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.
If you strolled past Elm Park during “League,” you might have scratched your head. Are those people really fencing with pool noodles? Playing bocce with a can of Campbell’s soup? Attacking a couch with bean bags?
Everyone who lives in Kerrisdale on Vancouver’s west side knows Elm Park as a home for baseball, soccer and tennis. But where did these strange new sports come from?
Artist Germaine Koh is the games master who moved into the park to generate these new ways to play. The park’s humble fieldhouse, once home to a caretaker, became her studio.
In 2011, the city’s park board came up with a new way to use these old buildings to benefit the communities they’re in, inviting artists to pitch residencies in exchange for use of the space rent-free. Koh’s proposal: work with the public to create brand-new sports and games.
Koh, who had played competitive badminton, volleyball and roller derby, wanted to explore the similarities between art and sport. Her artsy friends would always say they’re not jocks, and her sporty friends would always say that they’re not creative. She disagreed about this divide.
“In sports, you practice certain techniques over and over again. In that way, you gain mastery, but you also gain an ability to improvise, strategize and negotiate,” says Koh. “All of those are totally abilities and skills central to the creative process.”
The park board approved her residency for 2012 to 2014. Elm Park was a “tough nut to crack,” says Koh, “because people were used to organized recreation.” But the wacky ways that balls, discs, ropes, planks and trees were used caught the curiosity of passersby, with turnouts of a few dozen on the most crowded days.
The fieldhouses themselves are humble places. They’re single-storey, beige or grey and often attached to the park’s public washrooms. But for artists like Koh, they’re precious spaces in an expensive city.
“The interior décor was taupe coloured, not my choice,” says Koh with a laugh. “But I felt so privileged to be able to sit in a park and work.”
Vancouver’s fieldhouses have a long history, but Koh and others are moving in during a new life stage for the buildings.
The city started building fieldhouses in the 1920s. About 70 of the city’s 230 parks have one. They were the living quarters for the park caretakers, Hagrids and Groundskeeper Willies who tidied up and kept a round-the-clock watch. Living rent-free in the park was a special perk of the job, something no other major Canadian city offered. Caretakers settled in for long tenures, typically two to four decades.
David and Normande Waine were caretakers in the most prized fieldhouse residence of all – the one in the city’s massive Stanley Park, steps from the ocean. To get it took 14 years on a waiting list “as thick as the Bible.”
“We never looked back,” David Waine once told the National Post. “It’s a privilege to be here.”
But 2005 would bring the beginning of the end of what the Waines called “eyes and ears” in public parks. The city decided that it would no longer install new caretakers to live in fieldhouses when the previous ones retired. Services were being consolidated, and the city was considering new uses for these buildings — though it took some time to determine what that would be.
When caretakers moved out, many of the fieldhouses were left empty or used for an unimaginative purpose: storage for sports equipment. One experiment turned the Grandview Park fieldhouse on the city’s east side into a community policing centre, but locals were displeased with the increased surveillance, and the police eventually left.In Vancouver, a park board of seven elected commissioners oversees and determines the policy direction of the city’s parks. In 2011, the commissioners directed staff to come up with an idea for the future of park fieldhouses.
Staff returned with a solution that also addressed a growing Vancouver problem. Fieldhouses were valuable real estate in public hands; meanwhile, creative people were struggling with the cost of studio space in the expensive city. Why not invite them in?
Artists like Koh were invited to pitch residencies to the park board. Those who were approved got to use the fieldhouses as studio spaces rent-free for three years, with an option to reapply (though, unlike the park caretakers, the artists did not actually live in the fieldhouses). The park board welcomed an initial cohort of eight residencies.
But there was a key condition. Artists were required to do 350 hours of public programming as part of their residency.
“We would not do a closed art studio, where you’re a jeweller just working on your jewelry practice,” says Marie Lopes, who coordinates arts, culture and engagement at the city. “You have to have some interest in working with the community.”
Composer Mark Haney seized the opportunity to do neighbourhood storytelling through music. He held a residency at Falaise Park, in the middle of the Renfrew Heights Veterans Housing Project, built to house soldiers who had returned from the Second World War. Haney and a partner researched the lives of 11 veterans who had a connection to the area, interviewing relatives and digging through archives. On Remembrance Day 2014, he debuted a piece inspired by the veterans called “11”, with musical cues that nodded to their lives. It was performed by eleven musicians on the hillside park, each playing a brass instrument chosen to fit a veteran’s personality.
The park board has since expanded the program to welcome a variety of disciplines: athletes, ecologists, chefs, cultural groups and more. It is currently in place in 23 parks, and now provides office space for non-profit groups, as well as studios.
