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features difficult to be around, staff members a week: one street closed to cars and open to 2
realized they were excluding a constituency that children’s play for four hours at a time. Just
would enjoy the museum more without these like Riverbend Park, the idea had to start
intense sensory experiences. Instead of rede- small — temporary, built to address the needs of
signing the architecture or software to make a local residents, while planting the seed of more
permanent change, Access Smithsonian, the substantive change. The group eventually
institution’s office for accessibility, designed a opened eight “playing lanes” throughout the
clock-bound structure to accommodate these city, created a replication manual for other
sensory needs. On dedicated weekend days, one neighborhoods, and generated data to advocate
of the museums opens early for visitors with dis- for more sustainable play space in the future.
abilities of any kind — an open door to whoever In this way, a city might change its shape to 15
needs it, says Ashley Grady, the senior program adjust to its citizens’ changing needs. Multiple,
specialist who oversees the program. The Morn- imaginative uses of public space could be made Section 1 / Logical Reasoning and Organization: Shaping an Argument
ing at the Museum staff makes adjustments to from what’s already in front of us. In 2020, cities
some exhibit features — turning down the sound such as Philadelphia and Chicago also opened
or dimming the lights and offering targeted pre- play streets for children in lieu of traditional
visit prep materials. For a set number of hours, a indoor summer camps. But open streets for chil-
museum offers a particular welcome to an over- dren could be more than just a stopgap amenity
looked population. for pandemic emergencies.
In Mexico City, Gabriella Gomez-Mont, A found park, a welcoming museum, streets
who ran the wide-ranging and experimental that shift their shapes for children: These are
Laboratory for the City between 2013 and 2018, designs built with time as the sculpting tool.
used time structures to recover play space for Ordinary people like Isabella Halsted have been
children. The city was home to more than two able to reshape time, and make our public spaces
million children as of 2015, and its green more truly public. What other worlds might be
spaces and parks are unevenly distributed. possible, inside or outside a pandemic? Who else
Ms. Gomez-Mont’s group worked with resi- might take up the cause of a small shift in the

dents in a pilot neighborhood to recapture play clock, a rescue of time outside the machine
space for kids where no built structure was of efficiency?
available. They tried a time experiment once 2021

Sara Hendren, “The Simplest Tool for Improving Cities is Also Free,” The New York Times, July 16, 2021. Copyright © 2021 by The New York Times. All rights
reserved. Used under license. https://nytimes.com/

Let’s look at how Hendren employs these patterns of development to convey her argu-
ment that creating public events or spaces by designating time for them is a simple, free,
and effective way to improve cities. She opens her essay with cause and effect: A stretch
of a busy parkway near the water is closed to cars on Sundays during warm weather
and, “[i]n the absence of cars on a four-lane thoroughfare beside the water, all kinds of
other street uses blossom.” She transitions to a vivid description of what those Sundays
bring to the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, including the example of designated
time for “people on feet and on wheels” to enjoy a “towering line of stately, centenarian
sycamores” and both common and rare shore birds. This description helps readers envi-
sion a real-life example — you can see exactly what kind of trees line the road that is
closed to car traffic on Sundays, envision families with young children in strollers
83

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