Crossing Places: a Review of Urban Youth Policy 1960S–2010S
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Crossing Places: A Review of Urban Youth Policy 1960s–2010s Dirk J. Rodricks and Kathleen Gallagher with Julius Haag and Scot Wortley; Caroline Fusco, Amanda DeLisio and Danielle Dicarlo; Lance McCready Research Paper 243 October 2018 Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership www.neighbourhoodchange.ca ISSN 0316-0068; ISBN 978-0-7727-9129-0 Crossing Places: Urban Youth Policy 1960s – 2010s ii Crossing Places: A Review of Urban Youth Policy 1960s-2010s Dirk J. Rodricks and Kathleen Gallagher with Julius Haag and Scot Wortley; Caroline Fusco, Amanda DeLisio and Danielle Dicarlo; Lance McCready October 2018, vi, 73 pp. ISSN 0316-0068 ISBN 978-0-7727-9129-0 Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work University of Toronto 248 Bloor Street West Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V4 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://neighbourhoodchange.ca This study and its dissemination is supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humani- ties Research Council of Canada which has funded the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership based at the University of Toronto (J. David Hulchanski, Principal Investigator). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the research team, the advisory board members, the university, or the funder. Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership iii Crossing Places: Urban Youth Policy 1960s – 2010s Executive Summary This report is the product of many productive discussions within the Urban Youth Working Group of the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership (NCRP) from November 2014 through December 2017. The working group brought together community partners from youth- serving organizations and scholars from education, criminology, recreation, and social work to examine the impacts of growing urban socio-spatial inequality and polarization on youth. The purpose of this report is to provide a high-level overview of the history and context of poli- cies and programs in four areas affecting urban youth at the neighbourhood level: schooling, policing, recreation, and employment. Advanced graduate students Dirk Rodricks (Ontario Insti- tute for Studies in Education), Julius Haag (criminology and socio-legal studies), Amanda DeLisio and Danielle Dicarlo (kinesiology and physical education) worked with faculty members Kathleen Gallagher, Scot Wortley, and Caroline Fusco, respectively, while Lance McCready of OISE focused on employment. They approached each of the four key areas with two critical ob- jectives in mind: 1. To introduce non-specialists within the working group to the key policies and programs in the four areas, and 2. To create a foundation for the development of an NCRP research proposal on youth, schooling, and criminalization using a socio-spatial lens. Each area would be further explored through four sections: (a) history and context; (b) govern- ance and geography; (c) policy development; and (d) implementation. The development of these primers, as they would come to be called, led to three key discover- ies that organize and structure this report: 1. Young people are imagined as key beneficiaries in the development of neighbourhood- level policies and programs. 2. Neighbourhoods are not simply where (young) people are located, but significantly shape how (young) people engage in learning, leisure, and work. 3. Critical incidents and legislative interventions (often in response to such incidents), structure policy across all four areas of schooling, crime, recreation, and social work, in overlapping but fragmented, and sometimes contradictory, ways across all levels of government. Following these discoveries, this report then places the four primers in conversation with each other so that we can obtain a more holistic appreciation of the intersecting nature of policy in the material lives of youth. Furthermore, this report includes a comprehensive review of both critical incidents and critical legislation together with their impact on schooling, policing, recrea- tion, and employment for youth aged 13–24 (see Appendix B). Conclusion This report offers an important understanding of the compounding effect of disadvantage in young people’s lives when policies and programs fail to recognize social difference, differential access to opportunities, and urban mobility in the lives of contemporary youth. Simply put, the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership Crossing Places: Urban Youth Policy 1960s – 2010s iv overall impact of these policies is larger than their individual effects. And such negative overall impacts often come at the cost of access and opportunities. Recommendations The report concludes with seven considerations for future research: 1. Researchers and policy-makers need to reconsider conventional notions of neighbour- hoods as singular and geographically bounded. Youth understandings of neighbourhood are fluid and often tied to material needs and desires. Such fluidity and mobility need to be reconciled in research and future policy development. 2. Data collected through community organizations and the government, across all levels, must interplay with interlocking systems, such as the social determinants of health. Fur- thermore, research studies must sufficiently interrogate the ways in which discourses of neoliberalism and liberal multiculturalism structure and shape the impacts across different groups of (young) people. 3. There should be a call for greater leveraging of research partnerships between academia, government, school boards, and communities. Community centres are especially well- positioned to partner with researchers in the study of key neighbourhood and youth de- velopment and engagement questions relative to particular demographic groups. 4. Researchers need to investigate neoliberalism as a theoretical imperative in policy devel- opment for recreation, education, policing and criminalization, and employment. 5. There is an opening for creative arts-based methods, such as drama and visual sociology (such as photo-voice research), to complement traditional qualitative and quantitative methods, while also importantly activating youth expertise. 6. Technologies such as GIS and other mapping software can offer valuable tools to spatial- ize the “floating” or mobile urban youth experience in new and important ways, offering insights into the layering of opportunity gaps and the clustering of risk factors in the daily lives of youth. 7. Positioning youth as co-creators from the outset, rather than simply consultative partners mid-way through policy or program development processes, is one way to engage and sustain youth participation and involvement, especially since they are the ones most di- rectly affected by these policies and programs. Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership v Crossing Places: Urban Youth Policy 1960s – 2010s Authors Dirk J. Rodricks, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto Kathleen Gallagher, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto Julius Haag, Centre for Criminology and Socio-legal Studies, University of Toronto Scot Wortley, Centre for Criminology and Socio-legal Studies, University of Toronto Caroline Fusco, Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, University of Toronto Amanda DeLisio, Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, University of Toronto Danielle Dicarlo, Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, University of Toronto Lance McCready, Department of Leadership, Adult, and Higher Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto Urban Youth Working Group The Urban Youth Working Group brings together interdisciplinary scholars from Criminology, Education, Social Work, and Kinesiology with three community partners: WoodGreen Commu- nity Services, United Way of Toronto and York Region, and Sherbourne Community Health Centre. Members of the group are interested in issues of urban youth experience. The initial goal was to advance, for the Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership (NCRP), a better understanding of opportunities and risks for youth in Greater Toronto Area (GTA) neighbour- hoods. We aimed to identify what the needs are, where the gaps exist, and to generate further research inquiries that speak to the broader NCRP objectives (see http://neighbourhoodchange.ca). Acknowledgements We offer our thanks to working group coordinator Emily Paradis (NCRP) and to fellow working group members Jessica Carriere (Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, U of T), Julia Drydyk (United Way Toronto and York Region), Diane Dyson (Woodgreen Community Services), Rosemary Gartner (Centre for Criminology and Socio-legal Studies, U of T), Shani Kipang (Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, U of T), Laura McDonough (United Way Toronto and York Region), Anne Wessels (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, U of T), and Greg Yerashotis (Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, U of T), for insights and questions that laid the foundation for this review. Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership Crossing Places: Urban Youth Policy 1960s – 2010s vi Table of Contents 1. THE PROCESS ................................................................................................................................... 1 2. SCHOOLING ......................................................................................................................................