Streets Are for Playing On, Too
Many of us want to live on a street where we know our neighbours - where we knock on a door to borrow a ladder, ask someone to keep an eye on the house while we’re away, or get a hand carrying a heavy box up the drive. Streets like these don't happen by accident. They're built intentionally, house by house, through the kind of ordinary contact that starts because someone decides to go first.
New housing developments start without that history already in place. The Selo townhouse development near Parrs Park in Glen Eden is only a few years old, new enough that most of the people who live there are still working out who their neighbours are.
When Community Waitākere supplied a play kit to the residents of Selo, it wasn't really about the kits. It was about giving people that hadn't had the chance yet a reason to stand outside together.
"A huge thank you to everyone at Community Waitākere and Auckland Council for their support in making our first event such a success," Olivia says. "Everyone had such a fun morning, and it was so cool seeing our community come together, familiar faces and new neighbours too! Here's to many more!"
It's a small thing - chalk, a ball, a few hours outside - turning strangers on the same street into people who now recognise each other.
That's what sent Community Waitākere exploring more ways to do it. Play, is one of the lowest-barrier ways to get a street to act like a street again - no meeting agenda, no sign-up sheet, just kids on bikes and adults standing around watching them. Around the same time, Auckland Council is introducing that idea at a city-wide scale: Play Streets, an initiative that temporarily hands a residential street back to the people who live on it for a couple of daylight hours, with none of the permits or traffic management that usually make this kind of thing too hard to bother with.
Community Waitākere is now working with Auckland Council to bring eight play streets to life across West Auckland - supporting the people on local streets to organise and host their own. What happens on the day is up to them: chalk drawings, bike races, an obstacle course someone's dad builds out of milk crates.
Olivia has already asked about the next one. "We are so very grateful," she says. "Looking forward to finding a time for the stencilling too!"
That's the shift Community Waitākere wants to see; a street that keeps finding reasons to come back outside.
For more information on hosting a Play Street in your neighbourhood – contact us.