As Dave Harvey retires from his co-leadership position at Park People, he reflects on the incredible journey since founding the organization in 2011.
Why are events in parks important? How do grants fit into Park People’s larger goals for creating change in city parks?
We know we benefit when we get outside and connect with others when winter makes us feel isolated. Here are some ideas for how your group can animate parks in winter.
Here are some valuable tips to create a welcoming, safe, and respectful environment for participants of all abilities, backgrounds, ages, and gender identities!
Watch our special launch webinar with the Report's authors to get the inside scoop on our findings.
How the City of Charlottetown’s experience with Hurricane Fiona demonstrates the importance of cross-departmental partnerships and resilient infrastructure to mitigate the impact of extreme winds.
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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.
Over the past few years, our collective understanding has recognized that systemic racism is prevalent in parks and public spaces. Historically, these areas have been sites where Black, Indigenous, and racialized people face suspicion, surveillance, harassment, violence, and even death.
Year after year, our public survey has shown that about 1 in 10 city residents avoid parks and greenspaces due to fear of discrimination or policing.
This year, when asked whether city parks should do more to address equity and racial justice, over two-thirds (67%) agreed. Similarly, in 2023, 66% of cities recognized the role of parks in combating racism.
While awareness of these issues is growing, action remains limited. Only 17% of cities feel equipped to address racism, allowing the needs of racialized populations to fall through the cracks.
How can municipalities move from awareness to action? We spoke with Jay Pitter about the BEING BLACK IN PUBLIC SURVEY a bi-national survey, developed by Jay Pitter Placemaking (Lead Investigator: Jay Pitter, Co-Investigator: Professor L. Anders Sandberg) and administered by the Institute for Social Research. Overall, the survey asked “What are the public space policies, design approaches and unspoken social attitudes that both diminish and enhance Black peoples’ experiences when navigating cities?”
This research fills gaps in understanding the Black experience in parks and other public spaces in Canada and the United States. Pitter identified a lack of data, particularly in Canada, on how Black communities perceive and experience these spaces. Many institutions measure narrowly defined ideas of inclusion by tracking safety or the absence of anti-Black violence, but Pitter argues that this is insufficient – mitigating violence should be the bare minimum.
Her research also explores how the historical and ongoing trauma from racism, police brutality, and violence in public spaces as well as, mobility inequity and lack of pathways to economic prosperity affect Black people’s well-being, social belonging, and sense of spatial entitlement.
“At the heart of this survey is filling a gap in what the other stats do not—which is to center Black people as wholly, human, spiritual beings. Previous research and stories often omit the impact of incidents related to lack of safety and restriction. What do those numbers mean? To Black people’s mental health, to Black people’s sense of self, to Black people’s belonging, to Black people’s imagination and aspirations? So, one of my main focuses was to re-humanize Black individuals and communities by creating space for their deep reflection, healing and dreaming aloud.”
Jay Pitter, Award-winning placemaker, adjunct urban planning professor and author
The BEING BLACK IN PUBLIC SURVEY uses a trauma-informed, asset-based approach that emphasizes Black joy and knowledge. Respondents were asked about positive experiences and memories in public spaces, with Pitter emphasizing the importance of learning from successes, not just tragedies.
Pitter also highlighted how Black communities contribute to public spaces.
“I didn’t want to reduce our experience in public to strictly a victim experience, because despite the auction block, centuries of anti-Black public space policy, and disproportionate experiences of violence and homelessness, Black peoples’ labour, placemaking expertise and culture have contributed so much to the form and vibrance of public spaces. We make public spaces lit.“
Jay Pitter
This approach of centering joy and honouring Black peoples’ placemaking contributions is a crucial example of how cities can engage with equity-deserving groups without compelling them to relive histories of oppression. Pitter noted that many respondents expressed gratitude for the opportunity to share their positive experiences and knowledge.
The findings from this study will be shared in an action-oriented report in February 2025, offering insights for cities and institutions on fostering real inclusion for Black communities in parks and other public spaces. Pitter shared some early findings: parks are among the most frequented public spaces by Black individuals and generally score well on physical safety. However, her early findings indicated that parks fall short in fostering Black cultural identity, deep belonging, and inclusive programming.
Pitter sees significant opportunities for growth, including co-creation of spaces, representation in park leadership, power-sharing, and park events that elevate Black communities.
To learn more about how your city can enhance inclusion for Black communities in public spaces, stay tuned at jaypitter.com for the full report available in February 2025.
Park People is excited to launch the 2024 Canadian City Parks Report, our sixth annual edition highlighting the most significant trends, issues, and practices shaping Canada’s city parks.
Join the report’s researchers in a special launch webinar to explore our findings:
The webinar will feature an engaging discussion on the future of city parks, with guest speakers from the City of Victoria and Greenspace Alliance. They’ll share opportunities and challenges in their work around collaborations and partnerships, across city departments, communities, non-profits, and more.
This hour-long webinar will be held in English, with simultaneous French interpretation.
