The Leisure Challenge of the '80s...

Are You Preparing for the Probable Tomorrow?

by John R. Kelly

Those concerned about public recreation have been subjected to a series of fanciful flights of imagination about leisure in the future. Such staid and traditional publications as the Wall Street Journal and Playboy have presented visions of the future. Not surprisingly, the WSJ has stressed the marketing of a variety of leisure goods, equipment, electronic games, and travel packages. The Hefner enterprise has also predictably produced visions of technological wonders such as "sensavision" attached to oversized beds. Add to such exotic forecasts the "conventional wisdom" in recreation circles about more and more leisure time, and it is no wonder that recreation futurizing has not seemed particularly useful to those developing plans and programs.

At the same time, a number of social changes are rather well-established. If public recreation planners and programmers are to deal with the tomorrow that is relatively assured rather than highly speculative, those trends should be taken into account. All are now underway and are consistent enough with other social change that they are not likely to dissipate or disappear. In fact, many communities are having to cope with some of them already.

Some of the trends are related to employment patterns:

• While the long-anticipated reduction in the average work week has not materialized, there are significant changes in the shape of the work schedule for many workers. The first is a greater variety and flexibility of schedules. With over half the employed now in services, including retailing, the Monday-through-Friday 8-to-5 work schedule characterizes fewer workers each year. Shopping center hours, restaurant schedules, production services, and all sorts of people-serving enterprises operate through the night and weekends. Workers have their nonwork time in mornings rather than evenings, weekdays rather than weekends, and not even the same times from week to week.

• A second shift is the greater proportion of employed women. When over half of U.S. women age 20-65 are employed outside the home, then there are consequences for the workplace, home, family, community, and for women themselves. Certainly the assumption that most women's recreation could be scheduled during the "off hours" is no longer tenable. Increasingly women experience the same time scarcity as many men and are looking for intense leisure experiences with the greatest satisfaction outcome per hour invested.

• More two-income households not only have discretionary income for leisure but also have scheduling conflicts. Further, the decreased availablity of women as "mother-chauffeurs" and volunteer workers will have impacts on recreation for children.

Other economic trends:

• Increased energy and travel costs not only affect vacation and weekend trips but also community and at-home leisure. The location and scheduling of community recreation that has relied on the availability of the private automobile is unlikely to escape change.

• At the same time, housing costs are rising so rapidly that the interior space and private yard of the detached home may be available to a smaller and smaller proportion of childrearing families. Various forms of multi-unit housing for families would seem to call for increased provision of common space and facilities outside the home and yard.

• There seems little doubt that a number of commercial enterprises including conglomerates are entering the leisure-related markets with both new and competing products. Considerable effort will be made to promote the message that leisure satisfaction requires purchases and that public recreation agencies should provide space to use the newly-purchased leisure toys.

See Tomorrow...Page 28

John R. (Jack) Kelly is Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches and conducts research on leisure and the human life cycle. His recently completed text, to be published by Prentice-Hall and appropriately titled Leisure, will be released this fall. Kelly has a Ph.D. in sociology; enjoys playing tennis, listening to music, and participating in a variety of outdoor activities.

Illinois Parks and Recreation 15 January/February, 1980

Tomorrow... From Page 15

There are also some established population changes:

• While the total population of the United States is leveling off, there are significant shifts in its composition. By the year 2020, we will reach a new peak in the proportion of the population in retirement years. Ours is an aging, if not growing, population.

• Other changes include shorter childbearing periods for most families. Insofar as most adult leisure has been family-related, there will be more stress on leisure companionship in the marriage in pre-and post-parental years. A similar trend is toward a greater number of single adults — both never married and formerly married — in urban areas. The social meanings of leisure for singles requires considerable attention.

• While some households are moving back to the city, the major growth area is still the suburbs. Implications for the residual city-dwellers and for those in the far-flung incremental suburbs revolve around both leisure and employment travel costs, loss of community, the requirement of private transportation, energy costs, space utilization and land-use planning, taxation and the financing of services, and the time costs of such space-inefficient residence patterns.

In general, there are many indications that the trend toward greater diversity of leisure expressions and styles characteristic of the 1970s will continue in the 1980s and be reinforced by diversity of work schedules, family and household structures and styles, and market distributed leisure equipment and opportunities.

This is not a complete list of trends or likely changes. Nor has there been any attempt to draw out the implications for public recreation. Rather, this is an invitation to start a conversation about recreation in the 1980s and the development of priorities responsive to social conditions that aren't quite the same as the 70s.

Illinois Parks and Recreation 28 January/February, 1980