Speakers
Description
COVID-19’s impact on physical activity in local neighbourhoods has been significant given that many communities have had to severely limit access to or completely close physical activity spaces in efforts to help reduce transmission risk. As a direct consequence, some local governments in Canada turned their attentions to re/organizing infrastructure such as major public roads and streets into free, accessible active transportation-only spaces for residents. The City of Toronto introduced ActiveTO in the Summer 2020 as one such initiative. In this paper, we highlight key findings from a study examining the changing representation of ActiveTO’s benefits for residents in Canadian media between 2020 and 2022. In the early days of ActiveTO, it was framed as helping residents feel a sense of normalcy through freedom of movement. However, over time, its benefit to the city became more questioned and contested as industry and private sector stakeholders opposed the regular closure of major streets on the grounds of how they understood the return to normalcy as freedom of business. Throughout these various framings, the ways in which ActiveTO missed opportunities to attend to existing geographic inequity in physical activity spaces across the city remained relatively unaddressed. Although ActiveTO held (and still holds) potential for the reclamation of public space for physical activity, it did not (and still does not) improve access to safe, free, and accessible physical activity space for all residents, particularly those groups and neighbourhoods that bore (and still bear) a disproportionate burden of illness and hardship due to COVID-19.
