dry grass singing

this used to be my playground

Outrage. There is no other word for it. The Powers That Be have dug up the basketball court behind my house and in its place are planting a Landscaped Garden, that in my humble opinion will serve no greater purpose than to become a breeding ground for mosquitoes and other creepy-crawlies.

This angers me for several reasons. Firstly, it seems to me to be a summary action of the sort that The Powers That Be claim they are trying to move away from in their attempt to create a society built more on consultation and consensus. Yet, here there was no consultation, nay, not even an attempt to notify the residents in the area who would be affected by the decision. And now that it's been done, there's been not so much as a squeak of an explanation from the authorities as to why such drastic action had to be taken. All we have are rumours. As for me, all i know is that when i walked out of the house a few mornings ago, the basketball court was right where it had always been for the last 25 years (or longer, for all i know), and when i came home in the evening, it had been replaced by an angry heap of rubble spread across the entire area - jagged slabs of concrete lying haphazardly like so many beached whales gasping for breath under the evening stars. It was an act of destruction, cold, cruel, and callous, and all the more unforgiveable because the manner in which it was done just smacked of pompous 'i-know-better-than-thou' officialdom.

But it was not just a physical space that was destroyed. That would have been tolerable, if only barely. What makes this almost a desecration is the fact that the basketball court was the focal point of the neighbourhood's social life, the place, in fact, that made the neighbourhood a neighbourhood, rather than just a random collection of terrace houses scattered in a tree-lined valley. It was the place where New Year's Eve countdowns were held, where children learned to skate and rollerblade and cycle, and most importantly, where the young people of the neighbourhood would gather each evening for a game of basketball or football. This was a daily ritual that had remained unchanged ever since my family moved into the estate a quarter of a century ago, and those of us who have been around for some time still cherish the idea that hanging out at the bastketball court was a rite of passage for generations of children growing up in the neighbourhood. And now this communal space has been taken away, and in its place is an ugly rectangle of lumpy orange-red soil and balding tufts of cow grass.

i grew up hearing the sounds of shouted laughter and balls ricocheting off the wooden backboard. i even learnt to distinguish between the sounds made by basketballs and footballs - basketballs have a mellower, more echoey timbre, while footballs tend to sound sharper, harder. i remember the little green and red mosaic tiles that were used to mark out the lines on the court, before the tiles were removed and the lines were painted in instead. The basketball court was where i first learnt to ride a bicycle - i remember first wobbling around its perimeter, supported by my father, then careening round and round in the belief that the faster i went, the easier it would be to keep my balance. All these things are woven into the fabric of my memories and it seems almost disorienting now that the place that these memories are inextricably tied to is suddenly gone.

Some people, i know, would object to this apparent excess of sentimentality and nostalgia - life goes on, they would say, we need to move forward, not live in the past. Still, in this case i do not see how the new Landscaped Garden is going to be an improvement on the past, and the losses (of a sense of community, of a sense of rootedness) seem to be infinitely greater than the potential benefits (no more footballs crashing into people's backyards, pretty flowers and trees to look at). In almost every way, this is a step backwards - an erosion of civic space at a time when the national agenda purports to be the strengthening of communal ties, a diminishing of the store of emotional capital that gives people their sense of identity and self. Perhaps the Landscaped Garden will, with time, begin to accumulate a history of its own and become as much a part of people's lives as the basketball court was - but this is one occasion when i feel that too much optimism would be misplaced. Cynical? Perhaps. But there are times when cynicism seems a well-justified and perhaps even natural response, and this is one of them.

posted by eothen @ 1:43 PM