`Healthification' and the Promises of Urban Space

Abstract

In this article, I begin to unpack how urban physical activity space is being imagined by physical activity policy-makers. I review literature pertaining to youth, urban space and play, and I engage in a preliminary analysis of a small selection of government (Canada) and media communications to examine how space and health are represented discursively in policy texts. These representations of space and health are not necessarily new, but are appearing to become more prevalent in Canadian public health contexts as the `panic' about youth crime and physical (in)activity escalates. I am concerned with how space is represented in policy texts and what space is called onto be(come) in the service of the new public health in Toronto, Canada. I examine how youth are discursively incited, and in what ways, to make use of, and to find salvation in, `healthified' urban spaces. In current neoliberal and neo-conservative times, youth are increasingly called upon to engage in healthy living in spaces that are replete with discourses of `healthification', civic engagement and consumerism. I conclude by suggesting that we need to pay attention to current investments in urban youth's active living space, how urban youth take up and/or refuse spatial inscriptions and prescriptions, and how youth imagine themselves as subjects of healthified urban spaces (that are best thought of in terms of a complicated network of hegemonic local and global interrelations).