One residency at Adanac Park teaches locals how to fight the “alien invasion” taking over public parks and private gardens: the fieldhouse is home to the Invasive Species Council of Metro Vancouver, battling everything from knotweed to the European fire ant.
Mr. Fire-Man at Maclean Park teaches locals how to harvest wood and make their own musical instruments. Night Hoops, which helps out at-risk youth, runs a free basketball program and connects young people with mentors on and off the court. The Iris Film Collective at Burrard View Park shares the love of celluloid; if you prefer a different visual medium, there’s the Cloudscape Comics Collective at Memorial Park.
With each round of residencies, the park board publishes which fieldhouses are available and a recommended focus for each. A fieldhouse in a park near a diverse ecosystem, for example, could be targeted for environmental stewardship. Applicants can indicate which park fieldhouse they prefer, but, ultimately, the park board makes the decision. For example, the Strathcona Park fieldhouse hosts a residency by the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty. It’s a significant match, as the park is near where many Indigenous residents live and is a rare green space in that part of the inner city.
The park board provides each residency with a staff liaison to connect them with people and programs at the nearby community centre. That way, residencies get a sense of who locals are and what they might be interested in.
Some fieldhouses were ready to go, some needed renovations, but for the most part, “they just needed a coat of paint,” says Lopes. “With a little spit and polish, we were able to turn them into active spaces again.”
Not every artist is interested in spending 350 hours with the public, even if rent is covered. But it was perfect for Koh because League, as she named her residency, was not an art project she could have done on her own. She needed players to try out, refine, even invent the games with her and was able to emerge from the residency with a batch of tested and crowdsourced games.
Koh was pleased to see people of different athletic abilities get in on the action, whether as players or as “Bossypants” who direct play.
“It’s an interesting thing: some games are more cerebral, others are more physical,” she says.
In “Scrumble,” players wear t-shirts with a letter on the front and back and attempt to spell words by rearranging themselves. In “Petri,” players score by throwing balls into different-sized “Petri dishes” – circles drawn on the field. The balls each have different bacterial qualities and can multiply points, so the exponential growth might suddenly rocket someone into first place. (Perhaps a good post-COVID game? Koh now wonders.)
Players also improvised with the park itself, not just the field. The fieldhouse had a yard, and teams competed to build the best structure for growing beans. It was a summer-long race to see whose beans would grow the tallest, a game of patience and engineering. Koh describes it as a “slow race to new heights.”
An old couch lent to the fieldhouse wouldn’t fit through the door, and so it was placed outside for games of “Couchie,” which was introduced to the League crowd by two friends who had invented it during their university days as roommates. Players throw beanbags to try and lodge them into the couch’s cracks for points.
Some games took players outside of the park’s boundaries. The Arbutus Corridor was nearby, a disused Canadian Pacific rail track that ran north from the Fraser River, through the park’s neighbourhood of Kerrisdale, and up to False Creek. It would eventually be purchased by the city in 2016 and converted into the 8.5-kilometre Arbutus Greenway for recreational use.
Even back when it was a disused track, Koh saw its potential. Similar to fieldhouses, the track was an underused urban space waiting for reinvention. She encouraged players to walk the length of the track and turn the experience into some kind of game. One player found a bunch of lost pages from a book and read them during the walk. Koh herself scooped a glass of water from the river and carried it all the way to the creek, where she deposited it.
Koh muses a lot about the theoretical question of what play is, but her simple hope for League’s participants was that they would learn to adopt a playful attitude in their lives.
“One of the intentions was to expand the notion of where play begins and where the play ends, and stop thinking that play is just a thing for kids or something that just happens on a sports field,” she says. “Play is a way of developing useful problem-solving skills, an attitude of everyday creativity.”
Before Fresh Roots moved into its fieldhouse, the urban farming non-profit was already getting creative with underused urban land. The organization was founded in 2009, and partners with schools to turn their yards into edible gardens and to educate young people on how to grow fresh food.
When the opportunity came up for a fieldhouse, Fresh Roots applied and settled into the one at Norquay Park. It has just been approved for a second term.
Norquay Park is right on the city’s busy thoroughfare of Kingsway, and the fieldhouse is beside the playground and spray park. It’s a high-traffic spot in a high-traffic park, and Fresh Roots has grown a sharing garden that passersby can’t miss, tended by staff and volunteers.
“It takes a lot of labour, and the weeds are taking over!” sighs Caroline Manuel, the communications and engagement manager, who works out of the fieldhouse office. The pandemic’s dip in volunteers has made maintaining the sharing garden a challenge. Still, the crop is plentiful this year. There are green beans, beet greens, rhubarb, raspberry canes, red-flowering currant, sage, thyme and more — and the public is welcome to take from any of them.
