Jessica Francis Kane's The Rules is a very contemporary evocation of the uncertainty and uneasiness we have about the relationship between the city and the child. The unease of the modern parent is made all the more bitter by our half-remembered nostalgia of our own childhoods, which are naturally empty of parental anxiety, coupled with the even more idyllic pasts referenced in popular culture, where freedom to wander, play and observe the adult world without any interference or questions is apparently a universal right.

The flipside, then and now, is the spectre of roaming, near-feral children undermining the sense of community and public decency. In Britain, the evolution of ASBO culture has helped define a hapless generation. The nebulous - often wholly justified, often not - definition of 'anti-social behaviour' means that huge swathes of classic children's literature read like treatises for truancy and paeans to parental neglect; the roaming Outlaws in Just William, the scruffy, fatherless family in Five Children and It, the train-baiting teens in The Railway Children, the child-alone-in-the-city subtext of Catherine Storr's Polly and the Wolf.

These fictional spaces act a powerful mental utopia, creating the impression that the world was a playground for children, with adults largely absent. Colin Ward's 1978 The Child in the City (from where the above image was taken) was a celebration of children's life on the street, their games, interactions and relationships with the fast-changing city. There are more images at this Japanese page on traditional children's street games, which includes the work of Iona and Peter Opie (see also things 9). Many of the images and scenes appear not just archaic, but threatening, as our feel for what it means to be free in the context of the city changes with age.

This isn't a new phenomenon. Graham Greene's haunting short story The Destructors (1954) captures anxiety about youth run amok in the post-war landscape, as a gang of children resolve to destroy the house of their nemesis. "'Wren built that house, father says.' 'Who's Wren?' 'The man who built St Paul's.' 'Who cares?' Blackie said. 'It's only Old Misery's.'" And later:

"The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become."

Now the spaces of play are highly designed, neat little self-contained worlds of structured complexity and elaborate colours and forms. The reason? We want proscribed spaces for children now, rather than allow them free reign of public space where they are both threatened (or become the threat itself). These firewalled zones are being joined by branded virtual spaces (recently lambasted by Lord Puttnam), where adventure and discovery is carefully controlled and closely linked to consumption. Adult nostalgia blinds us to these new realities, allowing us to indulge in fond remembrance of our past while keeping a tight grip on the present day.

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Related to the above, an incredible flickr set of life at Riverside School in Thamesmead, circa 1976 to 1978. One of the largest post-war housing complexes in the UK, Thamesmead was a sprawling complex of concrete walkways. Not notorious enough to be reviled, the estate had a rare cameo as a sun-kissed urban utopia in the 1996 film Beautiful Thing, and is now seen as one of the jumping off points for the Thames Gateway development. Another image from the same set: playground. Risk management has changed.

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Spacing Toronto / PrarieMod and Pacific Northwest Regional Architecture, two region-specific architecture weblogs, both via ecAr, a tumble log / the sordid saga of the Clissold Leisure Centre in Hackney; finally, the architect's point of view (which is absolutely not good enough for the community activists) / the DeLorean Bus concept, an 'Americanized' design that might have changed our perception of the DeLorean name for ever more. posted by things at 22:31