Quick thought on teenagers and whether or not they have/need “things to do.” I know this is a bit off topic, but it’s relevant to a broader conversation about placemaking. And full disclaimer, I got my first cell phone at sixteen, it was a Nokia flip phone, and I didn’t get a smartphone until a couple years into college.
Personally, I think American teenagers are at a particular disadvantage in terms of social lives and entertainment because of the built environment (yep, it’s one of those rants). Let’s pretend you’re fifteen, too young to drive, and you live here:
How in the world do you have even the slightest bit of independence? Unless all your friends live in that same neighborhood (not very likely), you need your parents to give you a ride anywhere and everywhere that you want to go. And even if they did all live in that neighborhood, what are you going to do? Walk in circles every day? Maybe ride bikes (except not on the main roads because there’s no sidewalks and the cars are all going 50mph)? You could play basketball in the driveway, assuming that’s your thing and you’re up for doing it for hours at a time every day. You could maybe go to the neighborhood pool a few times, sure, but not every day, and not in the winter, and only if your HOA allows teens to be there unattended. So if you need some kind of entertainment that is eclectic and varied and relatively unsupervised, then yeah, you’re gonna play video games and stare at your phone all day.
By contrast, we were in Scotland a couple weeks ago, and man, kids were just roaming everywhere. We saw kids without adult supervision on sidewalks, buses, trains, and not just in the big cities. We took a train from Edinburgh to St. Andrews one day, and a group of like eight teenage girls boarded at a small town and went two stops down to a different small town. At a different stop, some boys boarded to go watch a soccer match in Dundee. We saw kids taking the bus to part-time jobs, to meet up with friends, to head home from school. The level of independence kids had there was insane, because they didn’t have to rely on their parents for mobility. And, surprise, most of them didn’t have their noses in their phones the whole time because they were out being social.
So yeah, I think the whole “kids these days just want to look at their screens all day” trope is mostly self-fulfilling. A lot of them don’t have anything else to do, so what do you expect? But, if you give them options for places where they can safely hang out unattended (like Moore Square) and ways to get to those places, then maybe they’ll stop looking at their damn phones so much.
Oh, and no, a shopping mall with a 5:30p curfew doesn’t count. Confine a kid in any one space for several hours with no way to go anywhere else and obviously they’re gonna start messing around and causing trouble. Again, kids need options, and ways to get between those options. That’s all.