Planted in this part of the east side, Fresh Roots partners with other groups nearby, such as summer camps and seniors groups
“We tested the waters and there’s lots and lots of interest to have hands in the dirt, direct access to a space to tend to,” says Manuel.
Fresh Roots also runs “Art in the Park” events. The art that they did with summer camps — crafts like seed bombs — proved to be so popular that they offered them to the public.
The fieldhouse has helped give the non-profit a physical presence in the community with which to make wider connections. That contact is especially helpful because 40 percent of the Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood exclusively speaks a language other than English at home.
“Not everyone’s on social media,” says Manuel. “We’re putting signs in as many languages as we can, chatting with people chatting with people as they come by, basically just trying to be here so people do start to feel comfortable to ask questions.”
Lopes is pleased the park board can help by situating artists and cultural groups in the middle of the communities they serve.
“In a city where rents are what they are, relieves that pressure for an artist studio or a non-profit office,” she says.
Marie Lopes can’t stress enough that it’s the “open door” that’s key to the program’s success.
By bringing art and engagement into everyday parks, the fieldhouse program removes some of the barriers that stand in the way of accessing art and other activities through museums or formal programs. And that engagement can be as casual or as collaborative as locals like. They might stop by a nearby park to enjoy music put on by the residency for half an hour. Or they might work closely with the fieldhouse residency for the full three years as a collaborator.
She says the park board occasionally gets calls from other cities curious about the fieldhouses, as they’ve become a “flagship” program.
Nearby, North Vancouver runs residencies out of the Blue Cabin, a remodelled 1927 float home. Richmond runs residencies out of the heritage Branscombe House, one of the first settler homes in what was the village of Steveston.
Lopes has this advice for cities looking to start similar programs, whether it’s out of fieldhouses or other unused buildings.
“Look at your assets really carefully,” she says. “Stop thinking about your unused spaces as problematic. They’re opportunities. Look for collaborators where everybody wins. The community benefit is just boundless.”
About Christopher Cheung
Christopher Cheung is a Vancouver journalist. He is interested in the power and politics behind urban change, and how Vancouver’s many diasporas strive to make a home in a city with colonial legacies. He is a staff reporter at The Tyee.
Tasmeen Syed was five years old, walking down Mabelle Avenue with her cousins when she came across people painting in the park that sits between seven large residential towers in central Etobicoke.
Previously just a neglected space with broken fences, an out-of-order water fountain and eroded slopes that people cut across to get to the Islington subway station, Mabelle Park is now a vibrant park whose lush art gardens, log seating, ice hut, wooden shed and colourful camper trailer bring together the residents within the surrounding Toronto Community Housing buildings, many of them newcomers to Canada, low-income families, and seniors.
“I wanted to paint on rocks and spray paint canvases and wear a funny giant shirt that makes me look like a tiny mad scientist covered in paint, and I’m doing all these fun things and they said, ‘come back tomorrow, we’re gonna do something even crazier’,” recalls Syed of that first encounter with MABELLEArts, an initiative that aims to bring together the Mabelle Avenue community through the creative arts.
She spent that entire summer with the MABELLEarts team and has spent every year since with them. She’s currently wrapping up a role with them as a community mobilizer before she heads off to university.
Her experience seems indicative of the way many of the residents of Mabelle Avenue, the 4,000 people who live in the towers belonging to Toronto Community Housing, have come to encounter MABELLEArts: an initial sense of curiosity that leads to committing many days and nights enjoying activities with the dedicated MABELLEarts team.
Nicolette Felix, the director of community mobilization at MABELLEarts, says that the area is an underserved pocket that nobody really knew existed. It’s a drop of density in the largely low-rise suburban west end of Toronto, and although tucked between fairly busy streets it only has walkable access to a small number of amenities, including a dollar store, a middle school, and a smattering of restaurants.
It’s surprisingly small considering how much happens.”
Leah Houston, MABELLEarts Artistic Director
“It’s quite hard to find, if you’re driving by you may not even see it,” adds Felix. But, she adds, MABELLEarts “really put Mabelle on the map.”
That attention, in turn, generated funding opportunities, which help to sustain the programming. The additional funding “allows us to serve more people in our community, and we’ve been able to create employment, because, as our programs expand, we need more hands-on-deck,” says Felix. “There are no better people to hire than folks who live on the block, who understand the needs.”
