Park People’s Executive Director, Erika Nikolai, has been honoured with the Distinguished Individual Award from World Urban Parks—an international recognition that celebrates her leadership and the growing national movement Park People has helped build here in Canada.
Why are events in parks important? How do grants fit into Park People’s larger goals for creating change in city parks?
The emerging stream of the Park People Nature Connect Fund provides up to $5,000 to grassroots and registered organizations across Canada that connect people with nature, foster ecological stewardship, and restore urban parks and green spaces.
The scaling stream of the Park People Nature Connect Fund offers up to $20,000 to registered organizations across Canada that connect people with nature while fostering ecological stewardship and restoring urban parks.
Learn more about green social prescribing, an evolving practice that encourages individuals to reestablish connections with nature and one another to enhance their mental, physical, and social wellbeing.
A reflection on the BEING BLACK IN PUBLIC Survey Report, exploring how Black communities experience parks and public spaces, and what fosters joy and belonging.
How do we build a healthier, greener, more joyful Toronto? We start at the park. Discover how communities across the city have transformed their green spaces over the past fifteen years. Then roll up your sleeves and help shape what comes next.
By donating to Park People, you’ll support vibrant parks for everyone.
City parks staff steward some of our most vital yet undervalued public assets: urban parks and green spaces. These areas are far more than patches of grass, they are dynamic community hubs, crucial environmental infrastructure, and essential public health resources.
The annual Canadian City Parks Report (CCPR) equips municipal park staff, community advocates, non-profits, and the public with data and stories that make the case for parks. Between 2019 and 2024, the annually released report illuminated trends, challenges, and opportunities in how we plan, manage, and experience our shared green spaces. Forty-six municipalities participated over these years, collectively representing 48% of Canada’s population.
This report synthesizes the major findings from the CCPR over these pivotal years. It serves as a curated and thematically organized index of data and stories from across the years, with comments on the trends we witnessed through that time.
1- Health Imperative: Parks as Essential Public Health Investment
One of the most consistent trends across the CCPR data is the growing use and recognition of city parks as essential public spaces, a shift dramatically accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. What were once considered amenities are now firmly recognized as critical spaces that support the mental and physical health and well-being of city residents.
2- The Funding Gap: Resources and Capacity Constraints
Despite documented increases in park use and public valuing of parks, municipalities report ongoing financial and staffing constraints that limit their capacity to maintain and enhance park systems.
3- Environmental Function: Climate Adaptation and Biodiversity
Urban parks serve important environmental functions, particularly in climate adaptation and supporting urban biodiversity, roles that have gained increased attention as climate impacts intensify. Parks are more and more understood as ‘upstream solutions’ for the environmental and economic impacts of extreme weather events.
4- Equity and Access: Addressing Systemic Barriers
Participating municipalities reported on their efforts to address equity, inclusion, and reconciliation in park planning and management, reflecting broader societal reckonings with systemic barriers to park access and enjoyment.
5- Evolving Practice: Community Engagement and Complex Operations
Park management now encompasses complex social dimensions beyond traditional maintenance, including community engagement strategies and navigation of challenging urban issues that intersect with public space.
How the park sector can meet today’s complex challenges through partnerships and collaboration.
How Addressing Conflict and Reframing Challenges as Opportunities Can Create More Equitable and Sustainable Parks.
How collaboration, mindfulness, and power-sharing in parks can help nurture and repair relationships between ourselves, our communities, and the wider natural world.
How parks can help create more equitable, resilient cities—not only as we recover from COVID-19, but as we address another looming crisis: climate change.
Trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities to inspire action, share learning, and track progress in city parks across the country.
Park People launches the first Canadian City Parks Report, highlighting park trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities.
The Canadian City Parks Report finds tight parks budgets, increasingly extreme weather events, and changing use of parks by residents are challenging cities across the country. But it also finds many cities are leading the way on solutions through an increasing focus on collaborative partnerships, proactive parks planning, and inclusive engagement practices.
In the report, we share:
Budgets tight while populations grow
Cities across Canada are experiencing budget constraints at the same time as growing populations and changing demographics create demand for more parks, amenities, and programming.Resilience must be scaled up. As instances of extreme weather increase, additional pressure is placed on park systems to absorb effects, like flooding. While cities are piloting green infrastructure in parks, there is a need to scale up and standardize these efforts. We found only 48% of cities have citywide green infrastructure strategies that includes parks.
The future is connected
Population growth and urban development is necessitating a focus on proactive parks planning and creative methods to expand and connect parks. Currently 70% cities have updated park system master plans.
Partnerships are powerful
Cities are developing non-profit partnerships and collaborations with resident groups to bring creative programming, alternative funding, and specialized knowledge to help meet new demands on city parks. We found 74% of cities currently have at least one non-profit park partnership.
Inclusion means going deeper
Cities are beginning the work of ensuring parks foster inclusion by exploring their own policies and practices, increasing accessibility, and developing programs for newcomers.
Happy reading!
Park People launches the second annual Canadian City Parks Report, highlighting the trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities to inspire action, share learning, and track progress in city parks across the country.
As we worked on stories about biodiversity, creative park development, community engagement, and homelessness, the world changed around us. But it quickly became apparent that these stories were not made irrelevant, but more urgent than ever.
This year, the report highlights new city park insights to shape the future of biodiversity, creative park development, community engagement, and approaches to homelessness in city 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 27 municipalities and nearly 3,500 residents of Canadian cities.
How urban biodiversity improves our well-being and why that matters even more during COVID-19.
How we can both deepen the conversation about biodiversity and broaden it to include more people
Why habitat corridors are important for urban biodiversity and what cities are doing to make sure parks large and small are connected
As populations and development boom in many cities, finding space for new parks is creating challenges—and spurring innovation
How creative community groups and city support are growing connections through food in parks.
This case study is part of the 2021 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.
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In Canada, philanthropy has historically been focused on public institutions like universities, hospitals, and the arts, but less so on parks. However, recent years have seen major new public space donations in Canada. With rising appreciation for parks during the COVID-19 pandemic, philanthropic interest in parks could grow, bringing both opportunities and challenges.
