How resistance to change limits children’s right to the city

Many Canadians over the age of 40 likely remember spending their childhoods playing on the street and moving around their communities on their own or with friends. And, according to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11, cities should in fact be places where all residents, including children, can thrive — they have as much right to occupy and use urban streets as motorists do.

However, children today are less active and independently mobile and aren’t engaging in as much outdoor free play.

In Canada, a major reason for this trend is that we’ve deprived children of their right to the city, including the freedom to safely play and move about on the streets near their homes and schools without the need for adult supervision.

Innovative interventions such as School Streets are critically needed. School Streets are temporary, car-free zones created in front of schools during peak drop-off and pick-up times to improve student safety and encourage walking and cycling.

Yet, our research has found that they often face stiff resistance. By closing streets adjacent to schools to cars, School Streets confront drivers with a reimagined and restructured public space they may not be ready to embrace.

Planning cities for cars, not kids

The stripping of children’s rights to the city is a centuries-old project in North America.

Prior to the mass production of the automobile, children could often be found playing on city streets. But as automobile ownership became commonplace, growing numbers of children were being injured and killed by motorists.

Rather than limit where automobiles could travel, urban planners and public health officials advocated for the creation of other places for children to play, hidden away from traffic, such as neighbourhood parks.

This automobile-centric approach to city planning created a societal shift in attitudes about the kinds of spaces considered appropriate for kids to play and move about. Consequently, we now view it as normal not to see or hear children on city streets.

By disempowering children in terms of where they can go in cities, our society has developed assumptions that children are not sufficiently responsible or competent to navigate their communities.

Children’s mobility in car-centric cities

Ironically, as we have become more fearful of allowing children to move about freely, driving children to their destinations has increased in response to this fear. We have largely confined children’s movement in cities to vehicles.

Consequently, we now face an immense societal challenge in enabling children to move independently in their communities, particularly in spaces commonly occupied by children, like outside of primary schools.

In terms of the journey to school, research has shown that risky driving behaviours by parents during morning drop-off times — like letting them out in unsafe areas, obstructing views, making U-turns and speeding — are commonplace.

These behaviours are associated with an increased risk of children being struck by motorists. Hazardous conditions around schools, combined with widespread perceptions that children do not belong on the street and are incapable of getting to school on their own, reinforce the already low rates of walking or bicycling to school among children in Canada.

Innovating cities for children

School Streets can address both issues: reducing the real dangers posed by automobiles in spaces occupied by children while also helping all citizens reimagine how, and by whom, streets can be used.

Typically implemented by municipal governments or not-for-profits, School Streets enable children to come and go safely from school. Though they’re common in many European cities, their uptake in Canada has been slower.

From 2020 to 2024, we led a study entitled Levelling the Playing Fields, in which we systematically evaluated School Street interventions operating in Kingston, Ont. and Montréal. The findings from this study helped launch the National Active School Street Initiative (NASSI).

Funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada, NASSI helps Canadian cities learn about and implement School Streets. Through NASSI, year-long School Streets were launched in September 2025 in Kingston, Mississauga, Ont. and Vancouver.

In September 2026, additional year-long School Streets are expected to launch in Kingston, Mississauga, Vancouver and Montréal, while four-week pilots are planned for Ottawa, Peterborough, Ont., Markham, Ont., Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary.

Reactions to innovating cities for children

Launching and sustaining School Streets requires support from a broad range of people, including municipal councillors and staff, school administrators, teachers, parents, residents, and police departments.

In our work in Kingston and Montréal, we encountered many champions of School Streets whose support was instrumental in launching and sustaining these interventions. However, we also faced resistance to varying degrees. In some cases, this resistance came after interventions were launched, and in other cases, it was sufficient to prevent the intervention from launching at all.

Rather than acknowledging the benefits School Streets could offer, the resistance was often framed around risks to children — precisely the problem School Streets aim to address.

We were told that School Streets would diminish children’s awareness of road safety, put children at risk of being run over by rogue motorists and was inherently risky because children don’t belong on the street. We suspect these arguments were not truly about risks to children, but rather an unwillingness to share power, space and opportunities with children in urban settings.

We also heard a range of arguments shaped by what’s known as motonormativity — a form of unconscious bias in automobile-centric societies that assumes car usage as a universal norm and aligns solutions with the needs of motorists.

In this vein, we heard that School Streets excluded children whose parents needed to drive their child to school; that residents and visitors would be unacceptably delayed by the street closure; that school staff would be deprived of nearby parking; that children occupying the street would be too noisy and cause damage to parked vehicles; and that automobile congestion would be pushed to other streets.

The most troubling argument made against School Streets was that there were more deserving children in other neighbourhoods, presenting a thinly veiled Not-In-My-Backyard attitude.

School Streets are intended to enable children to reclaim their right to the city. Many members of our society, however, are not yet ready to afford children these rights because they conflict with strongly held perceptions about the places children are meant to occupy.