The park itself is owned by Toronto Community Housing, and its support enabled the opportunity to work directly with the residents of Mabelle Avenue. “We’ve been able to co-imagine and make real the kind of park we want to have in a way that could be more challenging if it was a City of Toronto park,” says Houston.Houston founded the organization in 2007, born out of working with Jumblies Theatre, which brings theatre into urban neighbourhoods. Houston brought the spirit of Jumblies to Mabelle Avenue, with a focus on bringing art into places where it normally doesn’t exist and bringing people together in public spaces.
Children and their families who are involved with the Arab Community Center of Toronto (ACCT), a non-profit that helps in the settlement of newcomers to Canada, are among those who have benefited greatly from participating in MABELLEarts events.
“When it comes to newcomer families that we serve – and ours is not an area that is paid attention to for many reasons – where they come from, art is a luxury type of thing,” says Dima Amad, the executive director of ACCT. “Children, youth and families don’t get to really participate in art-based activities that will contribute to their mental health and well-being, that will bring them together in a space where they are learning new things, but also to know other people.”
Despite the pandemic pause on many of the activities in the MABELLEarts calendar, you’ll still find their stamp everywhere on the grounds, with colourful flags, engraved art, and gardens and planters filled with brightly coloured flowers and native species. Comfortable spots with benches and hand-carved wooden stools invite passers-by to sit. A signature fire pit with a MABELLEarts cover on it is dormant, waiting for the time when it can be fired up for cooking once again.
Setting up a presence in that space was integral to building trust among MABELLEarts’ community.
“ comes from being in the same place for so long and publicly visible because we’re out in a park,” says Houston. “Even people who don’t participate know us, and they see a kind of tangible outcome of our presence.”
A number of temporary outbuildings include a trailer that serves as a mobile café, a woodshed, and a former ice fishing hut, all of which have been “Mabelle-ized,” meaning artfully decorated with brightly coloured paints. The organization plans to open a permanent space in Mabelle Park through the Mabelle Arts Project (MAP), a community centre that will be a clubhouse for MABELLEarts programming and serve food via its community kitchen.
“My interest as an artist was really in land-based work, public space, working outdoors, fusing food and gardening and outdoor activity with art,” says Houston. “More of ceremony, ritual, and events rather than a classic theatre piece with a script and actors.”
That philosophy has resulted in years of activating a space that would have otherwise been unused and encouraging the community of Mabelle Avenue residents to come together through performances, workshops, events, and activities like smashing watermelons to mark the end of the school year. For that event, the youngest or newest child in the community smashes the first watermelon on the ground, while a marauding chorus of trolls yells and shakes their fists in the direction of the local school.
The focus on every age being engaged is a core part of what MABELLEarts does, including a range of youth and elder events. “Working intergenerationally was really important because it was an opportunity for whole families to do something together, which is often missing in our society,” says Houston. “You sign up for a program for your son or your grandma,” she adds, pointing out that not many full-family activities exist in the city.
ust as many other organizations had to rethink how they could operate during the COVID-19 pandemic, MABELLEarts had to pivot as well, temporarily putting aside much of its in-person arts programming, which required gathering in large groups.
“Being there every day was something powerful about us as an organization,” says Houston. “We’re not there every day anymore, but in some ways, we’re even more connected to people with wellness calls, and that initiative continues to this day.”
The pandemic also brought out the launch of the MABELLEpantry, after the discovery that Mabelle Avenue was in a food desert. The program is dedicated to getting food to those who need it. It takes place every Wednesday in the park, which is set up to look and feel like a farmer’s market, with bales of hay stacked near tables full of fresh produce.
Houston began driving to the grocery store and buying food for 10 households, “hoping that people didn’t think I was a hoarder.” Now the pantry assists 550 households, with volunteers bringing food to building lobbies for those who can’t travel to the park.
There are no plans to close up the pantry once the pandemic is over. “No matter what phase we were in, or what reopening, we realized that this was something that needed to continue,” says Felix.
A core mission of MABELLEarts is infusing all activities with art, theatre and design, and Houston admits that finding a way to incorporate that into food security was hard. They decided to have two therapeutic clowns play with people in line at the pantry, while at the same time ensuring everyone stayed safe and six feet apart.
“On the one hand, it encourages and actually enforces people to social distance, but it’s also like bringing a kind of black humour into what is a very serious situation,” says Houston. “I’ve loved watching them play with people in the pantry, and defuse anger and conflict with their silliness.”
Houston participates as well, as the emcee, in an eye-catching outfit. “I try to be really funny, silly, and warm with people,” she says. “The premise is that we’re playing with the pantry as if it’s a party or rock and roll. But what it is, is a food bank.”
“Most people in the food bank business care a lot about human dignity and privacy, and they want people to leave feeling good, but not a lot of food banks are concerned with humour and beauty. And we really are,” she adds.
Focusing on food security during the pandemic has also brought in more participants than usual, in particularly isolated seniors.