For Sheila Taylor, Executive Director of the Parks Foundation Calgary, an independent organization that primarily supports resident-led park projects, park philanthropy is connected to the city’s entrepreneurial spirit.
“Citizens have always gotten involved to create the city that they want,” she said. “People deeply care about parks and public spaces—we’ve seen that more and more through the pandemic. And when people care for something they want to contribute to that—whether it’s their time, talent, or financial contributions.”
This deep sense of connection is also why Toronto’s Parks Forestry and Recreation Division’s Doug Bennet believes people give to parks. “Philanthropy is an opportunity for people to give to causes that are important to them,” he said. “People love our parks and a lot of people feel compelled to give back.”
Park philanthropy is still quite nascent in Canada. While there have been some larger donations, such as $25 million for Toronto’s Meadoway, the majority of funding is for smaller-scale projects, such as playgrounds, and community programming. This can take the form of individual major gifts, foundations, corporate donations, and community-based fundraising.
Bennet said that while donations to parks can make real impacts—and he has seen interest in park philanthropy grow during his eight years at the city—it’s important to keep the scale of these investments in mind compared to the overall publicly funded city parks budget.
“It’s not an insignificant amount, but it’s also not an enormous amount,” Bennet said. In the 2020 Canadian City Parks Report, for example, Toronto reported $8 million from private sources out of a more than $100 million capital budget, showcasing the dominance of public funding.
Even with philanthropy-supported park projects, private dollars rarely cover the whole bill. In Calgary, the city’s Leverage Partners Program provides matching funding for philanthropic and community-led park projects through an $8 million budget over 2019 – 2022. Thunder Bay has a similar program where the city will share half the cost with a community for projects over $100,000, while Ottawa splits its cost-sharing program into both minor and major capital projects.
While Canada is nowhere near the scale of park philanthropy seen in the United States, there are lessons we can take from the American experience where drastically reduced parks department budgets have coincided with an explosion of privately funded and operated parks.
Park budgets in Canada, while strained, have not seen the drastic cuts that many American cities have faced, which have effectively shifted a portion of responsibility of care and funding for city parks from the public to the private sector.
This shift has resulted in some truly eye-watering donations, including $100 million for New York’s Central Park and $465 million for the creation and operation of Tulsa’s Gathering Place.
These increasingly large donations have caused some to raise concerns. Critics argue that big money donations distort park planning towards donor visions, crowd out public dollars, and result in the overfunding of showcase parks in affluent, often whiter, neighbourhoods at the expense of lower income, racialized communities.
In response, a new crop of American philanthropic initiatives have sprouted that centre equity, funding underserved communities, and building local capacity.
Take Reimagining the Civic Commons. This equity-focused philanthropic initiative works in 10 U.S. cities to provide public space funding to support equitable economic development, environmental sustainability, and social connections. The project has published numerous resources to assist others in engagement methods, design, and evaluating impact. The experience of New York’s High Line is another example. Following criticism that the heavily privately-funded linear park catered to mostly white visitors and resulted in gentrifying the neighbourhood around it, the non-profit behind the park launched the High Line Network. This new organization—of which the philanthropic-supported Bentway and Meadoway in Canada are members—publishes resources to help other parks follow a more inclusive and equitable development path.
Successful philanthropy responds to community needs and doesn’t arrive with a fully baked plan that provides little avenue for community members to shape outcomes. For cities, it means ensuring transparent and equitable processes for evaluating projects. While some donors may be frustrated at a slower pace for approvals, these processes are critical in providing public oversight.
In Calgary, Parks Capital Development Manager Nico Bernard said that the city has done a lot of work defining the relationship with the Parks Foundation Calgary, including expectations of how projects align.
The city uses a “stage gate” process that involves projects passing through several evaluations. This ensures projects fit within the city’s strategic vision and meet actual user needs. Projects are evaluated several times from proposal to construction. “There’s a rigor there to make sure projects get vetted,” Bernard said.
Part of vetting is “thinking about the future of the space too, not just what happens when it’s first built,” Sheila Taylor said. It’s important to have conversations up front about who will maintain a space long-term before any fundraising agreements are in place.
The Foundation has also helped the city with its own priority park projects, such as the recently completed Rotary-Mattamy Greenway. With its $50 million budget funded by both private and public dollars, the 138km greenway connects 55 communities around the city and was a part of the city’s strategic vision.
In Toronto, Bennet said any donation over $50,000 must go to city council for a vote, which dictates a level of due diligence. “You’re going to want to make sure that you’re putting forward a project that aligns with city interest,” he said.
Additionally, Bennet said that the city directs corporate giving to the city’s Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, which are defined by a set of equity-focused criteria, and other areas of the city that may not have access to the kind of philanthropic interest certain neighbourhoods receive.
Assessing philanthropic opportunities in parks through an equity lens is important as recent reviews of Canadian giving have uncovered some startling divides.
A 2020 report, Unfunded: Black Communities Overlooked by Canadian Philanthropy, compiled financial data from Canadian foundations to look at what kinds of organizations get funded. While the report doesn’t focus specifically on parks investment, the results point towards a systematic failure of Canadian philanthropy to fund Black-led organizations—one that should make the parks sector pause as well. For each $100 given by top Canadian foundations, 3 cents went to Black-led organizations, while community foundations gave 7 cents.
Rudayna Bahubeshi, a policy and programs specialist with nearly five years of experience working in the Canadian charitable sector, said it’s necessary to evaluate park funding through a racial-equity lens given the mental and physical health benefits we know come from access to high quality green spaces.
While it’s important to review which groups and neighbourhoods have gotten funding in the past, Bahubeshi said that it’s critical for organizations to think upfront in program design about what they can do if they’re not reaching Black and Indigenous-led groups.
For example, if a funder is hoping to reach a certain population, they should be clear about those commitments in the grant itself, she said. If people don’t see people like themselves supported in the past, then “it’s not obvious to them what’s a priority for the organization.”
