We made friends with the children next door and in the neighborhood, walked to the local shops and walked to school sometimes.

This is what made it is some ways an ideal arrangement. But perhaps it may have been too suburban for my mother who didn’t drive. The needs of adults are different to the needs of children.

It sounds like paradise! But did the apparent low density of the neighbourhood make you dependent on parental car transport to make contact with friends, go to the cinema, visit shops, get to school etc? I remain an admirer of the 1965 book Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander. Children, like other humans, need both private space in which they can be themselves and communal space in which they can be part of a community.

This bounty had advantages and disadvantages. The advantages were of course being able to eat the fruit while the disadvantages was that picking up the rotting fruit from the ground was a good source of parental punishment.

I am sure with a bit of imagination it would be possible to design dwellings in which children had similar opportunities to experience gardens and nature in a safe way.

It would be good to think about the requirements first, and the factor of affordability second because sometimes putting the cart before the horse means that the horse gets left in the paddock and some poor person ends up pulling the cart!

My childhood, in Edinburgh, was almost as fortunate: a terrace with no front garden but a park on the other side of the street; a walled back garden (not large) and a natural river bank at the bottom of the garden. But my dad bought it for a price equal to about one year’s salary and, still measured in doctor’s salaries, the prices in the street are now about 8 years salary. Many of our neighbours were teachers and writers – and I doubt if many members of these professions still live there. When I was last there I noticed that there are no footpaths on the bank of the river. It used to be a prime play area. Now, I guess, parents regard it as dangerous.

My carefree childhood was spent in the planned city of Canberra with a backyard, a front yard and a circular park with mushrooms and native trees across the street! We always walked through the park to go to the local shops to buy the bread and milk for mum.

I think ‘resort’ lifestyle is a good description. It is like living in a hotel with a protected garden – or a condominium.
Re childrens’ play, they need lots of alternatives. A private garden can let them grow up as young rebels but it can also be an over-protected place dominated by parental control. A communal garden is a good combination of safety and community. A street, or public greenspace, is a good preparation for the dangers of the outside world.

It perhaps not the best arrangement for children. The possibility of unstructured play within a traditional backyard seems to be best. [ http://images-2.domain.com.au/2010/08/21/1831776/backyard_200-200×0.jpg ] and [ http://www.aussievault.com.au/media/vaults/121/entries/images/1516/7841/image-966-644.jpg ]

If there are safe opportunities to roam beyond the backyard – reports of happy carefree childhoods seem to be more prevailent. [ http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8313/7984898795_f30a914493_z.jpg ] and [ http://www.internationalcrickethall.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Main-cricketartprize2011.jpg ] and [ http://www.juniorlandcare.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/jl_yates_096.jpg ].

I agree that gyms and parks have different roles. But I also think gyms benefit from the fact that individual consumer decisions can increase expenditure on them, because they are not private goods. By definition, this is not possible with ‘public’ parks and this makes it difficult to know what resources society would like to devote to them.
The normal arrangement in East Asia is for apartments to have access to a communal garden to which the public does not have access (like this). This makes the gardens safe for children and the arrangement seems to work well. We have some examples of this in London, where it also seems to work well, but it is not common. Is this arrangement common in Australia?

Do you think gyms are public parks are competition. My thoughts are rather that they are complementary?

Yes. Of course the communal gardens may be badly designed: it probably depends on whether they have had a landscape architect involved and on the brief they have been given. Do you think that type of accommodation is suitable for children?

They usually have good arrangements for ‘maintaining’ communal gardens ie they cut the grass and prune the ‘easy maintenance flowering shrubs’. What troubles me is that the land is often badly designed and appears to have no use. It might be used for childrens’ play but there are signs saying NO BALL GAMES and parents do not seem to regard it as any safer than playing in the street.