“People who might not have necessarily been comfortable coming out to sit and listen to some music if they didn’t know people, or just that it was too much work with their walker, those people are all coming down now,” says Claudine Crangle, MABELLEarts fundraising lead. “There’s a broader group of people who, I’m positive, will be even more involved in the arts and culture pieces as they’re starting to really ramp back up.”
“What people tell us over and over again is, you are my family. I’m here from another place, I don’t know a lot of people and I see you as my family,” says Houston, recalling a common refrain she hears at the pantry. “Between us as a staff, I would say we know everyone unless someone is new …. We can greet them almost all by name between us.”
For senior Bernadette Shulman, participating in MABELLEarts has eased her loneliness and introduced her to new things, like drawing, sewing, beadwork, and even some dances.
“It makes life more enjoyable,” she says. “When I walk down Mabelle Avenue, people are calling my name and sometimes I don’t even know them. But I smile because they have to know me from MABELLEarts because it’s only MABELLEarts in this community where everyone actually knows each other.”
The future of Mabelle Park is all about doubling down and creating permanent infrastructure that will enable the organization to invest even more time with the residents.
“We’ve been in the neighbourhood for so long, and because our work was so deeply collaborative, we built a profound amount of trust and eagerness to do things,” says Houston. “Imagine 100 households who are just really keen to do stuff with us, and we realized that that was a really unusual opportunity, so we started to think about what we might be able to do with that level of trust and willingness to collaborate.”
That brought them to create MAP, the multi-year strategy to really solidify MABELLEarts’ position in the community with a permanent clubhouse, a more official role as an intermediary between TCH and the tenants, and a plan to work together for more community improvements.
MAP is moving forward, and Houston says they’re busy working on the final design for the permanent community centre and securing funding.
Felix says that having a permanent space dedicated to MABELLEarts will allow for the expansion of arts programming, provide a community kitchen, and enable the seeding of micro-businesses that would be run by community members.
The social enterprise projects are in the planning phase, and Felix says there are many untapped potential business ideas waiting for an opportunity.
“There are a lot of folks who live on Mabelle that have prior experience in the food industry and we’re seeing people coming into the pantry and telling us about things that they’ve done in the past, and all their hidden talents, and we’re hoping that we can harness that and develop some programming that trains people how to run their own business and then cycle it through the MABELLEpantry and sell back to the community while keeping many of our other initiatives going,” she says.
For the moment, the team of youth summer staff is working on beautifying the park, with a lot of gardening and planting, for the community that’s slowly emerging from their towers. The MABELLEarts team is putting down seeds for what they hope will be more beautiful community engagement for years to come.
The people behind this community arts organization are passionate about the work they do, and it’s that commitment that truly unifies the Mabelle Avenue residents in unexpected ways, from smashing watermelons together to intercultural Iftar nights, with food, ceremony and arts that activate the park during the month-long Ramadan observance. It’s a bright, joyful spot in a pocket of Etobicoke that could have remained dark and unused.
“I’ve never even heard of anything else like this,” says Syed. “It surprises me that other people don’t have a weird organization in their park.”
About Kelly Boutsalis
Kelly Boutsalis is a writer and journalist, based in Toronto. She is Mohawk, and from the Six Nations reserve. Her words have appeared in The Toronto Star, Spacing, The Globe and Mail and The Walrus.
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.
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
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.
They say all good things must come to an end. But sometimes, if we are lucky, endings can be the start of something even more beautiful. That is exactly what happened at Parc Jarry in the Villeray-St-Michel-Parc-Extension borough of Montreal, where the community park group Coalition des amis du Parc Jarry (CAP Jarry)*, recipients of a TD Park People Grant, turned the cast-offs of the Christmas season into a beautiful Ephemeral Forest of recycled trees that reflected community members’ hope and dreams.
Every January, once the holidays come to an end, bare Christmas trees are tossed to the curb. In fact, there are approximately 6 million trees in Canada that await the landfill every year. If not recycled properly and simply thrown out, every tree can create approximately 16kg of carbon dioxide. Not only does this have a significant impact on the environment, but it also misses a great opportunity to give the trees a more impactful second life.
CAP Jarry, led by Michel Lafleur, set out to tackle this challenge. Instead of the landfill, they invited all Montreal residents to bring their old Christmas trees to Parc Jarry, plant them in pre-made wooden stands, and create a magical Ephemeral Forest where park-goers could wander in a safe and socially-distanced manner. After a two-weeks on display in the park, a company specializing in repurposing wood removed the trees and gave them a new life.
