Do children play on the street where you live? If so, lucky them! Traffic has made most streets in Luton unsafe for play, which keeps children indoors and affects their health and wellbeing. Adults have take too much public space and use it for their cars.
If you’d like to help reclaim outdoor play for children, you might want to look into hosting a Play Street this year. This would see your road temporarily closed to traffic – like many were for street parties during the jubilee. Children would get three hours to run wild in the street, four times a year. Chalk on the road, blow bubbles, ride bikes, etc.
Play Streets are a citizen-led scheme, which means the council can’t do it for you. What they have done is simplified the application process for closing a street, making it easier than ever before. If you’d like to give it a try in the summer holidays, now is a good time to start planning for it. The council need 12 weeks notice and need an application in by the end of April, so talk to your neighbours and parents’ networks soon if you’d like bring it to your street in the summer.
Lots more on the council website, and here’s the flyer:
Play Streets are obviously a nice thing in their own right, but there’s also a climate connection. They challenge the dominance of car culture, remind us of what we’ve lost in giving so much over to the car, and hint at an alternative future. We can’t solve climate change without a new approach to transport and travel, and in re-negotiating our relationship with traffic we might find gentler, safer, more playful streets too.
Zero Carbon Luton 