Reforming how grants are reviewed is also key—a topic Bahubeshi explored in a 2021 article for The Philanthropist on anti-Blackness in the Canadian sector.
She stressed that care needs to be taken when assessing groups based on “capacity” because there’s a tendency to pass over groups who have less experience, ultimately resulting in the same groups being funded time and again. Rather than penalizing groups with less experience writing grants, it should be viewed as an opportunity to support these groups to grow, Bahubeshi said.
This advice supports what urbanist and anti-oppression consultant Lena Phillips wrote in a 2020 article on creating safe public spaces where she argued that current funding models privilege certain groups, containing access barriers such as requirements for charitable status or incorporation.
Some granting organizations have since taken steps to address these gaps. Both the Toronto Foundation and Vancouver Foundation have launched grants that specifically target Black and Indigenous-led organizations, offering phone consultations and reducing some of the barriers to access around charitable status.And, while it is a publicly-funded grant, the Federal Government’s 2021 Healthy Communities Initiative, delivered by Community Foundations Canada, contained equity guidance for applicants designed by Canadian placemaker Jay Pitter that is helpful for organizations, cities, and foundations when designing programs.
While much of the focus on park philanthropy is about money, another important aspect—even more so than the dollars, some experts said—is the community capacity and stewardship-building element.
Park People Managing Director Erika Nikolai said it’s the time and energy people donate through organizing community programming that is so important. These smaller activations help build community connections, but also the capacity of these groups to put on larger activities and advocate for improvements.
She also pointed out that the pandemic has highlighted the importance of community programming in supporting more socially connected and healthier communities. Rather than focusing philanthropic dollars solely on capital projects, she said supporting these types of activities can be beneficial, while also requiring less money.
Philanthropic projects can also help bring people together. While solely city-funded park projects include community engagement elements, the quality of that engagement can be different when community members are more directly involved in raising funds, conceiving of a project themselves, or both.
Sheila Taylor argued philanthropy is about building a constituency of support for parks and a sense of shared responsibility and purpose. “I really believe that philanthropy isn’t just giving money, it’s about a commitment of your time and talents to a cause,” she said.
The Foundation focuses on providing tools to communities rather than taking on projects themselves. This includes grants to support conceptual design work and help managing the financial aspects of projects.
“We built a music garden last year and that was a real labour of love that saw many, many Calgarians donate personally,” Taylor said of the Quinterra Legacy Garden, a park built in memory of five youth who were murdered in 2014. “It was probably hundreds and hundreds of donors to this park to create this music garden and it was such a transformational experience.”
Toronto’s Doug Bennet pointed to the experience of philanthropic-supported playground builds. Engaging residents in constructing playgrounds together is a way to build relationships, Bennet said. “Partnership work can be about building that trust and that’s critical for government.”
Another way to tap into similar stewardship and relationship-building impacts, however, may be through participatory budgeting exercises. This publicly-funded process allows community members to propose and vote on a slate of projects to fund in their own community. Canadian cities such as Kitchener, Montreal, Longueuil, and Toronto have piloted this process to varying degrees, with Montreal launching a $10 million budget focused on social and ecological resilience. These cities touted higher rates of participation than traditional park engagement. But they also raised concerns about the potential to foster a competitive atmosphere, which highlights how an equitable, transparent decision-making process is key—whether privately or publicly-funded.
Finally, philanthropic and community-driven projects can help bring fresh ideas and a creative mindset to public spaces. A community can sometimes see connections across different types of public spaces they use in their daily lives—such as parks, hydro corridors, and streets—that a city parks department may not.
As Calgary’s Manager of Partnerships Marisol Narvaez said, philanthropy “does cause us to rethink how we approach public spaces.”
Just look at Calgary’s recently constructed Flyover Park. This unique park was the result of a community vision to reimagine public space underneath a roadway overpass.
Community members worked with middle school students to envision what was possible, eventually bringing on landscape architecture students from the University of Calgary to help flesh out the design. It was ultimately funded by a collection of private donations and funding from both the provincial government and the city.
Now it has become a much beloved spot in the community, but, as Sheila Taylor put it, “it started with children who had an idea to create a park there.”
Note: This story discusses the racial uprisings and attacks of the past year, including the murder of George Floyd, Wet’sutwet’en land defense struggles and attacks on people of Asian descent.
This past year was marked by an unprecedented wave of racial justice movements that fostered hope and resilience in the middle of a global pandemic (no small task). Across Canada and the world, Black, Indigenous and people of colour demanded justice in all its forms.
Wet’sutwet’en hereditary chiefs asserted their rights to ancestral lands in opposition to an oil pipeline that highlighted how colonization continues to play out in the present day. Months later, the murder of George Floyd prompted a similar reckoning, one that focused on the livelihoods of Black people in America and beyond. These movements forced us to engage in uncomfortable dialogues about the ongoing effects of racism and colonization.
It is no surprise then that the response to these struggles have taken place in public space. Professional fields such as urban planning have traditionally promoted the importance of public space for its ability to stay “neutral” in the face of politics and oppression, presuming everyone to have the same access and interactions with their surroundings, regardless of their identities.
So, when Christian Cooper, an African-American man birding in Central Park, and Justine Abigail Yu, a Filipina-Canadian relaxing in a public park, were both subjected to racial attacks in public spaces, it forced this “neutrality” into question. Over the past year, the Chinese Canadian National Council collected instances of anti-Asian hate crimes online. Of the hundreds of records collected, over 50% occurred in public spaces.
Amid the solidarity actions that shut down streets, railways, and other public spaces in response, prominent thinkers such as Jay Pitter addressed this directly: “urban design either perpetuates urban inequity or it can actually resolve urban inequity,” she stated in a news segment.
These stories and numbers confirmed what many Black, Indigenous, and people of colour already knew about this “neutrality.” In short: it wasn’t real. Not for those whose racial identities shaped their experiences in public space as much as the amenities or maintenance. The right to exist in public space, freely, was just as important to make these experiences enjoyable. And the recognition that it should be those very same communities to make the necessary changes was finally taking hold.
