Troy D. Glover

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Waterloo

As an accessible and low-risk mode of transportation and recreational activity, walking both produces and is produced by socio-spatial urban features. The health benefits of walking transcend physical fitness, remaining integral to mental health and to fostering social connectedness in urban communities. Understanding what drives walking behaviour,...

Social space production theorizes space as a socially constructed phenomenon, comprising of the expectations of society, technical design decisions, and the physical features that result. This theorization of space is especially relevant to recreational public spaces (e.g. parks, playgrounds, community centres) in low-income settings. This is becau...

p>The hosting of friends and relatives is an important and common experience. Hosting gives reason and opportunity for residents to explore their community while spending time with guests. For newcomers, hosting brings additional significance due to their relative isolation from traditional social networks and comparative unfamiliarity with the com...

p>The hosting of friends and relatives is an important and common experience. Hosting gives reason and opportunity for residents to explore their community while spending time with guests. For newcomers, hosting brings additional significance due to their relative isolation from traditional social networks and comparative unfamiliarity with the com...

There is a significant amount of evidence highlighting the health, wellbeing and social benefits of gardening during previous periods of crises. These benefits were also evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper presents a narrative review exploring gardening during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the different forms...

Social connectedness among neighbours impacts health and well-being, especially during stressful life events like a pandemic. An activity such as neighbourhood walking enables urban inhabitants to engage in incidental sociability and acts of “neighbouring”—that is, authentic social interactions with neighbours—to potentially bolster the social fabr...

Categorizing cyclists according to their trip purpose drives public investments in cycling infrastructure, yet it dismisses important considerations and leads to unintended consequences. To better encourage cycling, we argue the narrowly defined “bike-to-work” categorization for cycling warrants rethinking because it ignores (1) trip purposes other...

Neighborhood social ties matter crucially, especially during stressful life events like a global pandemic, for they represent vital sources of wellbeing and community capacity. Activities that enable community members to engage in incidental sociability and acts of “neighboring”—that is, authentic social interactions with their neighbors—warrant at...

Because of their profound effects on health and wellbeing, particularly their sense of social connectedness, community garden stories warrant the close attention of public health professionals. Efforts to tell these stories, if and when told, often smooth over, intentionally ignore or fail to appreciate vital subplots of social experiences that des...

This Special Issue centralizes powerful leisure stories that may otherwise be understood as myths—sometimes recognized, often less so—that circulate in the field, and beyond. In everyday use, a myth perpetuates a popularly held belief that is false or untrue. However, in social and cultural theory, myths are more complex, as partial truths that pri...

The recognition of cycling as a beneficial mode of transportation and leisure pursuit and the need for dedicated changes to the built environment continue to grow. However, cities worldwide dedicate very little of their budgets to cycling infrastructure, and investment remains contentious. By focusing attention on education and law enforcement, cit...

The hosting of friends and relatives is an important and common experience. Hosting gives reason and opportunity for residents to explore their community while spending time with guests. For newcomers, hosting brings additional significance due to their relative isolation from traditional social networks and comparative unfamiliarity with the commu...

The majority of research on built form and walking has been approached from a deterministic perspective and does not address the theoretical underpinnings of individual walking behaviour. This paper interrogates the relationship between individual walkers and their local environment in order to illuminate how and why people walk through/with space....

Whereas physical distancing slows the spread of COVID-19, tactics associated with it have the potential to exacerbate social isolation in our societies. Far from withdrawing from one another during this period, however, engagement in sanctioned localized leisure, particularly neighborhood walking, has facilitated a welcome resurgence in neighboring...

This paper examines the interplay of leisure, activism and the animation of public space by exploring CITE – A Celebration of Skateboard Arts and Culture, an art installation and pop-up skate park featuring skateable sculptures constructed in commemoration of Toronto skateboarder Justin Bokma. CITE, which took place in the summer of 2018, deliberat...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide directions for research on non-medical health service and servicescapes by building off Rosenbaum’s study of social support for men at a resource center for testicular cancer. Design/methodology/approach This paper cites literature and introduces directions for future research. Findings This paper c...

The need to upgrade infrastructure for cycling has never been greater, yet urban development in North America continues to privilege car usage. Cities are responding by encouraging alternate modes of transportation through bike-friendly design and planning, but the politics of approving such initiatives remain contentious, even though evidence reve...

This article focuses on the potential of leisure to encourage political cross-talk among everyday citizens, exposing its discussants to different political perspectives. Though our literature has long championed leisure for its public sphere effects, little research has examined its actual impact. To generate interest in this line of inquiry, I dis...

