spaces where it is difficult to forge any relationship or sense of identity. These are spaces of consumption, where it is necessary to have money to use them as they were intended. Realising this on the Olympic site would only further disenfranchise the surrounding communities, who have already had their parkland, allotments, football pitches, and in some cases, homes, requisitioned.
In an era where government is drawing so much on the methods of the private sector to improve public services, it would do well to look to the significance attributed to sport within independent schools. Private schools have long viewed competitive sport as integral to the school week, a public spectacle, and sporting success as comparable to academic achievement. Proper use of the Olympic development would seek to compensate for the disastrous sale of Britain’s school playing fields under previous Conservative administrations; it gives the government an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to restoring the status of sport as a good in itself, rather than as something that makes the most fleeting claim to be in the national interest.