Adri Stark is specialized in research and policy at Park People, and co-author of the annual Canadian City Parks Report.…
Julia is the Food Systems Coordinator for the City of Victoria. She comes to the role after over 15 years…
Nicole DesRoches, born in Ottawa and living in Chelsea Québec, part of the National Capital Region, therefore living within the…
Joy is the Manager of Research and Partnerships at Park People and facilitates national research and network engagement that supports…
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.
One of the key challenges of growing cities is acquiring new parkland to serve intensifying neighbourhoods when so much land has already been built on. In fact 69% of municipalities said acquiring new parkland was a major challenge for them in 2023. A long-term plan in Mississauga shows how a consistent, transparent approach to acquiring existing housing can lead to long-term gains in expanded parkland for a growing population.
Mississauga’s Cooksville neighbourhood, an area designated as an urban growth centre, is already deficient in parkland according to the City’s parks plan. While the City’s goal is 12 percent of land area for parks within urban growth centres, Cooksville was significantly below that target. With the future LRT and high-rise housing development coming to the area, growth will only continue to intensify, said Sharon Chapman, Manager of Parks and Culture Planning at the City of Mississauga.
The solution is a long-term plan by the City to acquire land within the Cooksville area to expand existing parkland so that it can accommodate more use and different activities. Council approved the plan in 2017, identifying 31 properties totalling 10ha to be acquired to assist in “achieving large cohesive areas of park with continuous trails systems.”
While expanding parkland is the primary goal, there is a second benefit of the expanded parkland–climate resilience. Some of the current houses in the area sit within a floodplain and could not be constructed today, which might make it more appealing to sell to the City, Chapman noted, since homes with a history of flooding are less marketable to buyers.
The project is not without controversy, however. Some homeowners have been upset at the plans to demolish housing in the area, saying that they don’t plan on selling to the City. Chapman said she thought some of the initial resistance from homeowners was due to misinformation as well as concern about change. The City made sure to clarify that it was proceeding on a “willing buyer-willing seller” basis only, meaning that expropriating properties is not part of the plan. Negotiations with owners willing to sell are based on reports prepared by accredited independent appraisers estimating the fair market value of the property.
“Our approach has been really a co-operative one with each individual homeowner. We have respected property owners who did not want to talk anymore about it.”
Sharon Chapman, Manager of Parks and Culture Planning at the City of Mississauga.
Commonly, park and housing advocates are pinned against each other as if urban residents need to pick between one or the other. Chapman acknowledged this and said that the City was aware “the project might be seen as removing housing stock,” but she noted it was only a few single-detached homes and not all 31 properties actually had houses on them. “We know that we are losing a small amount of single family homes and the area overall will grow immensely in terms of the new units that come in, so we need to keep the bigger picture in mind to make sure we have the right amount of parkland there.”
To date, 19 properties have been acquired, creating over 8 ha of new parkland–just shy of the 10 ha goal. Demolition happens on a rolling basis so that houses don’t sit vacant and can be turned into parkland right away.
“We’re at a point now that the properties we have acquired are enough that we can now start moving forward with plans to redevelop the park.”
The City has moved now into public engagement for the parkland, which will include both natural and built features.
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.
“In the meantime, we need to get a little bit creative and bring in partners to animate them and make them as engaging as possible.”
Paul Farish, Toronto’s Director of Parks Planning
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.”
In Midtown Toronto, a city-owned parking lot is poised to become the largest park addition in the Yonge-Eglinton area in decades, providing much needed public space in the rapidly intensifying neighbourhood. There the City is installing pickleball and basketball courts as well as tables, seating, and other amenities as an immediate “phase one” approach in advance of full park design and construction.
In Toronto’s parkland-deficient Downtown, the City purchased one of the last undeveloped parking lots. As environmental work and park design processes take place, the site has been temporarily programmed as a popular restaurant patio. A known landmark in the city, the property was a part of a design competition that secured an innovative design and approved budget of $10 million.
At another site, along the waterfront, a recently closed parking garage at Spadina Pier is being planned for refurbishment as a site to host cultural and special events in the near term to showcase its potential as a future permanent park. Farish noted a number of local organizations that could serve as programming partners.
The first was a partnership with The Bentway–the park conservancy that operates a public space underneath a nearby elevated highway–to activate the site as part of Toronto’s 2023 Nuit Blanche. The Bentway’s installation (delivered in partnership with the City) helped to test and build awareness for the planned waterfront park, including art projections on the recently restored 100-year old Canada Malting silos.
“The phased approach helps City staff, residents and partners to develop the long-term vision for the park through temporary activations, fluid programming and on-the-ground experimentation”
Lessons are learned during this process about what works on a specific site that can inform future designs and operational needs for the park.
The approach also provides “flexibility in terms of partnership and operating models,” he said, “furthering the creativity and experimentation while maintaining an emphasis on the benefits of public space and publicly-owned lands.”
By 2030, 30% of Canada’s land, water, and marine areas will be protected. That is, of course, if the country meets this goal, which was set by the international community at COP15, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference.
Reaching such an ambitious goal requires strong collaboration. All levels of government, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities, local non-profits, private landowners, and individual residents must all work together. But how do you build such a broad, but also deep coalition?