Despite their proliferation across the globe, efforts to animate public space remain largely unexamined in the leisure literature. Animating public space refers to “the deliberate, usually temporary, employment of festivals, events, programmed activities, or pop-up leisure to transform, enliven, and/or alter public spaces and stage urban life.” Thi...

Using data from the Canadian Summer Camp Research Project (CSCRP), we examined the association between social capital and attitudes toward physical activity in wilderness summer camp settings. In our analysis, we examined the potential role of environmental awareness and personal development as mediators of the association between social capital an...

Summer camps in Canada provide services to hundreds of thousands of youth each year, giving opportunities for growth and development. However, summer camps in Canada remain understudied. Using one phase of data from the Canadian Summer Camps Research Project (CSCRP), analysis was conducted on the effect of camper self-concept on their environmental...

Maintaining meaningful social connections boosts health in amazing ways. Even so, social isolation pervades disturbingly in contemporary society. Because of its harmful consequences, social isolation represents one of the most serious social problems of our time, ironically in an age when connecting with others seems easy. Nevertheless, leisure stu...

Explorations of kindness and gratitude, a felt sense of thankfulness, are missing from tourism studies. Such explorations shed light on psychological value of relationships and social capital. We adopted a positive psychology theoretical lens to explore acts of kindness from strangers towards tourists and to understand how these acts are valued. To...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Public park and recreation settings are important environments for health promotion and public park and recreation organizations are increasingly recognized for contributing positively to community health and disease prevention. Researchers typically focus on the influence of the built environment on health and less on the social...

This chapter unpacks the dynamic interplay of leisure, social space, and belonging by examining how leisure relations are negotiated and contested in the production of social space. Drawing on the seminal work of Henri Lefebvre and Judith Butler, the chapter demonstrates how social space in leisure settings encourages and discourages certain forms...

The literature on newcomer settlement concentrates almost exclusively on young children and adults, leaving a sizable gap in research related to adolescents. Accordingly, this research project explored the role of community places in the settlement experiences of adolescent immigrants to Canada from Africa. Data were gathered through a cognitive ma...

This study explored the roles of an online social networking site called Momstown.ca as a form of technologically mediated leisure in mothers' experiences of online connections. Active interviews with 22 members of Momstown.ca revealed that mothers encounter limiting ideologies of motherhood reinforced through the separation of the public and priva...

This research was developed to answer two questions: (1) What is the relationship between producer bias and the way public recreation services are produced? (2) What is the relationship between people's preferences for a particular model of service production (i.e., producer biases) and how people think of themselves as participants in their commun...

Leisure researchers work within a contested landscape for evaluating the quality and significance of their work, thereby necessitating the need to do both rigorous and socially relevant research. The 2014 Butler Lecture tackled the issue of research relevance by advancing three connected pathways to social impact: knowledge mobilization, encouragin...

This chapter interrogates the growing and ongoing bond forged between leisure and public space to shape the urban landscape and imbue it with collective meaning. Focusing on the animation of public space, which I define here as the deliberate, usually temporary employment of festivals, events, programmed activities, or pop-up leisure to transform,...

The concept of encounters may initially seem contradictory to expectations of solitude in an urban forest. Indeed, the physical features of urban forests can isolate users from many reminders of city life, thereby providing opportunity for reduced anxiety, increased contemplativeness, and a sense of peacefulness (Ulrich, 1981; Kaplan, 1983; Hartig...

Using qualitative data, this article critically explores social processes of human relationship-building in dog parks and their implications for enhancement of community (or lack thereof). Doing so contributes to the leisure literature by expanding understanding of the roles dogs can play in facilitating social capital among people. Similar to onli...

Local geographical communities have changed significantly in the last several decades due to a number of cultural factors, including women’s increased participation in the paid workforce and growing rates of single parenthood. Changing communities have resulted in increased social isolation for mothers raising young children, which often means a la...

Place research underscores a need for social learning. Social learning about place is appropriate in a preparatory phase prior to initiating a formal planning process. Doing so enables land-use planners to begin public dialogue at a point that appreciates landscapes and builds a positive base to grow relationships among stakeholders. Sharing storie...

Storytelling is a genuinely human way of making meaning out of our lived experiences. With this mind, narrative inquiry – that is, doing research with firstperson accounts of experience – offers leisure researchers a meaningful way to produce knowledge that deepens and enlarges our understanding of leisure experiences. While our field is becoming i...

This introduction to the special issue of JPRiTLE on Advancing Healthy Communities through Tourism, Leisure, and Events is aimed at inspiring a healthy communities research agenda in our field. The authors argue advancing healthy communities/cities ought to be at the core of what we do as tourism, leisure, and events (TLE) scholars. Accordingly, th...

