Places in common

Abstract

The recent ‘riots’ or ‘disorder’ should not deflect us from creating a local, shared communal realm underpinned by the value, ‘Children and teenagers being seen and heard in shared public spaces is a hallmark of a society at ease with itself’. The emphasis here is on ‘shared’. This key value is honoured more in the breach than in the application. The local outdoors within social housing estates and regeneration schemes ‐ understood as potential venues for informal, unplanned sociability across the generations ‐ receive insufficient attention. Any attention given is too often governed by essentially negative criteria. Children, teenagers and adults are conceptually hived off from each other. Observation should create understanding of the potentialities inherent in the out of doors. It is out of doors that one learns through experience how values, beliefs and traditions are transformed into ways of life. This is a form of learning that cannot be taught/ acts of co-creation across generations.