Children in the streets

PalmaWhen a ruler is asked what legacy they would like to leave, they begin to list a catalog of works, a record of investments, of remodeled streets, sports facilities, recovered squares, and built housing; in the best-case scenario. In the worst, they opt to talk about projects that only exist in communication cabinets' talking points. It's logical. Infrastructure is inaugurated, photographed, and remains for the next electoral campaign.

That's why Virgilio Moreno's answer caught my attention when Maria Llull asked him what kind of Inca he would like to leave behind. He didn't talk about buildings or grand projects, but about a more cohesive, more plural city, where coexistence is part of the daily landscape. Maria, who prunes her texts with Prussian diligence, omitted that when Moreno explains that in his city children play ball in front of the Town Hall and teenagers stroll and sit in the squares on summer nights, there are other mayors who listen to him with envy. He doesn't talk about noise or disturbances. He talks about children playing.

We live in an era where public space seems to only function when it is perfectly tidy. We want clean, quiet, and predictable squares. Balls, groups of young people, any sign of life that isn't programmed bothers us. We have ended up confusing the absence of conflict with coexistence.

A city is not alive because it has more sidewalks or more streetlights. It is alive when its inhabitants feel that the street also belongs to them. This is the most difficult public work to build: the one that does not appear in municipal budgets, nor is it awarded through a tender, nor is it inaugurated by cutting a ribbon.

Good town mayors – even when they govern cities that long ago stopped being towns – know this. They walk slowly, because there is always someone who stops them to talk. They listen and understand that governing consists less of building structures than of ensuring that people continue to want to live together. Then we have Palma, governed and explained as if it were Al Capone's Chicago.

The success of a city is not that the streets are impeccable, but that there are still children playing in them and young people walking through them without feeling like a nuisance. And, above all, that those who govern do not pay much attention to those who are bothered by this.