In March, 2009, there was a most excellent discussion at "Just Up the Pike" on the subject of "user-maintained, publicly-owned recreational space". The case in point was "K-Town", a skate park in Kensington. This is a success story about skateboarding where all too few exist. Please take the time to follow that link and read the article and the discussions.
As of June 12, 2009, at the Rock Creek Village shopping center, there appears to be a fairly sizeable gathering of kids, mostly "skate rats", hanging out near the CVS, both in front and behind.
Behind the store, there is a capacious parking lot, almost perfect for skateboarding. Yet the youths congregate in the front of the store, near a patio between Caribou Coffee and Urban Burger. The patio is a nicely terraced -- and generally well-maintained -- area which is just perfect for dining outdoors as weather permits... and it is also perfect for skateboarding. Steps and ramps and rails abound... as do opportunities for catastrophic head injuries.
There has been a history of youth gatherings here since the shopping center was built in the mid 1970s. Yet problems persist despite over 30 years of opportunities for youth and facility management to reach an understanding.
Today, the problem is mostly one of kids sailing their boards off of steps, potentially putting the facility at liability, despite the easily visible "no skateboarding" signs. Additionally, each of the kids here seems to have left at least one beverage container or snack wrapper lying around. Despite the major concern of the facility management being liability for injuries, the shopkeepers are probably more concerned for the image of their establishments, and the safety -- or perceptions thereof -- of their
customers.
Police can be slow to respond to complaints. Response times are sometimes measured in days rather than hours. This is very low on the list of priorities as the dispatchers try to send the most officers the most quickly to the highest priority situations, such as crimes of violence or major traffic accidents. Yet the shopkeepers believe that a constant or recurrent problem, even of low impact, will affect their businesses as much, or moreso, as any single incident no matter how outrageous.
Most of the kids seem to be in the 14-16 age range, though some few seem to be a bit older, though none seem to be college age... and that might be part of the problem.
During some discussion of the kids with some of the staffers of one of the restaurants, which at evening rush hour on a beautiful Friday night was practically without customers, a lot of very familiar ground was covered, much of which was covered in the discussion linked-to, above.
One of the things that came out was that it's really very difficult for adults -- especially adults in the age class of the various kids' parents -- to try to get much cooperation from teens in the general area of 15 years old. This is actually healthy; it is part of the process of Individuation:
"In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology" (Jung, Carl, Psychological Types. Collected Works Vol.6., par. 757).
During the maturation process, individuation takes on a strange appearance, in that adolescents will seemingly turn away from the influence of their parents, and from many of the norms of society, which might be expected. Then they promptly adopt the norms of a society that they continually evolve, pushing the envelope and embracing novelty, while at the same time adopting the norms of their age-group in the greater society.
In practice, this comes off as a lot of rebelliousness. Taking a deeper look, though, it's evolution. Times change, and this instinct to turn away from parental and social standards and ideals is actually adaptive behavior. Without it, society might be unable to change quickly to adapt to new times and places. Kids might grow up with ideals and notions becoming rapidly out-of-touch and even dysfunction in large or small part.
Part of the "rebelliousness" is really a search for better ways of doing things, and of course, it's about a fairly standardized child becoming a unique adult. The only problem that most people have with 15-year-olds is that the process is just really getting started, and often that start is an uneven start.
Rock Creek Village shopping center is about as upscale as you can get and still remain within Aspen Hill, Maryland.
View Larger Map
Just south of the busy Maryland Route 28 on a levelled hilltop is the northern wing of the shopping center. Between that and the western wing is the patio, which opens onto both the central parking lot and a broad open alley just feet from the large read parking lot:
The rear parking lot is generally level, with lots of curbs and traffic islands to make it a slight challenge. With the exception of a potentially dangerous unfenced boundary which leads down a fairly steep slope to busy MD-28 below, that rear lot is fenced all around by either buildings or tall wooden fencing.
People probably wouldn't mind too much -- except for the question of liability for injuries -- if the teens congregated there, rather than in front of the CVS... other than the problem of trash, and keeping the place clean.
While taking notes and talking to people, I saw one staffer trying to shoo away the kids, who were starting to leave a very unsightly mess. Eventually he went out there with a big plastic bag and words were spoken to the effect that trash was not good and being clean was good. Evidently some of the kids didn't like being told what to do and shot off their mouths... but at the same time, other kids were cleaning up the trash, and doing it as if they thought it was the right thing to do.
The other main complaint, and it was more of a concern than a complaint, was the near total lack of safety equipment. This might be the habitual practice of most of these kids, or it may be that they had come pretty much straight from school and hadn't picked up their equipment from home.
Here's where the concern came from: some of these kids had a bad combination of little skill and a willingness to take heedless risks. One young man fell off of his board about every 45 seconds or so, on average, and almost every time he did, he took a pretty hard fall backwards. Without a helmet, and considering that he was mostly falling while trying to jump or ride curbs, it is probably only a matter of time before his helmetless head hits one of those curbs, and he could be in a wheelchair for life, and the local stores or facility management company could be paying for the rest of that life.
So, how to proceed?
Kids will be kids, they have to be, and it's really not helping them by trying to keep them from being kids. It's part of their developmental cycle, and all that adults can really do is to try to teach safety, where possible, and provide it, as necessary, with such things as fencing or hazard removal.
One thing that might work would be trying to develop the same system that's being developed over at "K-Town", where older skaters teach younger ones the rules, especially about staying safe with proper equipment, and keeping the place clean enough so that nobody can really complain for an actual reason.
We will also need to develop routes of communication between all of the stakeholders, not the least of which will be the kids in question.
Problem or opportunity? We should all get together and talk it over, to see how to make it work for all concerned. Because one thing is for sure, kids will be kids, skateboards are popular, and school's out for summer, as it will be next year, and the year after that.
0 comments:
Post a Comment