Animating Parks Before They’re Parks

How an inter-divisional collaboration in Toronto is bringing vacant spaces to life

This case study is part of the 2024 Canadian City Parks Report, showcasing Inspiring projects, people, and policies from across Canada that offer tangible solutions to the most pressing challenges facing city parks.

Summary

• Funding, ownership, legacy agreements and environmental contamination issues can cause spaces slated to become parks to sit vacant for years.
• Partnerships within the City of Toronto and with external cultural and economic development organizations are helping animate these spaces with interim uses so the public sees benefits now before spaces are fully designed.
• Interim uses allow the City to understand what works and what doesn’t to better inform future design, programming, and operational decisions.

Cities are in dire need of new park space. Despite that need, however, sometimes funding challenges, environmental contamination, and ownership issues mean that sites slated to become parks won’t actually be designed and built in their final form for several years. 

To address this challenge, Toronto’s Parks, Forestry and Recreation Division is collaborating with the City’s Economic Development and Cultural Division and external cultural and economic development organizations to provide and animate much-needed public space in the immediate term. 

Toronto’s Director of Parks Planning, Paul Farish, said that rather than waiting sometimes years to go through a formal process that includes design and procurement–all while the space remains vacant–the City is “opening a public space that people can access and enjoy and even shape themselves at the front end.” 

He added the City’s Economic Development and Culture Division has been a “very useful partner” because they bring “ideas and third parties who can introduce programming and run events” until Parks, Forestry and Recreation is ready to turn it into a fully operational park. 

One example is a future park space at Front and Bathurst Streets where environmental contamination issues meant it would be several years before the City could turn the land into a public park. In the meantime, the City is working with Stackt Market, which has run a successful shipping container market–North America’s largest–and outdoor event space on the site since 2019. The partnership brings thousands of people to the space for free and ticketed events, provides space for local businesses in pop-up shops, includes food and drink options and prioritizes community programming. 

“It’s a kind of quasi-public space,” said Farish, adding that it’s “important to be flexible and acknowledge that there’s different ways in which a property can achieve its objectives, including public space objectives.”

Parking lots represent another opportunity. Farish said that the City has plans to convert a number of parking lots to parkland over the next few years, but due to funding or other factors they are not going to become parks tomorrow.

One challenge is that people may get attached to the interim uses so much that when it’s time to design the actual park, there is push back. “We’re conscious of it,” Farish said. In some places, the City is floating the idea of putting in a pickleball or basketball court in a parking lot–uses that could become entrenched in people’s minds even if they’re meant to be interim uses. “But you grapple with it,” he said. “It’s less of a concern because it’s still within the range of what was intended to be a public space with some sort of recreational or environmental benefit to the community.”