Through research, advocacy, and municipal positions, people of colour have been asserting the right to exist as thought leaders in urban space circles. As grassroots movements forced a critical eye on all the ways we are complicit in racism, people working in parks and public space were forced to do the same.
Jacqueline L. Scott noted the huge uptake in her work as a result. Scott is a PhD Student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on the experiences of Black people in the outdoors. Since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, she’s had an unprecedented number of webinar and media requests to talk about her work. She credited this interest to a better understanding that “the same racial hierarchies operate in the outdoor or environmental sectors as everywhere else.” In our April 2021 survey of Canadians, 77% of respondents said they thought people experienced parks differently based on aspects of their identity. Creating a “bridge” between environmental and social justice work is also critical in building relationships with communities that are predominantly racialized.
Scott sees those same hierarchies in the parks and recreation departments she has worked with. A “white wall” evident in staffing is a barrier to departments having the internal capacity to make meaningful changes. For example, in the Greater Montreal Area, the Diversity Institute recorded only 2.2% of public sector senior leadership positions were filled by racialized people in 2019.
It’s something Minaz Asani-Kanji, Manager of Outreach at Park People, has also noticed. “You don’t often see Black people or people of color in these positions. From the park supervisors to even the people that are hired for the summer.”
Some cities have hired specialized staff members to bring in new perspectives and lead equity-related initiatives. In Thunder Bay, the Indigenous Inclusion and Relations Manager and Indigenous Liaison have begun discussions on how to decolonize and Indigenize public space. Projects such as the Northwood Splash Pad have benefitted from such targeted engagement. And in Edmonton, the Indigenous Framework is a result of a co-creation process with Indigenous communities that includes commitments such as removing barriers to employment for Indigenous people.
While these are important steps, Asani-Kanji pointed out it may still not reach people who don’t realize working in parks or urban green spaces is even an option for them. Jacqueline Scott described these as “information barriers” or “privileged knowledge.” Not only are certain communities less likely to see themselves working in parks departments, they may not also have access to existing connections to staff and necessary information that would make them successful in obtaining those positions. Building those relationships is part of the critical work Asani-Kanji does at Park People. Doing intentional outreach to underserved communities through Park People’s Sparking Change program, she supports leaders in these communities to bring their park project to life by giving them the tools to navigate parks departments.
Crucial works that build capacity and relationships hint at the heart of these issues: power imbalances.
Lourdenie Jean, founder of “L’environnement, c’est intersectionnel” (“The Environment, It’s Intersectional”) aims to address this directly. In her work, Lourdenie applies an intersectional lens to better understand which communities are marginalized and how.
“We see these power dynamics everywhere, even in parks and green spaces. Racism, sexism and capitalism are always present.” This is true at every level, affecting neighbourhoods, community organizations, and municipalities alike. These are the uncomfortable conversations that may invoke fear but should be met with bravery instead. From them, we see bold ideas arise.
Urban planner Lena Philips offers some ideas for the community organizations ready to allocate resources more intentionally. She writes a necessary first step is to compensate leaders who step up for their labour. In seeking to support their communities, Philips writes that organizations should rethink the criteria they use in funding and program applications to recognize the wealth of expertise BIPOC communities have.
Communities have also been organizing to organically build power from outside of formal institutions. This has taken many forms, though often through empowering community members to lead.
In Halifax, the social enterprise Hope Blooms provides diverse programming to youth centered around agriculture that tends to the lack of food security among its residents and enables youth to become leaders in their community.
The Ethọ́s Lab directly engages Black youth in Vancouver through mentorship opportunities so they can design and create spaces that feel safe for them. In both of these initiatives, emerging leaders are soon able to name and advocate against the power structures that marginalize their communities. Ultimately, Lourdenie Jean reminds people that sharing power should be everyone’s goal as “centering those on the margins is beneficial for everyone”.
As the protests and barricades happen less frequently, it can be easy for people not directly affected by these issues to think the work is over. Of 32 parks departments surveyed for this year’s report, only five (17%) said addressing systemic inequities and discrimination in parks was a major challenge, while eight (27%) said it was a minor challenge.
This is where policymakers and organizations such as Park People have a responsibility to contribute. In June 2020, we released our statement committing to internal processes responding to racism in all of its forms. Since then, Park People has been undertaking work on this, documenting our progress here.
Through these more formal and informal coalitions of changemakers, the voices of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour continue to remain louder than ever. Scott summarized this sentiment brilliantly: “And so for me, for these organizations: you have an opportunity now. Or are you hoping that it will go away? Because my sense is that we are not going to go away.”
Park People launches the third annual Canadian City Parks Report on Centring Equity and Resilience: How parks can help create more equitable, resilient cities—not only as we recover from COVID-19, but as we address another looming crisis: climate change.
Park use during the pandemic spiked across the country as people flooded into outdoor spaces to seek safe ways to connect with others, experience nature, and get some exercise. Parks became more important to Canadians in their daily lives, but cities also faced new challenges with rising demands and public health considerations.
In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from conversations with city staff with the data we gathered from our surveys of 32 municipalities and nearly 3,500 residents of Canadian cities.
Dive into the pdf to read about our key insights on trends and challenges in city parks:
How climate change is impacting how we plan, design, and maintain parks.
Whether converting streets to cool green oases, designing parks that celebrate water, or re-naturalizing the mouths of entire rivers, these eight Canadian projects point a way forward to more climate resilient cities.
How using an environmental justice lens can help tackle climate change resilience and inequity in parks.
Moving more towards nature-based solutions that view parks as key pieces of green infrastructure.
How Canadian cities can harness the power of park philanthropy—and address some of its challenges
How BIPOC park leaders are centring conversations of justice and power in parks
This case study is part of the 2022 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.
As encampments grow across the country, parks departments face a unique challenge: parks have become a highly visible site of the housing crisis, but permanent housing solutions lie outside the scope of what parks can offer.
However, as convenors, land stewards, and providers of public amenities, parks departments can lean into their strengths to play a positive role in addressing houselessness—from adopting a human rights approach to service provision, to deepening relationships with encampment residents.
