Play Reservations

Lately, I’ve found myself relating many of the topics discussed by Louv to my experiences here in Philadelphia. The first section of this week’s reading, discussing reforms and remedies to allow children to become more active in the environment, particularly captured my attention. Being an urban center, Philadelphia offers very limited amounts of land for the public to utilize. As a result, such limited spaces are experiencing an overflow of public enjoyment, which leads to higher liability risks. “As long as cities continue to overdevelop housing tracts and under develop parks and other sites for natural play, our regional parks and beaches will be crushed by demand, necessitating even more stringent enforcement. The ultimate remedies aren’t to lift the restrictions on endangered habit, but to create or preserve more natural places to play – including vacant lots and ravines and backyards of our own neighborhoods – and to reduce private vulnerability to lawsuits and fines” (240). Considering this, I thought of multiple places in Philadelphia in which the city could open up for public use. Perhaps the city should consider evenly distributing “play reservations”, as Louv names them, throughout the city. These plots of land would give children directed places to play, an alternative to finding places where they can potentially damage the existing ecosystem. By better distributing the amount of useable land, less people would be utilizing a specific space at one time, decreasing liability risks that many fear.