Pathways to Public Joy was a groundbreaking collaboration between Jay Pitter Placemaking and Eva’s Initiatives for Homeless Youth, one of Toronto’s leading organizations supporting unhoused and underhoused young people. Conceived and led by internationally recognized placemaker and public space expert Jay Pitter, this initiative engaged youth in a series of carefully designed public space experiences that fostered curiosity, capacity, healing, and delight—transforming the trauma and challenges many had faced in public space into opportunities for joy, connection, and belonging.

For too many young people navigating housing precarity, public space was not a site of leisure or possibility but one of violence, fear, criminalization, and exclusion. As shelter workers and supportive housing providers focused—necessarily—on critical life skills such as financial literacy and employment training, programming rarely addressed the deeper question of how young people could re-enter and thrive in public life. Pathways to Public Joy was designed to fill this gap, embracing a holistic approach that fostered healthy spatial entitlement, nurtured creativity, and exposed youth to joyful public experiences. Rooted in the principle that public spaces can be sites of healing, opportunity, and belonging—not just harm—the initiative transformed public space from part of the problem into a vital part of the solution.

The Pathways to Public Joy program was structured around a four-pronged approach:

• Preparation and Grounding: Prior to each engagement, youth participants received an overview of the activities and expectations for conduct, focusing on shared responsibility for each other’s joy, safety, and dignity. Youth also shared their hopes, interests, concerns, and accommodation needs, ensuring that each experience was designed with their voices at the center.

• Storytelling and Stewardship: Engagements began with a sharing circle, where youth reflected on past joy-diminishing experiences in public spaces and affirmed a collective commitment to supporting one another’s safety and dignity. This practice established psychological safety and framed the experience as an act of mutual care and possibility.

• Public Joy Excursions: Youth participated in deeply joyful, curiosity-driven public space activities—including a guided tour of a botanical garden with a landscape architect, during which they selected potted plants from a curated collection to bring back and beautify their shelter or supportive housing spaces. Additional activities included a DJing workshop at a local restaurant and cultural hub and special access to hands-on artmaking and lunch at an art gallery. These experiences were designed to ignite curiosity, foster embodied delight, and expand participants’ sense of spatial entitlement while respecting their personal stories and boundaries.

• Reflection, Documentation, and Capacity Building: After the series of excursions, youth participated in an evaluation process and a professional development exchange with shelter and supportive housing workers. The process, lessons learned, and key observations from these engagements were documented and compiled into a publication intended to inform future programming, design approaches, and policy frameworks for practitioners working at the intersection of youth, housing, and public space.

Through this process, participants not only reclaimed their right to public joy but also developed new relationships with public space—seeing themselves as entitled to comfort, beauty, creativity, and belonging in the urban landscape. For shelter workers and housing providers, the initiative offered new tools and frameworks for integrating joy into their ongoing work, shifting programming beyond survival toward thriving.

By transforming public space from a site of trauma into one of healing and delight, Pathways to Public Joy illustrated how public joy is not a luxury—it is a structural condition of justice and flourishing, and a vital part of building futures in which young people are not merely housed but fully at home in their cities.