274 / In search of the adult version of ‘playing freely on the street’

outside of their dwellings, many people are currently inhabiting the smaller pockets of space in and around their neighbourhoods: local parks, even just copses or patches of grass or playgrounds; the street corners (talking at a safe distance) of diverse, scaled-well high streets, that can actually speak to and articulate the local communities they... See more

“It’s such a big city,” Kohn tells me. “You live alone, you do things alone. People go to work, come home, and just want to relax...you’re not really meeting as many people as you’d like.”

When we built our house, I chose those casement windows that open out. It’s such a signal to the community that we’re open for socialization. Whether that's a latté, an ice pop, a cocktail, or a dog treat. It’s our little version of “make believe.” We put on a soundtrack you might hear at a cute café. Osman puts on an apron and plays barista.

what does the city look like, if everything is delivered directly to us? What does our community look like, if we never leave the house?

The same thing will now happen to cities. A lot of the old dimensions have become "good enough" — you can access a decent job, get Amazon deliveries, have your artisanal coffee, give your kids good education.... in so many different places, easily.

I think that the era of rigid zonal segregation is over. No longer can a city be simply divided into a series of discrete places: the place where I work, the place where I live, and the place where I want to spend my leisure time. This simplistic planning notion is about to change. People want to live in closer proximity to their work, and they wan... See more