Why cities forgot to play

Photographs of Hanoi, London or São Paulo from the 1950s share an odd feature for modern eyes: children on the street. Not in parks, not in clubs, but on the road itself, playing games in the space between houses. Within two generations that space disappeared almost everywhere, and the explanation is mostly geometrical rather than cultural.

As cities grew, the car took the street. A road that carries parked vehicles on both sides and moving traffic in the middle has no room left for a game, and no parent would allow one. Space for children was therefore moved into designated places: playgrounds, sports centres, after-school clubs. Each is better equipped than a street and each requires something a street never did — travel, supervision, often money, and an adult's free time.

The consequences are measurable. Studies across several countries find that the distance children are allowed to roam from home has fallen sharply since the 1970s, and that unstructured outdoor play has been replaced by organised activity and screens. Both replacements have value; neither is available to every family equally. A child whose parents work shifts is not in the swimming club.

Urban planners have begun to reverse small parts of this. School streets, closed to traffic at opening and closing times, are now common in European cities. Some districts widen pavements, add benches where adults can sit while children move, and treat a playground as transport infrastructure rather than decoration. The results are encouraging but limited: a street closed for forty minutes a day does not recreate a childhood.

This is the context in which a school hall with one tablet becomes interesting. It is not a solution to urban design; it cannot be. What it does is use space that already exists, at a time that already exists, without transport, equipment or fees. For a student who lives on the fifth floor of a narrow building beside a six-lane road, the question is not whether this is the ideal form of exercise. The question is what the realistic alternative is at seven o'clock in the morning.