The Threat of a Ticket Helped Create a Community
Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968 and may be best known to many Canadians for her leading role in battling against the Spadina Expressway and in other efforts to support a livable city. She died in 2006, but would doubtless have approved of the initiative in Beloeil Quebec. To return to that story, the precipitating incident occurred in 2014 when the police warned a six- year-old boy that he faced the threat of a ticket for playing hockey on the street in front of his house. The boy’s father, a municipal councillor, led a minor revolution to open the streets of Beloeil to the cause of child’s play. It led to provincial legislation giving municipalities the power to permit free play in the streets, and 17 other towns have joined Beloeil in this radical concept.
There are procedures to be followed. In the case of Beloeil, turning a street into a free play zone starts with an application to the municipality. It is studied by a committee, which rules out streets that are unsafe because of volume of traffic, sharp curves in the road, and other factors. The application is then sent to all neighbours on the street and must receive 66% support to proceed. Three streets in Beloeil have failed to gain this support but 48 others are in operation. Interestingly, on one of the unsuccessful streets, an opponent explained that the plan would be too dangerous and that children should go to a park to play – a vision that Jane Jacobs definitely did not share.
The most obvious beneficial impact of this liberation of the streets is the spectre of children at play rather than sitting inside working their thumbs on a cell phone or playing games on a computer. An ancillary benefit – perhaps even more significant – results from parents gathering to watch the kids at play, some with chairs and a glass of wine in hand. Through such interaction a sense of community begins to build. People who had hundreds of “friends” on Facebook but didn’t know adjacent neighbours are now connecting in the real world.