The work of Nature Canada–a national organization dedicated to protecting Canadian wildlife and wilderness–is all about bringing those various actors together in a concerted effort to work both nationally and hyper-locally through the Municipal Protected Areas Program to ensure Canada meets its 30×30 goal.
While protected natural areas may conjure images of vast uninterrupted pristine landscapes far away from where many of us live, Nature Canada Organizing Manager Dylan Rawlyk argued that protecting land within urban areas is vital.
One practical reason is that the most biodiverse landscapes within the country are situated along the southern edge of Canada where the majority of the population lives within a constellation of urban areas. Another less obvious reason has to do with storytelling. Bringing protected natural areas close to where people live their everyday lives helps make the importance of biodiversity more tangible. “[People] know it, they love it, and they’re connected to it,” Rawlyk said.
While cities often have natural area management and restoration plans in place, they each undertake conservation in slightly different ways, so part of the work of achieving the 30×30 target is working with cities to “unify all of our collective impacts,” Rawlyk said. While the majority of cities listed it as a priority, Park People’s 2024 survey found that one third of cities said addressing federal biodiversity and land protection goals was a high priority in 2024.
Nature Canada has forged both cross-country and hyper-local partnerships, creating, as Rawlyk put it, a web of organizations. At Nature Canada “we play the role of convening all those groups together and ensuring that we can see how the actions each one is doing is contributing to the greater whole.”
For example, in Hamilton, work led by Ontario Nature is helping to convene different organizations to add lands in the city’s Eco Park system to Federally recognized protection status. By working with the City of Hamilton, Hamilton Conservation Authority, and Hamilton Naturalist Club, the goal is to assess current lands and see which ones may need some different protection policies in place to meet the Federal definition and contribute to the overall 30×30 goal. Projects like this aligned with Federal programs such as the National Urban Park initiative led by Parks Canada are important to meet biodiversity protection goals.
Collaboration with First Nations communities and Indigenous organizations is “core” to the work, Rawlyk said, especially given the colonial history of conservation movements that have displaced Indigenous peoples from their land. To ensure these past mistakes are not repeated, Rawlyk pointed to an example of recent work by Réseau de Milieux Naturels protégés in Quebec, which “ran a workshop with a range of land trusts and also First Nations communities to try to build bridges between them.”
Nature Canada has also built partnerships with regional non-profits such as Ontario Nature and BC Nature who better understand local contexts and have strong political ties to move policies forward. Drilling down even further, working with hyper-local organizations, such as Whistler Naturalists Society, is essential because these groups hold deep knowledge of specific places, often performing activities like bio-blitzes to monitor species.
“That level of species understanding within the region is incredibly vital to be able to move forward with this work,” Rawlyk said. Even individual residents play a key role as they “can advocate to put more conservation measures in place” and act as watchdogs to ensure these places stay protected.
As climate change brings more frequent extreme weather, cities are grappling with increasing storm damage to parks and infrastructure. In 2024, 97% of municipal parks departments said that addressing impacts from climate change and extreme weather has become a challenge. Floods, droughts, and fires all pose risks, but there’s another element that’s caused massive damage in recent years–wind.
Park managers we spoke with in 2023 mentioned increasingly intense storms that don’t just bring higher wind speeds, but winds that last for more sustained periods, causing far more damage. While cities have begun to redesign parks to withstand flooding or adapt to drought through altering planting palettes, preparing for high wind presents a difficult challenge.
As the Parks and Recreation Manager for the City of Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island, Frank Quinn knows a thing or two about preparing for storms. But when Hurricane Fiona hit the Island in September 2022 as one of the strongest storms to ever land on Canadian shores, it was a different beast.
The storm was Atlantic Canada’s most costly, causing $220 million in damage to Prince Edward Island alone. Hurricane Fiona lasted for hours, damaging municipal infrastructure and ravaging the city’s tree canopy. In the Royalty Oaks natural area many old growth trees were knocked down–some 300 years old.
Quinn said the City’s Emergency Measures Organization, which includes senior staff from different departments, met frequently leading up to the storm as well as afterwards. As a smaller city, Quinn said people from different departments are used to working and supporting each other–something that came in handy after the storm.
“We all had good working relationships, we all know each other. We had a wide range of experiences and expertise.” They were able to draw on each other’s knowledge of internal staff expertise, but also contractors who could be brought on to help.
Public safety and clean-up were top priority, but Quinn was also cognizant that “once you’re in the house for a couple days, you want to get out.” His team assessed every playground within the first couple of days as well as inspected trail systems, posting notices about what was closed and what was open for use.
Without power, communication was a challenge, Quinn said. As the city cleared trails and re-opened amenities like playgrounds, they posted messages on the city’s website and used the media. But the key to public messaging was working with community organizations, like church groups, to pass information along to city residents.
The City is now building redundancies into systems and creating more back-up services. One big issue during the storm was fuel, Quinn said. While staff had fueled up machinery and vehicles prior to the storm arriving, when they needed to be refueled there were issues because the main fuel depot did not have a back-up generator on site.
“We dealt with smaller storms before where there were power outages for a day or two, but when you have a storm and sections of the City doesn’t have power for two weeks, this creates several issues and challenges,” such as where to get fuel.
