Summer is supposed to be when teenagers break free and gather with friends. But across the country, young people are finding that public spaces are increasingly inhospitable to their presence, with some cities resorting to curfews and "no unaccompanied minors" policies to discourage them from congregating outdoors.
The root cause is structural. Malls have declined, affordable hangout spots have vanished, and many public spaces were never designed with teenagers in mind. For young people without cars or spending money, the options have narrowed to almost nothing.
The vacuum has created an unexpected consequence: large teen gatherings that local officials call "takeovers" have erupted in cities nationwide. Rather than address the underlying shortage of welcoming spaces, some municipalities have responded with restrictions that youth advocates argue punish all teenagers for the actions of a few.
Ayan Chowdhary, a rising high school senior in North Carolina, describes the monotony of trying to find somewhere to be. He and his friends might go to the mall for food or browsing, but the experience feels repetitive and hollow. "There's only so much you can do," Chowdhary said. "It ended up being the same food places, and most of the time we end up window shopping as opposed to buying anything. At that point, it's like, what are you going to the mall to do?"
The problem is older than it appears. Patsy Eubanks Owens, a landscape architecture expert, began studying outdoor adolescent spaces in the mid-1980s and discovered something striking: design professionals had been deliberately excluding teenagers from public areas for years. "The response was overwhelming," she said. "It was, 'actually, I've been asked to design them out of places. It's a problem that's been going on for a long time.'"
Vague anti-loitering laws compound the issue by giving police broad authority to target young people. Criminal justice professor Jeffrey Butts notes that standing around with friends can be interpreted very differently depending on who is doing it and where they're doing it. "It's America. There will always be racial disparities because the government and systems designed to protect public safety are racially tinged," Butts said.
Teenagers themselves are now asking why they lack what urban planners call "third places" - locations that are neither home nor school nor work. Nate Storring, co-executive director of the Project for Public Spaces, says his organization has received a surge of inquiries about this concept, mostly from student newspapers. "Teens know that they're feeling lonely. They do their own research and find out what a third place is, and then they're like, 'man, why don't I have one of those in my community?'" Storring said.
San Antonio offers a model. Storring's group worked with teenagers to transform an underpass into The Pass, a space featuring basketball courts, charging stations and seating. The success came from genuinely involving young people in the design and improvement process, letting them identify what they needed and implement solutions themselves.
The lesson is simple but often ignored. "Stop treating teenagers like it's us and them," Storring said. "Treat them like people who have their own ideas, listen to them and talk to them in good faith about how to move forward, because they can be part of the solution."
Author James Rodriguez: "Cities are discovering the hard way that you can't police away a shortage of places to be. The answer is obvious: build spaces designed with teens, not against them."
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