“Since the start of Covid-19, encampments have proliferated and increased in size,” said Dr. Alexandra Flynn, a University of British Columbia professor who has studied cities’ responses to encampments during the pandemic. “It’s put more pressure on Canadian cities to have to engage with encampments.”
In our survey of municipalities, 90% said houselessness is a challenge—one unlikely to end anytime soon.
Experts including frontline workers, people with lived experience of houselessness, and public health professionals all emphasize the urgency of planning for these realities.
“Hopefully it’ll be an ending problem, but for the foreseeable future I can still see there being people sleeping in parks. And it’s sad, but it’s a reality we have to face,” said Matthew Huxley, an advocate with lived experience.
Diana Chan McNally of Toronto Drop-In Network agreed, noting “Even when the intentions are good, there’s always the push to move unhoused people out of parks. You have to abandon that altogether. You just do, because I think the reality is that… there’s absolutely nowhere else for people to go.”
Public health experts echo this advice. Experts urge cities to plan for encampments to enhance the resiliency of parks systems, as unsheltered houselessness is projected to grow in light of climate change, including more people turning to green spaces for relief during heatwaves.
As we wrote about in the 2020 Canadian City Parks Report, displacement-oriented approaches—ranging from defensive design to encampment evictions—cause harm in a number of ways. Pushing unhoused people out of parks can force them to seek shelter in more isolated spaces where they are subject to increased safety risks, and make it more difficult for outreach workers to stay connected with people they’re supporting.
Further, in a context where Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately affected by housing insecurity—representing 28-34% of the unhoused population despite accounting for just over 4% of the Canadian population—displacing people from parks represents ongoing colonial violence and land dispossession, undermining reconciliation efforts.
While there is a widespread perception that encampments prevent others from enjoying parks, our survey of over 3,000 Canadian city residents suggest this is not the case for most.
62% of respondents who noticed encampments in local parks said they had not negatively impacted their park use, pointing to an openness among park goers to share space with unhoused neighbours.
Encampments are often managed through an operational lens, with a focus on park upkeep. While this work is important, it is insufficient to address the complex needs of people sheltering in parks.
Vancouver is deepening their approach through the creation of a new position within the Park Board called the Director of Urban Relationships. A first-of-its-kind role in Canada, the position will focus on building relationships with encampment residents and community partners.
Donnie Rosa, General Manager of the Vancouver Park Board, said that the new position sends a clear message that “this is a line of business that we have” as city park professionals. Having this dedicated staff with appropriate expertise will alleviate pressures on the parks operations team, who often are tasked with responding to houselessness issues.
The new position comes after the Park Board led a process in partnership with the City of Vancouver and BC Housing to move residents of a large encampment at Strathcona Park to indoor accommodations in spring of 2021. However, new encampments that have arisen since then highlight the ongoing need for this work.
In engaging with the Strathcona Park encampment, the Park Board’s approach was guided by four key values: harm reduction, trauma-informed response, reconciliation, and collaboration. In practice, these values looked like relying on social workers rather than police officers, having Park Board staff participate in a ceremonial fire protocol led by Indigenous Elders when entering the encampment, and being mindful of language—for instance, recognizing objects in the park as people’s belongings rather than garbage.
Staying true to these values was not easy within colonial systems, Rosa acknowledged. Meetings with encampment residents could run for several hours on some days, as people had important stories to share with parks staff.
“That’s not how we work. We go from meeting to meeting to meeting,” Rosa said, but these moments were critically important for them and their team.
“As colonizers, but also as the institutions we represented, and we needed to hear it, we needed to spend that time.”
Rosa emphasized that in order to do this work thoughtfully, it’s necessary to be flexible with structure and timelines. “We need to support each other in saying, it’s okay to take this approach, it’s okay to put somebody’s wellness ahead of a deadline.”
Many cities are beginning to adopt a human rights-based approach to houselessness, which focuses on ensuring unhoused people have access to essential amenities and services in parks. For example:
Parks staff, who are often trained in areas like recreation, natural resource management, or landscape architecture rather than social work or community development, may feel ill-equipped to respond to houselessness, Rosa noted.
Indeed, through our survey of 30 municipalities, 56% identified a lack of knowledge or training about houselessness among parks staff as a barrier. Some cities, like Gatineau and Toronto, mentioned recent initiatives to train parks staff in understanding houselessness.
However, Rosa encourages parks staff to recognize the strengths that they do bring: “we’re community developers, we’re community connectors, and we need to use that in this setting to bring people together, create space for that dialogue.”
Fostering a culture of humility, dialogue, and collective learning has been crucial for the Vancouver Park Board in upholding these guiding values. “I learned more … through this process than I could ever have learned going to any sort of course or training,” Rosa said. “Just living those values and making mistakes. And then holding those mistakes up and saying, how can we be better?”
One of the Park Board’s missteps, Rosa noted, is that after campers moved out of Strathcona Park, staff cleared the remaining tents and belongings, thinking they were abandoned. In retrospect, Rosa wishes they had allowed more time for the process to consult with campers and ensure they were only removing items campers were ready to part with.
Taking the opportunity to involve campers in the park remediation process through a peer employment model was another learning for next time. Former encampment residents wanted to be a part of healing the park after their departure, Rosa noted.
A recent York University report highlights that cities have two sets of powers to address encampments: formal legal powers, like bylaws, and soft powers, like city messaging that shapes how the public thinks about encampments.
Parks departments are well positioned to leverage these soft powers to reframe the narrative on encampments. This work is especially important given that 70% of cities reported managing public complaints as a challenge they encounter in responding to houselessness. By cultivating parks as places of public education, cities can not only increase awareness and comfort around sharing space, but also help curb public complaints and alleviate the burden they place on parks staff.
In Gatineau, for example, the city’s recent houselessness action plan identifies “Improving the way we share space and facilitating cohabitation in public space” as a key area of focus. Their efforts so far have included forming neighbourhood-based ‘cohabitation committees’ that work with local stakeholders including social service organizations, residents, and businesses to promote public education on issues related to houselessness.
