A Tale of Two Cities: Unpacking the Success and Failure of School Street Interventions in Two Canadian Cities

Laura E. Smith, Veronique Gosselin, Patricia Collins () and Katherine L. Frohlich
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Laura E. Smith: Department of Geography and Planning, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
Veronique Gosselin: École de Santé Publique (ESPUM), Centre de Recherche en Santé Pulique (CReSP), Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC H3N 1X9, Canada
Patricia Collins: Department of Geography and Planning, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
Katherine L. Frohlich: École de Santé Publique (ESPUM), Centre de Recherche en Santé Pulique (CReSP), Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC H3N 1X9, Canada

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 18, 1-17

Abstract: One innovative strategy to support child-friendly cities is street-based interventions that provide safe, vehicle-free spaces for children to play and move about freely. School streets are one such innovation involving closing streets around elementary schools to vehicular traffic to improve children’s safety as they come and go from school while providing opportunities for children to play and socialize on the street. Launching these initiatives in communities dominated by automobiles is enormously challenging and little is known about why these interventions are successfully launched in some places but not others. As part of a larger research project called Levelling the Playing Fields, two School Street initiatives were planned for the 2021–2022 school year; one initiative was successfully launched in Kingston, ON, while the second initiative failed to launch in Montreal, QC. Using a critical realist evaluation methodology, this paper documents the contextual elements and key mechanisms that enabled and constrained the launch of these School Streets in these cities, through document analysis and key informant interviews. Our results suggest that municipal and school support for the initiative are both imperative to establishing legitimacy and collaborative governance, both of which were necessary for a successful launch.

Keywords: child-friendly cities; school streets; social innovation; program implementation; realist evaluation; street-based interventions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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