At the beginning of a public joy excursion with unhoused youth from , two young men disappeared.
We were exploring a verdant botanical garden tucked beneath the edge of a sleepy suburban neighbourhood. The group continued moving through the space, responding to a series of prompts I had prepared to spark reflection not only on the garden itself, but also on deeper questions of beauty, belonging, and who feels entitled to experience such places.
Between pauses — standing close-eyed on a bridge listening to birdsong overhead and wrapping ourselves around the trunk of a mature, majestic tree — some youth joked that the two young men were either vaping in a bush or already on a bus back to the city’s core. Having raised an independent young woman who takes up space in ways that rarely align with the rules, I knew better than to speculate.
How I ended up at a botanical garden with a group of incredible unhoused youth can be explained by an email I sent to the organization a month before the excursion and by a job I had with the YMCA, over twenty-years before that. I developed and implemented outreach strategies geared towards unhoused youth in the suburbs. Not the squeegee kids cleaning windshields on main streets or the kids that sought shelter beneath bridges, and in laneways between clubs on Queen Street. I worked with the suburban kids, the ones who couch surfed and snuck into their classmates’ closets after their parents went to bed. Back then, this kind of homelessness, the kind beyond the downtown core, was referred to as invisible. In actuality, the young people were rendered invisible, not in the sense of not existing, but in the sense of not having their existence valued by the community and systems meant to serve them.
As I continued to build a public space practice, and later engage in research, I couldn’t not see, and importantly, witness the humanity of unhoused youth. And I mean really see them. Not just their struggles and vulnerabilities but also their talents, aspirations, and street-based care networks. I have long critiqued the ways the very organizations meant to serve them often narrowly perceived them as clients rather than community members. They are supported with shelter, life skills workshops, and academic counselling. All these services are fundamental to their survival — but what about their thriving and transition into fulfilling public life?
This is the question I asked Aisha Francis, visionary Interim Executive Director of and her team. Their response was resoundingly affirming, and within weeks, we were recruiting young people for my Pathways to Public Joy pilot project. The goal of the program was to expose the youth to a diverse range of public spaces as a way of onboarding them not strictly to shelter or to a housing unit, but into civic life and community. It was also a way of helping to contribute to their sense of spatial entitlement.
Healthy spatial entitlement is a term I use to describe how social conditioning, uneven power relations, and public space policy and design shape the quality of space we feel we deserve, the amount of space we take up, and the ways we move through space. It is both a mindset and a practice embedded in my . People who cultivate healthy spatial entitlement not only experience deeper levels of personal and public joy, they also strengthen the civic commons, build more connected communities, and help to shape collective futures rooted in dignity and belonging. Naturally, many unhoused youth, navigating cartographies of survival and vulnerability, have a diminished sense of healthy spatial entitlement.
This is why we found ourselves together at the botanical garden. Following a conversational overview by my friendly colleague, landscape architect Joe Clement, the youth responded to a series of prompts, which were in fact invitations to experience the space through all their senses and to practice healthy spatial entitlement. Just as we fell into a flow with each other, we came across the two young men who had disappeared an hour or so earlier. They were standing at the foot of a stream delighted to be reunited with the group, and even more eager to share the part of the garden that exemplified a sense of beauty and joy for them.
Although they had veered off well beyond the bounds of the prompt, and without permission at that, I commended them for demonstrating healthy spatial entitlement in practice. They shared in detail why the shallow body of water summoned them, the peacefulness of its babbling, the variety and challenge of the rocks, which they’d practiced balancing on to get to the other side, and childhood memories of connection to water. What happened next is a moment, that a year after it has taken place, is just as vibrant in my memory.
The two young men invited their peers to cross the stream with them. Some youth from the shelter leapt forward while others voiced or silently expressed concerns. Without any guidance from myself, Joseph, or even Leanne Rabinowitz, a beloved and trusted staff person with Eva’s, they started to self organize. A tall and lovely young woman who preferred the prospect of carpentry or some sort of work with her hands over modelling, was the first to slip off her shoes and sink her toes beneath the stream’s surface. However, she was not interested in immediately getting herself to the other side. She held the hands of her peers and offered to take photos and videos of their big moment. Another young person, also comfortable with water, dove in to do the same. Within 20 minutes or so, almost 20 young people worked together to cross the stream on rounded rocks.
If I openly cried at such things, I would have.
This article is part of Jay Pitter’s Public Joy series. Read the , and .
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