“What we do on the cohabitation committee is destigmatization,” said Julie Sénéchal, Community Development Coordinator in the Recreation, Sports and Community Development Department at the City of Gatineau. This focus came from unhoused people who participate in the committee, who identified “the issue of prejudice and how they experience it” as an important priority, Sénéchal said.
The first committee was formed in the Île de Hull neighbourhood where a green space co-managed by the National Capital Commission, ministère des Transports du Québec, and City of Gatineau is used as a campsite for unhoused residents. A high school adjacent to the green space was one of the key partners on the committee. The students surveyed their peers to understand their questions and concerns about houselessness. Based on the students’ input, the cohabitation committee is creating informative video clips to educate neighbours to increase their comfort in sharing space.
Public space programs are also helping to support inclusion. The city hosts clean-up activities in partnership with community organizations and residents of the campsite. They are also planning an urban agriculture work program that would hire unhoused people as gardeners in partnership with a local service organization.
The plan is still in its early stages of implementation, and Sénéchal noted that meaningful, ongoing engagement with unhoused communities will be crucial to its success.
“You have to meet people where they are, that’s my working method,” Sénéchal said. She is optimistic that the plan will help to lay the groundwork for stronger collaboration with unhoused communities, noting that it “allows [the city] to put in place tools that will promote real participation and to include people experiencing houselessness in the planning process.”
“[Unhoused people] know the city from a different perspective than us,” Sénéchal said. “[They] have things to say and we want to be sure to hear them.”
In Montreal, the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough is moving in a similar direction with its new plan for social cohabitation and sharing of public space*. The plan includes an accompanying information tool that outlines realities of houselessness and encourages residents to form friendly relationships with their unhoused neighbours by saying hello or sharing a coffee.
Community-led programs can also help reshape public perspective. In Montreal’s Martin-Luther-King Park, community organization Exeko hosted a photo expo* featuring portraits of unhoused residents to help spark conversation among park goers.
Park programs can be especially helpful in addressing controversial issues related to encampments. Initiatives like a stigma reduction event hosted in honour of International Overdose Awareness Day in Thunder Bay’s Kaministiquia River Heritage Park can help community members develop a more compassionate outlook on the issue of discarded needles in parks, for example.
Programs like these offer inspiration in moving toward a future where parks, and parks departments, are seen as part of the solution to houselessness. For Donnie Rosa, the challenge moving forward is to think about “How do we make this [park] something that is enjoyable and not just a respite? How can we make your stay, your time, your life here one that works for you the best way possible?” of people who care very deeply and passionately about these issues.” When communities and cities commit to working together better, it’s a powerful pairing for parks.
Key points:
As we wrote about in the 2021 Canadian City Parks Report, Covid-related closures of indoor spaces like restaurants, libraries, and gyms, pushed people to take their usual “indoor” activities outdoors to the park. Eating, using the washroom, and socializing with friends are just a few examples of basic everyday needs that people have increasingly looked to parks to fill throughout the pandemic.
With these changing uses has come a culture shift in how people view the purpose of parks. As Sara Udow, Co-Founder and Principal at engagement firm PROCESS put it, “Parks are used for basic human needs, not just recreation.” In our survey of over 3,000 residents of Canadian cities, 93% agreed that allowing people to meet basic needs is an important benefit parks provide.
Yet narrowly defined ideas of “acceptable uses” of parks, rooted in stigma and inequities along the lines of race, class, ability, and more, mean that not everyone is able to enjoy the benefits of parks in supporting everyday needs. Often those who rely on parks most—such as those experiencing housing precarity and other forms of marginalization—are those whose needs are overlooked or actively denied.
For example, while parks are used by many as a place for rest and relaxation, unhoused residents are often met with enforcement and displacement when this rest extends overnight. And despite growing interest in planning parks with a public health lens, people who use substances are often excluded through hostile design features, like blue lighting in washrooms, that go against public health guidance.
However, cities and communities are beginning to recognize and address these inequities through programs that centre the well-being of those most often excluded. By challenging orthodoxies around service provision, enforcement, and environmental design, these initiatives point a way forward in creating parks that better care for all.
While addressing basic needs through features like washrooms is necessary, a focus on “meeting needs” can sometimes obscure what people experiencing marginalization have to offer to the community, said Azkaa Rahman, Strategic Planning Analyst at the City of Edmonton.
“There’s huge deficit thinking and [a focus on] managing needs rather than seeing the gifts, assets, resources and strengths that people have to give, share and exchange.”
Azkaa Rahman, Strategic Planning Analyst at the City of Edmonton
Rahman works with RECOVER Urban Wellbeing, a city-led initiative that aims to create the conditions for well-being for all people, especially people experiencing houselessness or marginalization in Edmonton. The framework that underpins RECOVER’s work is rooted in social ethnographic research with 59 street-involved Edmontonians that uncovered the elements that they consider most important to their sense of wellness.
Their research found that social and psychological needs—respect, family and connection, and purpose—were more important to participants’ idea of wellness than material needs. As a result, the well-being framework centres relationships: nurturing healthy connections to people, land, self, culture, the human project, and the sacred.
Each year, RECOVER launches and evaluates a series of ‘social prototypes’ to test different approaches to enhancing well-being, many of which take place in parks and outdoor spaces.
The 2021 projects include The Gallery, a public art project spotlighting the work of Indigenous artists with lived experience of houselessness with an explicit goal of building relationships between business owners and street-involved Edmontonians. Another example is Soloss, a prototype which hired and trained community members as ‘Losstenders’ to help peers work through grief. In developing the idea for the Losstender role, the project team hosted pop-up events in Churchill Square and Camp Pekiwewin, an Indigenous-led encampment, to seek community members’ input. Through the resulting program, Losstenders guide peers through healing using art, music, breathwork, dance or storytelling, addressing a gap as “professional services cannot replace the value of community care and support.”
Across Canada, 48% of cities said they had initiated at least one program to provide social services in parks. New park programs have popped up to meet basic needs such as food security, healthcare, and survival gear, while bringing a community focus:
Amid growing concerns around the role of police and enforcement in parks, care-centred models can provide an alternative form of community safety.