Franck Quinn, Parks and Recreation Manager for the City of Charlottetown.
Quinn said the City has learned lessons from the experience of Fiona and has already begun to prepare for the next storm. “We’re building new infrastructure and making it more resilient so that it can stand up to higher winds,” he said. The City also purchased new equipment that can be used for cleaning up trees, but can also be adapted for other day-to-day uses like grading trails.
Park People is thrilled to announce three new partners within our growing national network of Cornerstone Parks: the Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition in Edmonton, AB; Toronto Botanical Garden in Toronto, ON; and Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, NS.
Launched in 2021, Cornerstone Parks is the only national network dedicated to maximizing the impact and influence of Canada’s large urban parks. These are critical spaces for people living in cities to build meaningful connections to nature and each other, and they give cities a head start when mitigating the impacts of climate change.
Large urban parks often require more maintenance, operations, and programming resources, as well as innovative solutions to their unique challenges. Cornerstone Parks convenes organizations working in parks across Canada through a community of practice. The program supports them through direct funding for community stewardship and restoration, capacity-building within and between park groups (especially in equity-deserving communities), and measuring and storytelling the impact of our collective work.
The Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition, Toronto Botanical Garden, and Ecology Action Centre join the program’s three founding partners – Stanley Park Ecology Society in Vancouver, BC; High Park Nature Centre in Toronto, ON; and Les Amis de la montagne in Montreal, QC – as well as returning 2023 partners the Everett Crowley Park Committee and Free the Fern Stewardship Society in Vancouver, BC; Meewasin Valley Authority in Saskatoon, SK; Rowntree Mills Park in Toronto, ON; and Darlington Ecological Corridor in Montreal, QC.
The Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition (ERVCC) is dedicated to the protection, preservation, and regeneration of the North Saskatchewan River Valley and Ravine System in Edmonton, AB. The river valley is an 18,000-acre “ribbon of green” forming the largest expanse of urban parkland in Canada. The volunteer-led Coalition collaborates with many conservation groups and initiatives – including Swim Drink Fish, Edmonton Native Plant Society, Shrubscriber, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, and Edmonton’s Root for Trees – to support conservation and restoration through knowledge-sharing, co-stewardship, public education, and political advocacy.
Through Cornerstone, they aim to accelerate the number of trees and plants planted alongside Root for Trees, enhance water monitoring with Swim Drink Fish, support the Tree Equity Program and Bird Friendly Edmonton, and pilot a new trail restoration program with their City. All this while creating employment opportunities that elevate people-power over carbon and exploring future designation as a National Urban Park.
Toronto Botanical Garden (TBG) offers an array of gardens spanning nearly four acres in Toronto, ON, adjacent to the Don Valley Ravine, Wilket Creek, and Edwards Gardens. They’re currently undergoing a landmark expansion across a 35-acre site, re-aligning their efforts to become a purpose-led botanical garden, cultivating a community with a profound connection to nature, and inspiring impact in their unique ecosystem and beyond.
With Cornerstone support, Toronto Botanical Garden will pilot a series of activities – including accessible ravine tours, citizen science initiatives, seed saving, and a fall festival coinciding with City of Toronto Ravine Days – to help communities engage more deeply with their local ravine systems and support ecological restoration efforts.
The Ecology Action Centre has operated as a member-based environmental charity in Nova Scotia since 1971. Their efforts to establish a Halifax greenbelt – a thriving and protected network of parks and greenspaces – have led to strong partnerships with local conservation organizations representing three key locations: Purcells Cove Backlands, Blue-Mountain Birch Cove Lakes, and Sandy Lake-Sackville River.
As a Cornerstone partner, the Ecology Action Centre will expand its existing hike series to improve public awareness and engagement within these parks, initiate research on local invasive species through citizen science programs, and pilot new activities like park user surveys. They will support Blue-Mountain Birch Cove Lakes as they, too, explore future designation as a National Urban Park.
Welcoming new partners into the Cornerstone Parks program helps us to make different (yet equally critical) connections: between parks in the same municipalities and across different municipalities; between long-established and newly-emerging park-based organizations; and between different types of large urban parks, as shaped by our changing cities.
By fostering relationships between different parks within the same urban centres – Vancouver, Edmonton and Saskatoon, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax – Cornerstone Parks enables peer-to-peer support where challenges like invasive plant species, wildlife interactions, and the impacts of climate change (as well as local policies to address them) are often the same. By creating dialogues between cities, the program exposes park groups to new (and shared) challenges and demonstrates novel models of collaboration and co-governance to help surface transferrable solutions.
Since 2021, the program has evolved to address the fact that there are many different types of large urban parks. This includes historically prioritized destination parks like our founders, Stanley Park in Vancouver, High Park in Toronto, and Mount Royal in Montreal. It also includes “adaptive reuse” projects like Everett Crowley Park and its connecting Champlain Heights trail system in Vancouver and the Darlington Ecological Corridor in Montreal – a former landfill site and rail corridor, respectively – whose revitalization creates new and essential green spaces for equity-deserving communities. It further includes connective parks like ravines, river valleys, and greenbelts that continue to resist urban development as cities rapidly grow around them.
