Summer City Planning

scribedbyme.blogspot.com

Part I: Glendale Heights, the Village

Glendale Heights, Illinois, is a village, like many western suburbs of Chicago, that finds its residents indoors during the dog days of summer. There is no village-wide mandate that requires the people of Glendale Heights to retreat to their four walls. Rather, the cultural norm in this midwest locale is that one owns an air conditioner and then keeps it running all day, everyday. This allowed the sidewalks to stay unused and prompted many households to purchase gas-guzzling cars. The city is as square as this convention, whose border is depicted  in red, in the figure on the near left.

It's almost a square, right?

maps.google.com

I grew up in Glendale Heights, at the point labeled with the bubble A, in a townhouse such as the one that you see on your right. There wasn't much in the way of greenery outside, and my next-door neighbors, in their silvery-haired sagesse, told me to never, ever walk outside in that neighborhood alone. It's true that when you make images appear on Google Maps in the area, some of the titles of the pictures are: abandoned house, Section 8, dirty pond, broken fence with mattress behind it, and so on and so forth. This wasn't the most wholesome of neighborhoods. I was logically scared out of my wits during much of my enfance to leave my front door, but you know what? In hindsight, nothing really went on in Glendale Heights, at least not during the day; it was too hot for anyone to care about making trouble for other people! Was there no way to circumvent these unhealthy fears and explore the community?

Part II: "Green Living" or Enduring Life without A/C

I heard on CNN the other day that "you don't have to leave your town to be green" or something similar to that.  When I lived in Glendale Heights, I was pretty green. I solidly believed two things: 1) that someone went through our garbage can to sort out the recyclables and 2) that public transportation had the power to free you from the burden of owning a car.  I was wrong about 1, and I rarely took advantage of 2.

cobalt564/panoramio

Our family did not have an air conditioner installed in our house, but I stayed inside all day. What?  Yes. During those babysitter-less days (after the tender age of 10), there was a way to do it, which involved either sitting still enough in front of the TV for eight hours so that I did not break out in sweat or nurturing my emerging status as an early-adopter of the Internet community by reading and writing various blogs in our much cooler basement.

Now that I've lived a little more, my entire outlook of summer vacation has changed, especially so in the summer. The first year of my master's program here in the Netherlands finished this past June, and I now have a couple of weeks to - ahem - update my oft neglected blog and do what I will with my time off. Since I'm a student again, which also implies not having tons of money to realize my free-time aspirations, I can compare apples to apples with my time spent as a younger student in my midwestern suburb.

Part III: Summer Schedules

A typical summer day for me in the Netherlands has been filled with errands, Couch-to-5K training, projects and hanging out. It's a great schedule that keeps me pretty occupied all day, while being somewhat social. This type of régime would have been great for me when I was younger, since, comfortingly enough, the things that I find fun now haven't changed so much since then. Considering climate differences (It's much hotter during the day in July and August in Chicago than in Leiden.), transportation (I had no car.) and money issues (usually no pocket money) for a kid living in Glendale Heights, here's what an ideal summer schedule would be:

Summer Schedule - Glendale Heights, Typical Teenager

6:00 Wake up and small breakfast

7:00 Cross-country training with Carl (my neighbor down the street)

9:00 Second breakfast

10:00 Get out of the heat!!  Bike to Glenside Public Library

2:00 Eat a packed sandwich at park outside, or visit a friend (what kid is organized enough to do this on her own?)

3:00 See what friends are up to (I pretty much left this out of the equation most days, between the ages of 10 and 15, but things like family visits and church youth group trips kept me from falling off the social deep end.)

6:00 Snack and play violin (in the basement)

8:00 Dinner (My dad kept us fed.)

9:00 Chores (I think my dad was the only one who really did anything.)

10:00 Sleep - so I could get up at 6 again, the next day!  Most of the time, though, I stayed up late, since it cooled down at night.

I didn't have a bike, and living in the lower left-hand quadrant of the town did not make the trip to the library easy by foot. I did, however, have my brother's rollerblades, which fit me at some point during my adolescence. Google Maps says biking would have only taken 10 minutes from my house to the library, so rollerblading would have been just a tad longer. Walking would have been a good 40 minutes. That would have been gross in the heat!

Part IV: A Few Changes

I think the city of Glendale Heights should implement a program that could possibly be run by the public schools, such that all children could be occupied during the summer. Yes, parents received newsletters at the end of the school year, but real implementation of such ideas as volunteering and joining a sports team is unrealistic, especially for a single-parent family, like mine was. A bare-bones program could entail directly sending newsletters to the children that gave them suggestions on what to do without spending money, as is the case for many young people. I am sure that places like the library and the beloved Sports Hub  offered many activities, but either information about these options did not reach the kids themselves, or money and transportation were barriers. If children saw transportation as a barrier, then I believe someone in the city had to lay out the town in a more bike/foot/rollerblade-friendly way, possible through maps. These efforts still much needed for those families that cannot afford childcare for their children in the summer.