To make the trees even more magical, community members were invited to write their wishes and hopes for the new year on little pieces of paper tied to their tree. This gave every tree a personal touch and it gave people a chance to express their vision for the future. At a time when social interactions are rare and we long to interact with others, reading the personal wishes on every tree felt like an intimate exchange with the Christmas tree’s new owner – their ideas, their hopes, and dreams for the future.
The forest created a sense of human connection at a time when people need it most. Walking through the hundreds of trees in the middle of the vast Parc Jarry created an inspiring, joyful and frankly magical experience.
“Everyone was smiling”, remembers Villeray’s mayor Mme. Fumagalli, who helped facilitate the project from a political and administrative point of view.
“There was a lot of curiosity, a kind of mutual help, above all, such synergy… The project had an enormous positive impact”.
Mme. Fumagalli found it especially extraordinary how citizens got involved and took ownership of their parks this winter. From the Ephemeral Forest to the hordes of Montrealers who built snowmen across city parks after a snowstorm, she says we clearly see “the necessity during winter to have some kind of animation, especially with the current COVID context”.
Another key to this event’s success was in its simplicity: the idea is easily transferable to other parks, boroughs and cities to create their own magical Ephemeral Forest. “I am certain that it is an idea that will have a snowball effect”, assures Mme. Fumagalli. “There is so much potential, from vacant lots to small parks, the reproducible aspect on a small scale, and the fact that it requires few resources”.
Nothing is more rewarding than planting food and watching it grow from seed to harvest. That’s why thousands of people get their hands dirty in community gardens across the country. First and foremost, growing fruits and vegetables provides people with access to fresh food. But community gardens also play a vital role in connecting people to nature and each other, enhancing community resilience and well-being.
“The power of food, placemaking and public spaces is far-reaching and intersects greatly with the issues we are facing today.”
DeeDee, Marpole Temporary Community Garden
Among the 72 outstanding community park groups awarded TD Park People Grants this year are several that demonstrate how growing and harvesting food is a powerful pathway to cultivating community and ecological resilience.
Since 2016, TD Park People Grants have helped 365 grassroots community groups and community-based non-profits build vital connections between people and parks. Two of the community gardening groups supported through a TD Park People Grant this year are Marpole Temporary Community Garden in Vancouver and the Congolese Women’s Group in Ottawa.
Both groups demonstrate how environmental education, sustainability, and stewardship come together, both joyfully and fruitfully, in gardens that are programmed and animated by communities.
Marpole Temporary Community Garden was initiated by DeeDee Nelson who took it upon herself to investigate a “locked up and neglected” plot of land during the pandemic. As DeeDee initiated efforts to clean the space, she tells us, “people just started poking their heads in and asking about joining in.”The temporary garden is in Marpole, one of the geographic areas identified by the Vancouver Park Board as an Equity Initiative Zone. A developer provided the space to the community temporarily, just until construction begins. Located on a busy road, with, what Dee Dee describes as “cars whizzing by on Granville Street,” the garden is a green oasis that transports participants from the congestion and busyness of traffic into a lush space that nourishes the community.
The Congolese Women’s Group is made up of 21 new immigrant women living in the neighbourhoods served by the South-East Ottawa Community Health Centre (SEOCHC). The group was formed in 2019 after a picnic in the park inspired the group to make better use of outdoor spaces. Euphrasie, who works at the SEOCHC as a Community Developer, noticed that the women were both eager to find affordable sources of fresh food and keen to learn about plants. She humbly proposed a community gardening program, asking participants: “What do you think about starting a community garden? Even if it’s a small one, you can start there.” And with that, the women began growing food.
Also located in an equity-deserving neighbourhood, The Congolese Women’s Group sees the community garden sessions as an avenue to address issues like isolation, safety, and mental well-being in the community. In addition to gardening workshops, a Harvest Celebration will joyfully close off the season.
Access to quality, nutritious fruits and vegetables is a systemic challenge in equity-deserving communities. Food insecurity has become an even bigger challenge for low-income families as food costs continue to rise. As DeeDee shares:
“There are so many seniors on a fixed limited budget, and they have told me specifically that they’re growing their own food because it’s too expensive in the store.”
While both groups recognize the community gardens’ role in addressing food insecurity, they also prioritize sharing the harvests’ surplus with others. At Marpole Temporary Community Garden, participants frequently hand out fresh vegetables to passers-by. In fact, they’ve set up what they call a “Veggie Table” to formalize the generous gesture. When people ask “how much does it cost?” DeeDee gleefully responds,
“It’s free. It’s totally free.”
