Room Please

It is unmistakable.  The feeling you get when you notice you are not just walking along a sidewalk, but the space you are inhabiting is in fact an outdoor room.  A room designed just for you and for many, many others.  It is room to move, to breathe, to succeed, to fail, to stop and go and to simply watch the world go by.  Outdoor rooms are rare these days.  Sidewalks as we know them are a pittance of the opportunity afforded to generations long gone.  Today, our broken rivers of concrete are narrow hallways that line places once valued simply because they were connected to this room.  Today we treat this relationship like a burden or an afterthought of connectivity.  We need these outdoor rooms.  They are the public spaces that our nation's ideas were debated on and quite literally fought over.   We need them now more than ever.