For many people, the city is a landscape of everyday life. In cities, public spaces serve as venues for social interaction, sociability, conviviality, and the enactment of community. Despite their relevance to community life, however, urban spaces remain underexamined in the leisure literature. If researchers seek to understand leisure in the conte...

The purpose of this study was to explore the roles of an online social networking site (SNS) called Momstown.ca in the development of peer support Interviews with 22 members of Momstown.ca demonstrated that women experience a sense of isolation for a variety of reasons and desperately want to connect with other mothers in a similar situation. Women...

This paper compares perspectives on the governance of the management models employed by two of Canada’s largest provincial park systems, from the viewpoint of non-governmental organization members (NGOs) with an interest in protected areas. The two models are the parastatal model of Ontario (ON) Provincial Parks and the public and for-profit combin...

The increase of online diaries, or blogs, has not only affected communication channels, but also the way tourism destinations are being promoted and consumed. To date, few studies have focused on the content of travel blogs as a rich source of destination marketing information. A review of the current research on travel blogs revealed that the two...

As government funding is reduced and tourism-based fees are increasingly used to fund protected area operations, two options are often used for management: transfer of tourism services to the private sector or operation of tourism services by a government agency that functions like a corporation. This paper reports stakeholders’ views concerning go...

Few studies have considered the joint effects of social and physical environments on physical activity (PA). The primary purpose of this study was to examine the compounding effects of neighbourhood walkability and social connectedness on PA. Data were collected from adults (n = 380) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Perceptions of neighbourhood social...

This study uses a Lefebvrean analysis to explore the ways social relations are negotiated and contested in the production of a quasi-recreational space called Gilda’s Club of Greater Toronto, a venue that provides complementary care and support to people living with cancer. It does so by asking how Gilda’s Club, as a social space, resists and/or re...

This performance text explores how people “craft liveable truths” after a cancer diagnosis. Interviews with 26 members of Gilda’s Club, a meeting place for people whose lives have been touched by cancer, serve as the data source for the study. Weaving together excerpts from the interviews, a composite character named Henry is created to explore sto...

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to compare visitor perspectives of the governance of two of Canada's largest park systems: the parastatal model of Ontario Provincial Parks and the public and for‐profit combination model of British Columbia Provincial Parks. Design/methodology/approach The authors developed an electronic survey based on the ten...

The purpose of this study was to explore how a community-based, non-clinical recreational center, called Gilda's Club promotes and contributes to healing and health throughout cancer survivorship. Gilda's Club of Toronto is a not-forprofit venue in Ontario, Canada, that serves as a communal meeting place where people living with cancer, as well as...

In Canada’s health care system today, cancer patients are expected to endure long, often painful wait times. In this study we explored whether Gilda’s Club (an organization that supports people affected by cancer) might increase opportunities to resist the role of the “patient patient,” consequently providing a better understanding of how cancer pa...

The purpose of this study was to explore how a community-based, non-clinical recreational center, called Gilda's Club promotes and contributes to healing and health throughout cancer survivorship. Gilda's Club of Toronto is a not-for-profit venue in Ontario, Canada, that serves as a communal meeting place where people living with cancer, as well as...

Good governance is of paramount importance to the success of parks and protected areas. This research utilized a questionnaire for 10 principles of governance to evaluate the outsourcing model used by British Columbia Provincial Parks, where profit-making corporations provide all front country visitor services. A total of 246 respondents representi...

Mothers groups, or informal collections of mothers who meet regularly or semi‐regularly with other women who have children of similar ages, are often positive sources of friendship, support and the exchange of resources. Of course, they are also sites of less positive outcomes such as exclusion, judgement and the reproduction of dominant gender ide...

While analyzing the transcripts of interviews with cancer survivors and writing up her findings, the first author found herself suffering from a writer's block of sorts. She was stuck, unable to move forward, encircled by a cloud of voices. Some voices came from the empirical data of the study, others emerged out of her private personal experiences...

Executive Summary: Across North America, brownfi elds serve as poignant symbols of neglect, environmental injustice, and community failure. More often than not, communities are left to suffer alongside these neglected land-scapes. As a result, brownfi eld sites—often abandoned, contaminated, un-derutilized, and derelict—create a unique dilemma for...

Increasing emphasis has been placed on involving community members in the decision making and program implementation process. To reach community members and encourage participation, planners and public officials rely on involvement from key community representatives. These individuals are often critical to the success of partnerships and act as lia...

Writing leisure constructs a normative reality about ways in which life should be lived. Leisure research, like all discourses, is embedded in values and situated in ideological contexts. This paper contributes to an on-going dialogue concerned with the impact of ideology on leisure research. The tendencies for discourses of leisure are to provide:...