Canada’s large urban parks are vital nature spaces that deserve our support. Whatever their location and history, and however long their organizational legacy of conservation and care, they all provide critical nature and community connections to people living in cities.
Cornerstone Parks enjoy benefits that they, in turn, multiply and extend to the urbanized, often equity-deserving communities who visit them. They do this through accessible programs and opportunities that measurably improve park users’ and volunteers’ physical health, mental health, and overall well-being. A win for these parks is a win for communities.
The Cornerstone Parks program is honoured to play a role in providing shared resources, networking and capacity-building, impact measurement and storytelling, and overall advocacy to help support the continued growth of our new partners, the Edmonton River Valley Conservation Coalition, Toronto Botanical Garden, and Ecology Action Centre, and uplift the ongoing work of all our Cornerstone Parks.
I will retire from my co-leadership position at Park People at the end of June 2024, thirteen years after I founded the organization.
This milestone has me considering the many positive changes that have happened in urban parks in Canada since 2011 and the special role that Park People has played in advancing them. It’s been quite a journey for me, the organization, and Canada’s incredible ecosystem of city parks.
Since the very beginning, Park People’s work has been about creating new connections—between people and nature, between neighbours when they meet by chance in public spaces, and between leaders and bold ideas that can make our parks even better.
Park People’s own origin story echoes this theme brilliantly. In 2010, I released a paper for the Metcalf Foundation, “Fertile Ground for New Thinking,” with my ideas for improving Toronto’s park system. Its final recommendation was to start a park-focused NGO in the city. At the time, I had absolutely no intention to start or lead such a group, but an enthusiastic group of people were inspired by the paper and pushed me to start an NGO. In return, I cajoled them into becoming our founding board members and volunteers. We then embarked on a bold plan to support more people to see themselves as park leaders and to connect them to the tools they would need to create great parks for everyone.
On April 12, 2011, we officially launched Park People with our Toronto Park Summit. This was our first opportunity to connect park professionals and emerging advocates in our city. Through these lively conversations, we began building the collective power required to support and sustain vibrant green spaces that all urban residents can enjoy.
In the years since our original group of board members and volunteers has expanded exponentially: Park People now has more than 25 staff members, offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, and a national board of city and community builders. We’ve also engaged thousands of new supporters — our Park People Network now unites 1,400 local park groups in 35 cities in every province, and we’ve provided grants to grassroots community leaders to animate their parks in 21 urban areas.
When launching Park People, our goal was to spark a city parks movement that could fundamentally change how our society sees the value of these public green spaces. It was an ambitious vision, but I think that through our work with many great partners and community leaders, we’ve achieved it.
Canada’s parks have changed significantly in these last 13 years, mostly for the better. Park People is proud to have been a small part of these shifts, contributing vital research on trends and opportunities and working with governments and park leaders to support progressive park policies.
As a result:
The major increase in park use during the height of the pandemic wasn’t a one-time blip: I’ve never seen so many people using our parks in so many new and creative ways. Parks are where we meet with friends, celebrate occasions, mourn losses, sample great food, hear music, and experience art—they’re key to the diversity, richness, and joy of urban life.
This belief has long guided the design of Park People’s grants, training, and networking programs, which have helped hundreds of people turn their parks into dynamic community hubs. We’ve consistently made the case for the unique value of parks, from our parks-focused platform for the 2014 Toronto election to solutions papers, national conferences and our Canadian City Parks Report.
They aren’t frills—they’re core to the character of our communities. Our research has shown that they measurably improve our physical, mental, and overall well-being and can serve as antidotes to the social isolation and loneliness epidemic.
Who isn’t using parks is as important as who is. Through programs like Sparking Change, Park People centres equity-deserving communities in our program planning and delivery, collaborating with them to ensure their knowledge and experiences make parks accessible for all. As we embark upon this work and share what we have learned from it, we’ve observed that equity metrics have increasingly become a core part of park planning and acquisition strategies in municipalities across the country.
As Rena Soutar of the Vancouver Parks Board says, “There is no such thing as a culturally neutral space that’s been touched by human hands.” The 2022 Park People Conference featured three of Canada’s leading Indigenous park professionals, Rena, Lewis Cardinal, and Spencer Lindsay, who addressed how colonialism plays out in park practices and how we can embed reconciliation and decolonization into the places we call parks. As an example, the Vancouver Park Board has implemented co-management and guardian programs with Indigenous communities. At the same time, Edmonton worked closely with Indigenous leaders on kihcihkaw askî, the country’s first urban Indigenous culture park site.
As our climate changes, urban parks are becoming increasingly important spaces to mitigate heat, absorb stormwater, and protect plants, animals, and people. Park People has been at the forefront of highlighting opportunities for parks to serve as powerful tools for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
The value of a park doesn’t lie in size. Small pockets of green space can be far more meaningful to our well-being. As our cities increasingly densify and the cost of land rises, we’re seeing neglected spaces such as those under highways, roads, electricity corridors, railway lines, and even old landfills being transformed into beautiful natural spaces. Our research and financial support helped spur such innovative parks as Toronto’s Meadoway and Bentway and Calgary’s Flyover Park.
