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"When I was a teenager living in rural Nova Scotia, there were two two places kids spent most of their time when they weren't at school: the McDonald's parking lot and a gigantic sand pit," writes Hadley Dyer in her new book Watch This Space: Designing, Defending and Sharing Public Spaces.  

Unlike adults, teens don't have private spaces to call their own. At home, parents decide who can cover over, when they have to leave, how loud the music can be. At school, teachers are always keeping a watchful eye. That's why it was such a big deal when McDonald's arrived in my town. It gave us someplace to go. To see and be seen. To be together.

Watch This Space is not a hymn to McDonald's as public space; it is, in part, about the poverty of living in a society where a fast-food parking lot is the most public space many teens have. Addressing herself to younger readers (ages 9 to 14, I'd say), Hadley provides a straightforward orientation about the importance and design of public spaces that many grown-ups will also find enlightening. 

In fact, Watch This Space is a terrific book: readable, useful, precise, well designed, urgent. It compresses a tremendously sophisticated analysis into concrete, simple sentences. It also gives young readers tools for improving the public spaces they have and for someday, perhaps, building better ones. As contributors Kevin Bracken and Lori Kufner put it,

How do we fight for public space? Gigantic pillow fights, water balloon wars and cardboard tube battles!

Turning your community into a massive playground is an easy and fun way to celebrate public spaces. We call it "metromorphosis," or "the art of city transformation."

You can discover lots of ideas and tools for metromorphosis on their website, Newmindspace--just one of many resources highlighted in Watch This Space.  I can't recommend this book highly enough to parents, teachers, youth, and anyone who works with youth.

Remember, public space is yours. You have every right to get pissed off about sold space, ugly space, unused space and wasted space. But ownership comes with responsibility, and that means doing something when you see a problem.

That's a good message for kids to hear, and good for adults as well.