[Reader-list] the Act of leisure

[Menso Heus]

Dear Iram et al,

Between my 7th and 14th I've lived in a small town in the south of The
Netherlands. In front of our house was a playfield the size of a soccer
field where many children would come to play, and occasionally their 
parents would join too. There were many such spaces in the town, maintained
by the city council. 

Control on the space was done through the parents that lived around the 
space who would occasionally watch what was going on from their houses.
If things they deemed unsuitable were happening, they would either go out
to intervene, or phone other parents that their kid was misbehaving.

As I grew older and wondered more through the town, I soon discovered that
this control network stretched out not only to the playground in front of
our house, but through the entire town. For example, when I would secretly
smoke a cigarette in a place far from my home,, my mom would know about it 
before I got home. 
It was a strict surveillance network with spies and agents everywhere in 
the form of parents, neighbours and kids betraying other kids, intelligence
reports arriving in the form of fresh gossip.

For the last couple of years I've been living in Amsterdam, which like my
town has many public spaces. They don't come in the form of huge playgrounds,
but there are many public benches, parks and other places one can go and
sit down. Especially along the canals, streets seem more than just a space
that people are allowed to travel through. There are no issues of private
security guards or police officers telling people to move along that I know
of, which is quite different from what I read is happening in Delhi and 
other Indian cities. 

The big parks we have, the Vondelpark being the most famous, are a huge 
mash of people in the summer, from joggers to squatters juggling, people
playing frisbee or soccer, others practicing tai chi and other martial
arts, people having lunch and dinners in the grass, playing music, making
music, dancing. 
Street artists play on squares where people come to sit down and watch 
them, terraces are put out in the summer but no one will tell you to 
leave if you sit not on them but 5 meters in front of them.
In the summer, people in my street will carry their chairs outside so they 
can sit in front of their appartments in the sun, sometimes they eat there 
too. It makes the street a lot more vibrant than it is now, -1 Celsius and 
dead. 

Perhaps that's one of the reasons we cherish our public spaces so much, 
because it is only a few rare months a year that we get to use them. When
the sun comes out, so do the people.


Menso

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            All extremists should be taken out and shot
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