We’re asking a lot of our municipal parks departments. More people are using parks, and staff are now entrusted with addressing issues of homelessness, equity, reconciliation with Indigenous people, climate change mitigation, and adaptation. In my opinion, their work is more interesting and rewarding, and park staff are making a positive difference in our cities and communities. But it’s certainly a tougher job than it used to be. In response, Park People has made supporting and connecting our municipal park staff partners one of our top priorities.
The populations of our cities are rapidly increasing, and park budgets in Canadian cities are frankly not keeping up. If this longtime trend continues, I’m concerned about what our parks will look like 13 years from now. Without appropriate funding, there won’t be enough parks to meet community needs. We’ll slide down into an American-style model, where a lack of government support created a crisis in parks that philanthropy and private conservancies had to address. Partnerships and philanthropy are great, but there is absolutely no replacement for properly funded city parks departments.
Creative community partnerships are no longer the exception for city parks; they’re the norm. From working with local volunteer groups to creating formal park conservancies, park departments are embracing collaborations with unexpected partners to add value to city park resources, not replace them. Park People made the case for such partnerships from our earliest days, and we have helped to nurture and lay the groundwork for some of Canada’s leading park partnership models. Meanwhile, the federal government is becoming an important player in city parks. Canada was once one of the few jurisdictions without a strong federal role in city parks. But after creating Rouge National Urban Park in Toronto, the federal government has initiated a process to create six new national urban parks across Canada in the next few years. Provinces like Ontario, which have traditionally stayed away from pursuing provincial parks in cities, have also committed to new urban parks. Park People has been excited to partner with governments and support these game-changing efforts.
Park People didn’t invent community involvement in parks — there were people across Canada doing that long before 2011. But we played a critical role by bringing them together, amplifying their voices, sharing their successes, inspiring others, and most fundamentally, making it easier for them to unlock resources and address barriers so that they can make their parks more vibrant and their neighbourhoods stronger.
The last 13 years have seen incredibly positive changes in Canada’s urban park system. I’m proud to say that Park People has played an important role in advancing these developments.
When it comes to the health benefits of parks, what’s in a name? Can different types of parks – with varying sizes, histories, descriptions, and designs – offer the same benefits as Canada’s historic “destination parks?” Through Cornerstone Parks’ latest research, the answer is clear. Yes, and the key is making space for stewardship.
Cornerstone Parks launched in 2021 as the only national network maximizing the impact and influence of Canada’s large urban parks through direct funding for community stewardship, capacity-building within and between park groups, and measuring the impact of our collective work. In 2023, Park People analyzed two years’ worth of surveys from park users and volunteers at our founding three Cornerstone Parks – Stanley Park in Vancouver; High Park in Toronto; and Mount Royal Park in Montreal – to better understand the relationship between those parks and community health and well-being.
Our initial Cornerstone Parks Reports show that park use is associated with better health and well-being, and that these benefits are dependent on park users feeling nature-connected. People who engage in park stewardship (nature-based programs that invite volunteers to care for the land) versus other park activities report powerful environmental and social connections that make them happier and healthier. The results also show that some communities are unfortunately less engaged in park stewardship than others. The good news is that park stewardship – and its resulting health benefits – can often be accessed in unexpected places.
Understanding that most city residents do not live close to historic destination parks like Stanley Park, High Park, and Mount Royal, we wondered whether different types of large urban parks – from newer adaptive reuse projects to undeveloped arteries like river valleys – likewise boost community health.
To find out, we conducted voluntary, online and in-person surveys with 86 stewards participating in programs at four new Cornerstone Parks partners, Free the Fern Stewardship Society and the Everett Crowley Park Committee in South Vancouver, the Meewasin Valley Authority in Saskatoon, and the Darlington Ecological Corridor in Montreal. Between August and November 2023, survey respondents shared how stewardship impacts different aspects of their well-being and their engagement in pro-environmental behaviours.
Our 2023 Cornerstone Parks Reports echo the trends seen in our 2022 reports. From surveys with volunteer stewards at the new Cornerstone Parks, we found that:
Due to those nature connections, we found that:
These results are similar to what we heard from park stewards volunteering in long-standing destination parks in 2022.
Further, we investigated which park elements best support nature connections and thus have the greatest impact on health. Volunteer stewards in 2023 say that the places that best promote wellness-boosting nature connections are trails (25%); natural areas that include wildlife, forests, and native plants (30%); and around water (15%).
Volunteer stewards also say that the following places inhibit feelings of nature connectedness: grey/paved spaces (33%); crowded spaces (16%); recreation facilities including sports facilities, playgrounds, and other structures (21%); manicured lawns and non-native plants (17%); and areas with litter (12%).
The results demonstrate that naturalized spaces are essential to building strong connections to our environments. However, creating naturalized spaces in urbanized areas is not an easy feat. Our new Cornerstone Parks have found their own innovative ways to ensure diverse urban neighbourhoods enjoy nature nearby.
