Something I've been thinking about a lot over the last year is the way our societal obsession with protecting private interests is spilling out into our public spaces and fundamentally damaging them.

A good example of this is the increased use of surveillance tech. As more and more people leverage it to protect their private assets, it has a negative ripple effect of eroding the public trust and hospitality of our neighbourhoods. I was confronted with this the other day as I walked past a house the other day and heard a loud, recorded voice call out, "smile, you are being recorded!" What stands out to me here is that I was on public property, the sidewalk, where I had every right to be. Yet, this individual's need to protect their private interests made that public space less hospitable. The private space spilling into the public and ultimately trying to claim it as its own. Heaven forbid I had decided to stand there for a while; a picture of me might have ended up on facebook labelled as a "suspicious individual."

It's sad to think of sidewalks going the way of streets before them, hijacked by private freedoms and interests to the point of no longer being truly inclusive spaces for everyone. But it is something I am reminded of whenever I see them covered in snow while the streets are cleanly plowed, or cars parked halfway across them to fit more vehicles in a driveway, or whenever I warn my kids to interrupt their play in order to make it their responsibility to pay attention to the massive SUVs and trucks that are backing out of their driveways across the sidewalks.

More on this to come I'm sure.

Happy New Year.

Yesterday I was walking my kids to the library and I had a thought around collective vs personal responsibility as it relates to safety. As the girls ran up ahead of me I considered how this is what parenting is, watching your kids exhibit freedom and move forward into the world in ways that will always be ahead of and beyond you. We're in the process of trying to decide when to start letting our kids walk to school on their own and a big part of that comes down to trust.

But the thing that struck me was that it's not only about trusting my kids to be safe, it's about trusting the community to keep my kids safe. To make this thought even more brazen, it is your responsibility to keep my kids safe. Just as it is my responsibility to keep other people's kids safe.

This is a mindset that I think we've really abandoned here in our neoliberal 'western' society. Here, one's wellbeing is primarily a personal concern. Watching out for one another, especially strangers, increasingly feels like a quaint, naive thing of the past. At best, we accept that there are certain structures in society (laws, systems, etc) that are designed to organize us in a way that keeps people safe. Yet, even those are often pushed back against in exchange for personal freedom. Our car-centric way of life is perhaps the best example of this. There are so many small steps we could take to make our streets safer, but we often reject these as they might interfere with our freedom of movement. And perhaps no one bears the burden of this more than kids.

But, coming back to this idea that kid's safety should be a collective responsibility. I think this is part of what fuels helicopter parenting. We simply don't trust that society will put our kid's wellbeing before their own freedom. So we adopt that mindset as well and our kids experience the world from the safety of their homes, backyards, and the backseat of cars. Never mind that this is having negative effects down the road.

I believe this is something we should reject and move away from. The old adage, 'it takes a village to raise a child' had it right. Kids should be seen moving around freely in our communities as though they belong there, not as a failure of parenting; because we should look at those kids and think it is my responsibility that they feel safe here.

Going through an interview this morning with Stephanie Ross, the associate professor in McMaster’s School of Labour Studies. In it she makes some interesting comments about the way support for labour unions is the highest it's been in decades. Her point is that strikes are capturing the general mood of people in response to concerns such as inflation.

She also references the pandemic as a significant turning point in this new labour movement.

"The experience of the pandemic has made people really rethink how much they’re willing to sacrifice for jobs and their employers. Workers are much less likely to put up with bad working conditions, and there’s a generational component to that as well."

This seems to square with other things I've been reading over the last little while that suggest seem to suggest our relationship to work is changing significantly. I think there are a lot of factors at play here -- remote work, safe working conditions, the looming threat of AI, to name a few -- but it all adds up to the way the promises of capitalism are falling out from under us and people are becoming increasingly disillusioned to it. As the labour movement increasingly pushes its way into the forefront of these issues, it's important we find ways to build bridges with our other social concerns as well.

"The labour movement is leading conversations about what kind of society we want to have in a very public way, not just in negotiating rooms where nobody can see."

Time to rebuild in a way that works for everyone, not just a few.

Reading an excellent article this morning by Camilo Ortiz, PhD, that makes a compelling case for childhood anxiety being linked to a lack of independence. His argument is that providing children with more opportunities for independent activities might be the best way to change that. By independent activity, or IA, he means an "unstructured, developmentally challenging task that is performed without any help from adults." Examples could be riding their bike to the park by themselves, taking a bus, cooking a full meal, going to a movie with friends, or even building a campfire.

Ortiz says that so far the kids he has put through this program have resulted in "reduced anxiety in kids and their parents, increased self-esteem and willingness to try difficult things, and more free time for parents."

What interests me most here - apart from being highly relevant as a parent - is the way this intersects with how we plan and build our communities. One of the biggest impacts our car-centric planning has had is on kids. As I've written about elsewhere, I remember moving around quite freely and independently as a 90s child; biking to the library, friend's houses, the bulk candy store, and just exploring the town. My observations have been that this is no longer normal and that many kids primarily experience their communities from the back seat of a car. (Note: I am referring primarily to my experiences in more suburban communities as opposed to denser urban settings.) As kids spend less time moving about on the streets, people become less used to seeing them there and drive less carefully than they should.

I believe that design is always rooted in an ethical choice, communicating something about our values. When we design our communities in this way we are choosing to make them less safe and less inclusive for many people, including kids. It is certainly worth considering that this may be one of the reasons kids are feeling more anxious than ever before - we've taken away their independence.

I stumbled across a post on LinkedIn yesterday that was promoting some, admittedly, impressive AI tech that could translate what you were saying and actually change the movement of your lips while you were talking on video. The person sharing it was excitedly proclaiming, "we'll never need to learn another language again!" Unless of course you're not on a video call.

It's a good example of the way tech is increasingly mediating our interactions with each other in ways that have become so normalized that we're not even noticing it anymore. The pandemic threw many of us into a remote work setting. A side effect of this has been accepting video calls as a part of our lives; and with that has come all sorts of innovations to make our video calls even better.

Yet I can't help but think about what we're losing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for a back to the office pendulum shift. I prefer remote work, it's contributed to a much more fulfilling life rhythm. No, my interest is more around the things that contribute to a meaningful life and the ways tech is slowly eroding that.

One of the books I've been reading lately is all about the way in which our environment can have an impact on our happiness and the author makes some good points around the role that other people play in that. Not just in terms of our close relationships - though those do matter - but on a societal level. By being around other people that we learn to trust, we grow in empathy, and that increases our sense of wellbeing. The author writes,

“Not only does it feel good to experience positive social signs from others — smiles, handshakes, opened doors, bargains kept, and cooperative merging in traffic — but it feels good to reinforce those feelings of trust among both friends and strangers. It works best of all when we do it face-to-face: in the kitchen, over a fence, on the sidewalk, in the agora. Distance and geometry matter.”

This is one of my main concerns with the way tech is creeping into our lives. The digital realm is replacing many of the day-to-day touchpoints we once had with other people. Shopping, interacting with neighbours, learning, even borrowing. And what's important to note is that the tech that now mediates these interactions is made for the primary purpose of extracting profit for someone else. Yes, you can argue that a grocery store is the same; but those micro interactions with real people in the store were not.

This is why truly public spaces will always matter. Parks, libraries, trails, sidewalks/streets, community centres, public schools, etc. These are the places that belong to us all, they don't exist for the sake of profit, and they're where we practice and learn what it is to be human. This is something that online will never be able to replace.