This study focuses on the development of friendships forged subsequent to a stressful life event and its implications for the health and well-being of women coping with infertility. In so doing, this research contributes to the leisure and stress-coping literature by expanding our understanding of friendship forms of support. The findings suggest f...

Understanding stakeholder values is crucial to the development of a community-based model of landscape change. Be that as it may, engagement techniques are still in their infancies, and land-use planners are struggling for tools to facilitate discourse on public values related to landscape change. Accordingly, this article responds to urgent needs...

The purpose of this paper was to examine the therapeutic functions of Gilda's Club of Greater Toronto in the everyday lives of people living with cancer. Gilda's Club is a non-institutional setting, where people living with cancer join together to build physical, social, and emotional support as a supplement to medical care. Findings reveal members...

This paper adopts critical race theory as a framework to expose elements of racism embedded within the seemingly “color-blind” policies of little league baseball. It attempts to uncover the hidden subtext of race in a popular children's sport in America. Inspired by interviews conducted with the African-American founders of a grassroots baseball le...

This qualitative study is an exploratory case analysis of First String, a Community Team Inc., a unique grassroots association founded by a small group of African Americans in Champaign, Illinois. The founders established the neighbourhood baseball league to foster a greater sense of community in neighbourhood youth. In an effort to address the lac...

Perhaps because of the normative foundations upon which our field was built, leisure researchers have focused on social capital at the group level with a particular emphasis on how communities of interest develop and more or less maintain social capital as a collective asset. In so doing, they have tended to concentrate on the positive externalitie...

In our introductory essay to this special issue of Leisure/Loisir, we establish the need to rethink leisure and community research. In so doing, we encourage a deliberate shift away from the study of community recreation to the study of community recreation. Community recreation, we argue, dominates leisure research insofar as it has tended to focu...

The preservation and advancement of grassroots associations, such as community garden groups, often depend upon an association's ability to leverage a variety of resources situated within itself, that is, among its membership and outsiders whom it can convince to support its cause. With the salience of resource mobilization in mind, this study aime...

The guest editors of this special issue on leisure and social capital review the seminal perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu, James Coleman, and Robert Putnam on social capital. The review is followed by the authors' interpretations of the theoretical relationship between leisure and social capital, after which the contributions to this special issue a...

The purpose of this research was to study community gardens as sites for exploring the influence of leisure on gender roles and relations. In particular, we sought to understand how gender roles and relations were reproduced and/or resisted within the leisure setting of a community garden. Through our analysis of the data we identified three main t...

The purpose of this study was to compare the democratic values of community garden leaders and non-leaders with the intent to understand the democratic effects of participation in community gardening. The results support Putnam's (2000) assertion that the intensity of membership in voluntary associations is important to the development of democrati...

Finding ways to alleviate racial tension is all important societal issue. A well-establishcd strategy is to increase positve contact between members of different racial groups, which is hypothesized to lead to improved racial attitudes if the contact takes place under certain conditions. Bridging racial divides, however, has historically been a dif...

In this narrative inquiry, I explored a community garden as a social context in which social capital was produced, accessed, and used by a social network of community gardeners. In particular, I focused on the distribution of social capital among members of the garden group. My findings suggest social capital can be both a benefit and cost, dependi...

This paper provides a general orientation to narrative inquiry and demonstrates its relevance to research on grassroots associations. While there is an increasing recognition that grassroots associations warrant greater attention from researchers, the paper argues that there must be an accompanying call to broaden methodological approaches used to...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the variety of meanings that citizenship took on when associated with active citizen participation at a community center. Using a social constructionist framework, I aimed to understand how active participation shaped research participants' perceptions about citizenship. In particular, what did citizensh...

Given the recent interest in raves by municipal officials across North America, the intent behind this manuscript is to explore the various policy alternatives that government might consider in response to rave culture and the “threat” of Ecstasy on youth. In particular, the paper focuses on three policy options: tolerance, prohibition, and harm re...

My purpose was to offer a counter-narrative of a group of urban residents who were dealing with a negative portrayal of their neighborhood, by retelling the "success story" of the Queen Anne Memorial Garden, a community garden they built to combat urban decline. Using narrative inquiry, I explored how fourteen garden participants collectively recon...

Storytelling is a genuinely human way of making meaning out of our lived experiences. With this mind, narrative inquiry - that is, doing research with first-person accounts of experience - offers leisure researchers a meaningful way to produce knowledge that deepens and enlarges our understanding of leisure experiences. While our field is becoming...

The purpose of the study was to test whether relationships exist between citizenship orientations and service production. The study incorporated existing conceptual and theoretical literature into an informed empirical analysis to inform subsequent conceptual and theoretical work. In a comparison of respondents at three community centers, each tied...