2022 Canadian City Parks Report: Nurturing Relationships & Reciprocity

Park People launches the fourth annual Canadian City Parks Report on Nurturing Relationships & Reciprocity: How collaboration, mindfulness, and power-sharing in parks can help nurture and repair relationships between ourselves, our communities, and the wider natural world.

This year’s report begins to move beyond the impacts of the pandemic to explore how the lessons we’ve learned over the last two years can point the way toward more equitable and creative ways of planning, designing, and programming parks.

In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from conversations with city staff with the data we gathered from our surveys of 30 municipalities and over 3,000 residents of Canadian cities. 

Key Insights

Dive into the pdf to read about our key insights on trends and challenges in city parks:

1. The popularity of parks – Canadian cities continued to see an increase in the amount of time people spend in parks
2. Giving Back to Nature – It’s no surprise that people continued to seek out urban nature as a place to decompress during the pandemic
3. Centring Indigenous leadership – Decolonization and Indigenous representation and leadership in city parks continues to grow as a priority for cities with some recent initiatives pointing to a new way
4. Paying for it – Even before the pandemic, park budgets were perennially strained. In fact, if you’ve read the past three years of the Canadian City Parks Report, this point may start to sound like a broken record.
5. Making Engagement meaningful – The pandemic changed the landscape of park engagement, disrupting traditional in-person methods like town halls and challenging cities to find creative approaches to involving community members.
6. Resetting the approach to houselessness – The visibility and rising challenge of houselessness in parks is top of mind for both cities and urban residents, but there is also a lot of empathy in the public and creative initiatives from community organizations and cities that model new approaches.

Case studies

Case study

Cultivating Nature Connection Together

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

How leaders from across the country are using different methods to promote a sense of connection to nature by meeting people where they’re at

Case study

The Nourishment of Nature

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

How we can foster a greater sense of connection to nature through awareness, reciprocity, and gratitude—and why that matters.

Case study

Park budgets in the time of Covid

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

How the pandemic has impacted park budgets and sparked a heightened focus on the importance of equity-led investment.

Case study

Engaging with Equity

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

How park engagement can lay the foundation for relationships that last well beyond the end of a consultation period

Case study

Moving at the Pace of Trust

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

How investing in ongoing trust-building beyond one-off consultations can help to repair relationships, redistribute power, and reimagine parks.

Case study

A Human-Centred Approach to Houselessness 

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

The unique opportunity of parks departments to play a positive role in addressing houselessness

Case study

Parks as Sites of Community Care 

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

The unique opportunity of parks departments to play a positive role in addressing houselessness

Case study

Reclaiming urban spaces is a decolonial act

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

Examining Prairie cities’ efforts to decolonize park spaces and honour the Indigenous histories of the land they are built upon

Case study

Working Together to Fund Parks

Jun 27, 2022 Canada-wide

How collaborative funding approaches, and investment from other levels of government, are opening up new ways to support parks.

Launch Webinar: Watch the Recording

Happy reading!