Free the Fern and the Everett Crowley Park Committee work in Everett Crowley Park and the adjoining Champlain Heights Trail system in South Vancouver, BC. Champlain Heights contains a former city landfill as well as hundreds of low-income, co-op, strata, and seniors’ housing units. The area now boasts the fifth largest park in Vancouver, Everett Crowley Park. The park and trails are part of the only 4% of native forest remaining in Vancouver, making them a refuge for residents.
“Our greatest success that these ecological improvements reflect positively on the mental and physical health of individuals, especially those who live in the Champlain Heights community.”
Damian Assadi, Chair of the Everett Crowley Park Committee and Director at Large of Free the Fern
The park and trail system balance the much-needed features of the neighbourhood – including the busy Champlain Heights Community Centre, and sports and recreation facilities – with assets proven to promote nature connectedness. Free the Fern’s many projects include a Healing Forest, recognized by the David Suzuki Foundation as dedicated to the land’s first inhabitants and their descendants. They also include a Native Food Forest whose fruits, berries, and other edibles benefit both food-insecure humans and wildlife, birds, and insects.
The Darlington Ecological Corridor in Montreal is also an adaptive reuse project. It includes a former railway that connects to the biodiversity of Mount Royal through a series of interventions within the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough. This densely-populated, lower-income area contains many elements that inhibit nature connections, including paved spaces, crowds from the nearby universities, numerous sports facilities, and litter generated by local shops and restaurants.
“The city is an ecosystem, but a very disturbed ecosystem where we can create a habitat for species to thrive. But the ecosystem is also full of people with connections to the places they live. A socio-ecological approach balances people’s attachment to the places they live with the needs of ecosystems and creates new connections between both, for the benefit of both.”
Alexandre Beaudoin, Founder of the Darlington Ecological Corridor
Darlington achieves this balance of biodiversity, food security, and climate resilience by re-introducing nature connections into the urban fabric. They do this through giant gardening pots placed along the corridor where neighbours can reserve a pot, take free gardening courses, and plant their choice of edibles and flowers. Darlington maintains a nourishing forest and community gardens along the route, enabling residents to access fruits, berries, and plant medicines. A third of Darlington stewards (33%) say that these food forests are their favourite places to connect to nature. Knowing the well-being impacts of water, Darlington is also revitalizing a healing pond for patients of a local rehabilitation institute whose sensory, language, hearing, and motor abilities are impaired.
The Meewasin Valley Authority operates in the Meewasin Valley, a 6,700-hectare park that spans the South Saskatchewan River for 75 kilometres through and beyond the city of Saskatoon. Meewasin’s central location and massive trail system enable over 2 million visitors annually to explore its nationally unique ecosystems without leaving the city. Stewards could not contain their love for Meewasin, with almost 50% providing additional programming feedback and telling us they want more opportunities to volunteer!
“Meewasin aims to transform visitors through meaningful experiences: teaching about sustainability, how to be a good steward to our natural environment in our everyday life, and ways to stay involved through volunteering, donating, or sharing information.”
Andrea Lafond, CEO of Meewasin
The Meewasin Valley is linear and uninterrupted by development; therefore, it extends the benefits of nature to a wide variety of communities. Upgrades to the Meewasin Trail mean that residents from North, South and core Saskatoon neighbourhoods have access to the park and its programs. Access isn’t limited to those with the physical ability to travel there; Meewasin’s work exists in the digital space as well. The Meewasin App highlights traditional uses for the region’s land, river, and medicinal plants to showcase the intersection between traditional Indigenous and ecological knowledge.
Large urban parks aren’t bound by any one definition. Whether they’re 100+-year-old destinations like Stanley Park, High Park, and Mount Royal Park, or take other innovative forms, they offer proven health and well-being benefits to their communities. The 2022 and 2023 Cornerstone Parks Reports prove that the most important predictor of health and well-being is nature-connectedness. While Canadian cities continue to densify, there is a lot that they can do to reclaim their “in-between” spaces and create meaningful connections for the diverse communities that surround them.
Free the Fern and the Everett Crowley Park Committee, the Meewasin Valley Authority, and the Darlington Ecological Corridor reach out along neighbourhood trail systems, river valleys, and rail corridors – sites that resist urban development – to nourish their communities. They offer wellness-boosting programs and volunteer opportunities alongside access to food, healing, knowledge-sharing, and other points of connection. They thereby sustain and enrich both their own organizations’ capacities and the lives of residents around them.
It doesn’t matter what a park is called so much as it matters that communities feel called to it. Communities hear that call via the many nature-connected features, programs, and stewardship opportunities offered again and again by Cornerstone Parks. Hear the call and experience what park stewardship can do for you!
Decolonization of park practices, according to Rena Soutar, begins with the recognition that “there is no such thing as a culturally neutral space that’s been touched by human hands.”
On the first day of the 2022 Park People Conference, three of Canada’s leading Indigenous park professionals, Lewis Cardinal, Rena Soutar, and Spencer Lindsay directly addressed how colonialism plays out in park practices and how we can work to embed reconciliation and decolonization into the places we call parks.
Lewis Cardinal’s ceremonial name sîpihko geesik means “blue sky” and was given to him with the understanding that his ultimate purpose on Earth is “to build relationships between two worlds that don’t understand each other.”