The Congolese Women’s Group also shares this spirit of solidarity. The food collected during the workshops will be distributed to the community during an end-of-season Harvest Celebration which Euphrase shares, will be a “great, great event.” The food from the harvest will be shared with the entire community as a gesture that Eurphase says symbolizes that “yes, there’s something we can do together that can be beneficial, not only to us who are working there but also to everyone in the community.”
The community gardens play an important role in connecting participants to one other and to the broader community. At Marpole Temporary Community Garden, DeeDee has witnessed how engagement in the community garden leads to greater civic engagement overall. She shares:
“All of a sudden people learn they have a voice. They start to realize that the municipal government is made up of real people that can help make things happen. Every citizen can think about what they would like in their community and then ask for it, and that goes not only for public spaces but for land use, active transportation options and virtually anything else that goes on in a community. We have a say in our cities and the more we realize this, the more empowered we are to speak up.”
DeeDee surmises that seniors have been particularly attracted to the garden because many live alone. Particularly during COVID when seniors needed to avoid indoor spaces to protect their health, the community garden gave them a unique opportunity to socialize in the outdoors. She adds: “We are in dire need of outside space for the community. For people to come and spend time in nature and have a community space to gather.”
In our interview, Euphrasie from the Congolese Women’s Group shares how the community garden is a vital source of joyful community connection:
“I saw children coming and wandering in the community garden to look at the plants. They started asking: ‘Oh, what’s this? Oh, what’s that?’ It’s a very nice place to be because participants engage with people of all ages. They meet their seniors, they meet their kids, they meet with their parents. And wow, it’s such a place a way to bring people together to break that isolation, to just help people to go beyond what is going on in their life. You know, and when they meet, it’s just laughter. I love it.”
While laughter and glee fill the garden, it’s important to recognize that community gardens do the serious heavy lifting when it comes to building social resilience. As DeeDee from Marpole Temporary Community Garden astutely recognizes, the kind of social resilience cultivated in community gardens will be increasingly important in the face of climate change:
“Growing that community spirit and community connection is I think, totally what makes a resilient community because then if something like the heat dome or flooding happens, we know who’s down the street and who needs help.”
As we recently highlighted in the 2022 Canadian City Parks Report: “There are multiple inequities in the access and enjoyment of urban green spaces, with ramifications for climate justice, equitable park development, and public health.”
Community gardens in equity deserving communities provide people with access to green outdoor spaces that support individuals’ health and well-being. We know that people who spend more time in nature enjoy enhanced cognitive functioning. They are also more likely to report high levels of happiness and well-being.
As Euphrasie from the Congolese Women’s Group nicely puts it:
“Even if you’re not working in the community garden, just going in there, you breathe, that fresh air, you hear the birds singing. This is good for your health, for this environment and for the community.”
In all of the programs at Marpole Temporary Community Garden, DeeDee starts with a meaningful land acknowledgement, inviting participants to think beyond how nature can benefit human life, and encourages everyone to think about how they can enhance the natural world:
“If we’re saying thank you to the land, that means we must be getting something. So what are we giving? I like to ask people to consider our relationship within nature just like any healthy relationship, one that has a spirit of reciprocity.”
During the workshops, DeeDee teaches participants to use permaculture and syntropic agriculture approaches derived from Indigenous knowledge to enrich the land. For her, those practices are key to ensuring a sustainable planet.
“It really makes us think about what would be the best way to make this sustainable growth, not just growing for this year, but growing for the future.”
Both Marpole Temporary Community Garden and the Congolese Women’s Group underscored that finding space for community gardens is incredibly challenging. While the Congolese Women’s Group was able to secure space through the City of Ottawa’s Community Garden Program, Euphrasie emphasized how long and complicated the process can be:
“It used to be easier to apply for a plot. You just had to go in person and ask. But now everything is online, which is making it more difficult for us. It takes us more time and energy.”
Marpole Temporary Community Garden is situated on private land. However, relying on the generosity of private land owners is not sustainable over the long term. As DeeDee puts it “We’re enjoying our wonderful borrowed backyard while we have it.”
Given the many benefits of community gardens, we need to ensure gardeners have access to spaces to build meaningful relationships with one another, their community and the natural environment.
“Gardening nourishes the community physically, emotionally and mentally. It is a significant reminder of how working together as a community benefits everyone.”
Euphrasie, Congolese Women’s Group
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.
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Park engagement has been transformed by the pandemic. In our survey, 92% of cities said Covid has changed how they engage communities, and 23% said engagement has become a greater priority since the start of the pandemic.
As we’ve written elsewhere in the Canadian City Parks Report, it’s not just the format of engagement that has changed as cities shift from in-person to online methods. Cities are also sharpening their focus on building relationships with groups that have historically been left out, with 35% reporting that the pandemic has prompted more intentional outreach to equity-deserving groups.