Vancouver’s Sweetgrass Clan runs a grassroots, Indigenous-led community safety patrol in the city’s Downtown Eastside. Modelled after Winnipeg’s Bear Clan Patrol, the group aims to provide a positive presence in the neighbourhood’s public spaces, offering de-escalation and conflict resolution rooted in traditional teachings.
Robbie Epp, the group’s Founder, sees this model as an alternative to policing that will “take the violence out of our situation, and de-stress a lot of people on the streets.”
“A big thing in our teachings is … that the best way for us to take care of our children is to have patience and respect, to try to teach them by talking to them and being examples,” Epp said, “so I knew there was another approach.”
In addition to crisis intervention, Sweetgrass Clan hosts events that help bring the community together, like a BBQ in Strathcona Park hosted in partnership with the East Van Skate Crows. Epp said that these types of events can be important in helping to foster awareness and understanding among neighbours, noting that “the toughest [part of his work] is actually communicating with residents” to help them understand the realities of Indigenous people who are street involved.
At the same time, green spaces can be healing for vulnerable people, Epp said. “Where people feel safest is when we come together in a park,” he said, “you can see people are just sitting on grass and they’re relaxed, wiggling their feet and toes around … and that’s what we need.”
Other cities are also beginning to experiment with non-police public space patrols. In Montreal, a pilot project in the Ville-Marie borough has seen a mobile team of eight psychosocial responders created to support mediation, de-escalation, and conflict resolution in public spaces.
In implementing these types of programs, it’s important to make sure that the precise duties of these staff are made clear to the public, including encampment residents, said UBC Professor Dr. Alexandra Flynn. A recent report Dr. Flynn co-authored on encampments in Toronto found that the city’s parks ambassadors are described on the city’s website as “an authorized messenger or representative… of goodwill,” when in fact, they are trained to work closely with enforcement officials to monitor and report encampment-related issues. “If that is the purpose of these positions,” Dr. Flynn said, “then that needs to be more clearly stated as the goal by municipalities.”
In a recent research project Park People undertook in partnership with students at University of Toronto’s School of Cities, we found that designing parks that support the well-being and inclusion of unhoused communities requires ‘unlearning’ common design approaches.
For example, we heard from people with lived experience of houselessness that the idea of ‘eyes on the street’ popularized by urbanist Jane Jacobs is problematic for people who live out their private lives in parks. Also known as ‘natural surveillance’, creating clear sightlines to minimize privacy in parks is often thought of as a ‘best practice’ from the perspective of design philosophies like crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED)—a strategy which 76% of cities we surveyed said they use.
But for people who are denied access to private spaces like homes, having visual protection, like bushes or shrubs, is necessary. “To be constantly in the public eye … is so humiliating—to be constantly ignored, but also constantly surveilled,” said Diana Chan McNally, Training and Engagement Coordinator at Toronto Drop-In Network.
Daniela Mergarten, an advocate with lived experience, agreed that people need privacy in order to have “some autonomy” as well. Racial justice experts have similarly challenged the use of surveillance-based design strategies. As Amina Yasin wrote, CPTED has “historically criminalized Black, Indigenous, and poor people in public space.”
Instead of inherently untrusting approaches to design that promote surveillance between neighbours or attempt to control behaviours, we heard that park design should centre trust, care, and dignity.
This includes taking a harm reduction approach to supporting the well-being of people who use substances. Hannah Leyland, an Intern Architect in Vancouver with expertise in the design of drug consumption spaces, said that purpose-built amenities like sharps containers and safer public washrooms can not only save lives but also help to destigmatize addiction. Having these features in parks “sends a message to the neighbours that [people who use substances] are valued within our community,” Leyland said.
It also includes allowing people to hang out in parks—both alone and together. We heard from unhoused people that the absence of amenities like comfortable benches, covered gazebos, and picnic areas makes it difficult for people to meet basic needs like resting and socializing in a dignified way. Public space researcher Cara Chellew calls this absence “ghost amenities,” noting that these features are intentionally left out in park design as they’re thought to attract “undesirable behaviour” like “loitering.”As the authors of Care and the City write, “Deeply caring about others … [is] an exercise which can be best trained in open and accessible spaces that provide room for caring with, caring for, and caring about one another.” Through taking an intentional approach to park programming and design, we can realize the potential of parks as places that care for all.mmit to working together better, it’s a powerful pairing for parks.
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.
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
How we can foster a greater sense of connection to nature through awareness, reciprocity, and gratitude—and why that matters.
How the pandemic has impacted park budgets and sparked a heightened focus on the importance of equity-led investment.
How park engagement can lay the foundation for relationships that last well beyond the end of a consultation period
How investing in ongoing trust-building beyond one-off consultations can help to repair relationships, redistribute power, and reimagine parks.
The unique opportunity of parks departments to play a positive role in addressing houselessness
Examining Prairie cities’ efforts to decolonize park spaces and honour the Indigenous histories of the land they are built upon
How collaborative funding approaches, and investment from other levels of government, are opening up new ways to support parks.
As advocates have pushed for action on issues ranging from policing, to houselessness, to racial justice, the past two years have brought to light fractured relationships, mistrust, and frustration. But equally, these efforts have highlighted that communities are eager to have their voices heard.
“There’s much more attention that’s being placed on the city and the city’s choices by residents and by advocacy communities,” said Dr. Alexandra Flynn, a University of British Columbia professor and municipal governance expert. Dr. Flynn noted that parks have been a key space of protest and pushback and “expectations are very high that municipalities are going to be responsive.”
At the same time, however, the pandemic has turned park engagement on its head. When Covid-19 first hit, in-person consultations became impossible, leading cities to go virtual, with 81% reporting increased use of online engagement methods.
But the impacts on park engagement go deeper than the shift from in-person to online.
Early in the pandemic, cities rushed to establish pilot projects, like converting streets into pop-up parklets and loosening bylaws on alcohol consumption. In the urgency to respond to emerging needs, engagement was often rushed or bypassed altogether. Fast forward to this year: 92% of cities we surveyed said that they had extended or made permanent at least one park pilot program initiated in response to Covid.