In Edmonton, Cardinal is living up to his ceremonial name by devoting his work to building understanding between settlers and Indigenous communities. This lifetime of effort culminated in the recent opening of kihciy askiy, or sacred land, Canada’s first urban Indigenous ceremonial site in Edmonton’s River Valley.
In his presentation at The Park People Conference, Cardinal made it clear that the foundation for the 2022 opening of kihciy askiy was laid eighteen years earlier in 2004, when Aboriginal communities and the City of Edmonton co-created the Edmonton Urban Aboriginal Accord Relationship Agreement. The Agreement’s guiding principles established a new relationship between the two groups, which is best reflected in the statement:
“We believe all people in Edmonton are served well by positive relationships between the City and Aboriginal communities.”
Indigenous approaches to positive relationship-building such as mutual exchange and partnership, listening and storytelling, ceremony and celebration were, according to Cardinal, integral to the process of creating kihciy askiy. Over the long process of seeing the project to fruition, conflicts and challenges, of course, arose. However, Cardinal believes that the Agreement and the practices it codified helped “tamp down the darker forces of humanity” that can undermine visionary projects like Edmonton’s kihciy askiy.
Cardinal emphasized the importance of codifying the tenets of relationship-building in Agreements like the one in Edmonton. Once put in writing, these tenets set an intention for relationships that can be returned to again and again. In fact, one of the core principles of the Edmonton Urban Aboriginal Accord Relationship Agreement is a renewal, which includes the principle of “acknowledging this Agreement as a living document to be reviewed on a periodic basis to maintain accountability, transparency, inclusiveness, and responsiveness.”
Like Cardinal, Rena Soutar, Manager of Decolonization, Arts and Culture, and Spencer Lindsay, Reconciliation Planner, both from the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, consider the act of engaging in difficult conversations as the pathway to decolonizing park practices.
The Colonial Audit, which will be released in December, uses conversation as its central tool. In fact, for the audit, Soutar and Lindsay conducted 21 interviews over 5 months across 7 departments. As Soutar and Lindsay see it, only meaningful conversations can reveal the deep-seated colonial assumptions, beliefs and approaches underpinning the organization’s colonial park practices. In the audit, they identified 27 stories that illustrate the current effects of colonialism.
One story of embedded colonialism that Soutar and Lindsay shared at the Conference is the development of Vancouver’s NorthEast False Creek Plan. NorthEast False Creek is a prime downtown waterfront area in Vancouver that was set for redevelopment. Consultations with Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations and Urban Indigenous communities revealed that “access to water” was a top priority for the park’s redevelopment. However, when preliminary plans for the site were shared, it was clear that this critical piece of First Nations’ input was lost in translation.
The Park Board hit ‘pause’ on the project to take the time to understand how, after so much consultation with local First Nations, the park’s design could miss the mark. The conversations that ensued helped highlight the importance of “cultural translation” in park design.
As Soutar and Lindsay shared, for the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations “access to water” in the park’s design meant the individuals would have direct access to the shoreline- in an intimate and immersive way. However, colonial mindsets dictated that “access to water” meant enjoying beautiful vistas of water from a distance. In other words, for settlers, access to water means a beautiful vista from which to gaze at nature from a god-like vantage point. For local First Nations, it meant fishing, conducting ceremonies, and placing their hands and feet directly in the water.
As Soutar and Lindsay highlighted, the Northeast False Creek Plan reveals the consequences of unexamined colonial perspectives. The conversation that centered First Nations’ perspectives instead of settler ones, as Soutar says, “turned the narrative upside down to show the embedded colonial perspective.” These conversations made invisible colonial worldview visible, which then opened up the opportunity to “unlearn.”
Cardinal, Soutar, and Lindsay all underscored that decolonizing colonial relationships with nature is an urgent imperative. As Cardinal put it, “we are living in sacred times.”
Decolonizing our relationship with nature means, according to Cardinal, “understanding the connection between ourselves and the natural and spiritual world that surrounds us.” Cardinal shared that reciprocity with nature requires settlers to recognize that humans are not at the “top of the food chain” or at “the center of the universe,” but rather occupy but “one seat in this great circle of life.” As he puts it, “being in a relationship uncentres individuals as the focus,” and helps people view themselves in “a bigger context of family, community, and nature.”
Like Cardinal, Soutar and Lindsay emphasized that decolonization is the only path forward if we are to protect ecological diversity, which is essential for humans to survive. As their presentations underscored, the future of humans is bound up with our relationships with each other and with the rest of nature. As Soutar shared, “plenitude, abundance—that was already here” before settlers arrived and declared Vancouver’s unceded territories ‘parks’ that are ‘for everyone.’
As Soutar, Lindsay, and Cardinal make clear in their presentations on decolonizing parks and relationships, if we are to collectively move in the direction of decolonizing our parks, we must “forget everything we know” about our relationships to each other and the rest of nature. But, before we can forget or unlearn, we need to render the too often invisible colonialist practices visible. The learning, which is the focus of the audit, moves us in the right direction since, as Soutar reminded attendees: “decolonization is a direction, not an outcome.”