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What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street

In many ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for grown-ups.

Over the years, as Rose and Ferguson have expanded their experiment to other parts of the United Kingdom, neighborhoods across the country have discovered that allowing kids to play out in the open has helped residents reclaim something they didn’t know they were missing: the ability to connect with the people living closest to them. In the U.S., the ousting of children from the street was initially met with fierce resistance, Peter Norton, an associate history professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, told me. But children are also “very good at breaking down the learned reserve between adults,” Paul Tranter, an honorary associate professor at UNSW Canberra and the author of Slow Cities: Conquering Our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability, told me.

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