Dr. Flynn, who studied municipal governance during the pandemic, terms this shift in engagement “pop-up governance.”
“It’s easy to be in favour of pop-up governance when you really like the outcome,” Dr. Flynn said, noting that public space expansions have been popular among many urbanists. But the process is inherently undemocratic, said Dr. Flynn, noting that cities “leveraged the pandemic, in some ways, to not engage.”
For Dr. Flynn, this raises questions about “why did [these projects] have to happen without engagement? And does that speak to larger issues with the existing processes?” In her view, “governance models even outside of the pandemic, in most jurisdictions, really aren’t able to appropriately address the engagement needs of people who want to be weighing in” on park decision-making.
Indeed, our survey results found that only 22% of city residents feel they have the ability to influence what goes on in their local park—a decrease from 34% in last year’s report.
As cities shift from addressing immediate pandemic needs to planning for the future, there is an opportunity to rethink community engagement to give communities more decision-making power on the park issues that affect them most, said Koa Thornhill, a Program Manager at Park People with expertise working with equity-deserving communities.
As Thornhill put it, grassroots advocacy movements during the pandemic have “brought us to this beautiful point of thinking about, how do we decentralize some of the power that exists in [institutional] spaces?”
Shifting power means moving beyond one-off project-based consultations toward ongoing relationship-building with communities. This requires recognizing and valuing that communities know their needs best.
Zahra Ebrahim, Co-founder of Monumental and Park People Board Chair, said that investing time and resources in building meaningful community relationships upfront is well worth the effort “so that when you actually get to those places where you do need to do some really acute engagement… There are deep relationships.” As Ebrahim put it, “It’s a reorientation to how we come together and build partnerships—that is, going slow to go fast.”
The City of Edmonton is putting this approach into practice. Through their RECOVER Urban Wellness initiative, city-supported ‘social prototypes’ explore creative models for engaging with equity-deserving communities. One of the 2021 prototypes, called Auricle, asks “what would it look like for a city to engage citizens in more humble and authentic ways, deeply listening and understanding what wellbeing means to them?”
The project involved hiring a team of 10 Local Listeners—community members living in Edmonton’s Alberta Avenue neighbourhood—to engage neighbours using storytelling methods. Through this process, the Listeners collected over 150 stories, which were then shared back to the community at an event called Knowsy Fest. The festival, a celebration of community knowledge, invited residents to interpret the stories themselves, and share ideas for how the city might use their insights.
Azkaa Rahman, Strategic Planning Analyst at the City of Edmonton and part of the RECOVER team, said that this kind of community engagement “requires a paradigm shift towards deeply recognizing that relationships move at the pace of trust.”
“Having the time and resources dedicated to relationship building can be tough when we’re on taxpayers’ dime,” Rahman said. “Given that impact isn’t seen in the immediate term, people may have a hard time justifying why just ‘listening’ and fostering relationships is worthwhile.” But for Rahman, this approach is essential to make meaningful change in communities.
When it comes to building relationships, it’s important to be sensitive to neighbourhood dynamics, said Dr. Flynn. Connecting with communities that have been historically well-served by government may be relatively straightforward, but “there’s a lot of communities who don’t share that same trust,” she said.
To understand the unique priorities that exist in each neighbourhood, Ebrahim and her colleagues suggest that cities undertake neighbourhood-based “equity impact assessments” every few years.
This would involve co-creating neighbourhood profiles using demographic data to provide insight into how to tailor engagement methods to meet local needs—such as providing childcare where there’s a high proportion of single parents, or translating materials into commonly spoken languages.
Brampton’s Nurturing Neighbourhoods platform provides a useful model for relationship and trust building. The program was created in response to a commitment in the Brampton 2040 Vision strategy to conduct neighbourhood audits to identify priorities for ongoing, incremental improvements in neighbourhoods based on collaboration with residents.
For 2021, the Nurturing Neighbourhoods program offered guided virtual walking tours in each of the city’s neighbourhoods. The tours highlighted local parks, businesses, and community spaces, and emphasized ways residents could engage in their community. The tours were complemented by neighbourhood-specific online surveys and interactive mapping tools which invited residents to mark locations where they have concerns or ideas for improvement. The insights generated are then used to create a long-term action plan for each neighbourhood.
Kelowna is also moving toward a neighbourhood-centred approach to community engagement. The city is working with neighbourhood associations to “decentralize park programming [and] introduce park amenities and programs that better reflect the needs of the local community,” city staff said.
Koa Thornhill echoed the importance of cities committing to “hav[ing] strong ties to local organizations,” and also pointed out the opportunity to connect with residents directly through existing on-the-ground staff.
Parks maintenance staff, for example, could see it as their role to maintain human relationships the same way they maintain the grass. Thornhill recommended providing on-the-ground parks staff with “training to maintain and navigate relationships.” She noted it could boost morale by “help[ing] them see that community members are really grateful for the work that they do and it doesn’t go unseen.”
In thinking through how to strengthen relationships with communities, results from our national survey of 150 community park groups provide insight on how municipalities can move forward.
63% of cities said they had a strong relationship with local community park groups, but when asked the same question, only 44% of community groups said they had a strong relationship with the city. This number was even lower, at 38%, for groups that identified as equity-deserving. This discrepancy highlights that community relationships may not be as strong as city staff perceive.
The good news is that 83% of community groups said they’d be interested in deepening their relationship with their municipality. When asked what cities could offer to support community groups’ work, some common themes emerged:
Above all, what groups are looking for is to be recognized as valued collaborators working toward a shared goal of ensuring that parks best serve communities. As one group put it, “We need municipalities to trust us; the people who look after these spaces often are the most knowledgeable about what it needs because we are there every day.”
Dr. Alexandra Flynn is hopeful that we can work toward this future, noting that “municipalities are full of lots of people who care very deeply and passionately about these issues.” When communities and cities commit to working together better, it’s a powerful pairing for parks.