“There is new awareness about systemic inequity, and creating equity in our park system means talking with those most affected.”
City staff, Gelph
This work is needed. Our public survey showed that equity-deserving groups face disproportionate barriers to participating in city-led park planning processes. Overall, the top three barriers respondents cited were: being unsure of how to get involved (36%), unsure if their participation would make a difference (31%), and not having enough time to participate (28%). These percentages were higher for respondents who identified as Black, Indigenous or a person of colour (BIPOC), at 48%, 35%, and 36%, respectively.
Cities and community groups across the country are responding to these barriers through creative methods that put equity at the fore.
It is vital to involve communities in deciding what the engagement process looks like, said Jennifer Chan, Co-founder and CEO of the Department of Imaginary Affairs (DIA) . Last summer, the organization led a project called A Tale of Two Parks to surface stories of safe and unsafe experiences that exist at the same park. Through the project, six racialized youth were hired as Social Researchers to engage park goers, especially BIPOC communities, in two Toronto parks.
Through conversations with community members at the park, the DIA team learned that park goers often have great ideas for changes they’d like to see, but community members often felt that “it doesn’t really matter what our ideas are, since the city doesn’t care about us” Chan said. “This statement really struck me in thinking about, how can we meaningfully engage with community when the starting perspective is that ‘the city doesn’t care about us?'”
In response, the DIA designed a participatory planning game called “What if Parks Were Designed By Us?” The game allows participants to experience and define a months-long planning process in a matter of minutes. It invites community members to work together to develop their own planning process, strengthening their ability as a community to identify issues, build a unified vision, and even practice dealing with monkey wrenches getting thrown into their plan.
By gamifying the planning process, DIA aims to reduce barriers to existing planning processes as well envision new possibilities for park engagement, shifting away from traditional mechanisms like town halls “where all the power is held by the city, not with the community,” Chan said.
The City of Toronto has been engaging residents for the Toronto Island Park Master Plan since 2020, which will set out a new vision for a beloved destination park accessible by ferry just minutes from downtown. It’s a signature project that involves many stakeholders, as the Island is meant to serve all Torontonians.
A key priority for the engagement team is embedding an equity lens throughout the process. “Equity really is framed by identifying who is and who isn’t at the table,” said Daniel Fusca, the city’s Manager of Consultation for Parks, Forestry and Recreation.
The process started with a pre-engagement phase—a new approach for the division. This involved meeting with relevant community organizations, Indigenous partners, and other departments within the city, to get a sense of their priorities and determine how they wanted to be involved.
The pre-engagement phase “goes against most people’s instincts of what is appropriate engagement,” Fusca said. There’s an expectation, rooted in conventional engagement practices, to “put something in front of the public for them to react to or else it’s a waste of their time.”
“It took a bit of work to convince everybody that this is actually a good idea,” Fusca said. “There’s a bit of getting people out of their comfort zone.”
The pre-engagement with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN) and other Indigenous partners was especially vital given the significance of the Islands as a sacred place of healing and ceremony. Through these conversations, the city heard about the importance of incorporating ceremony into the engagement events, and re-working their land acknowledgment to recognize the waters as well as the lands.
They also heard that each Indigenous partner had different collaboration preferences. Some rights holders preferred regular meetings with the city. For the urban Indigenous communities, they’ve held sharing circles during each phase which are led by an Indigenous facilitator—something the community identified as important.
Lori Ellis, Project Officer of Strategic Projects, acknowledged that the pre-engagement took time and required them to adjust their original scope of work. “But it’s worth its weight in gold in regards to building that foundation of trust and transparency,” she said, noting that the city is now looking to incorporate a pre-engagement phase into future projects.
It’s also laid a foundation for ongoing collaboration with different communities to share back how their input has been used. The project team has tried to make these touchpoints meaningful by tailoring them to the community’s specific interests and input, Fusca said. “We would hone in the presentation to just focus on the things that were most meaningful to them and try to reflect back anything they told us,” he shared.
Constantly scanning to “identify the key voices that are still missing, and to do our best to address that” has been another strategy at the heart of the city’s approach, Fusca said. For example, after identifying that youth and racialized communities living outside of the downtown core were underrepresented in the first phase of engagement, they developed a Youth Ambassador Program.
The program hired a team of 10 youth between the ages of 15 to 27 who collectively spoke nine different languages and lived in neighbourhoods outside of the downtown core. They were provided with training and a budget to design their own outreach program to engage their communities.
Pablo Muñoz, a Senior Public Consultation Coordinator for the city who has previous experience as a youth worker, noted the important role youth play as conduits of information to and from the community. “For a lot of immigrant and refugee families, children and youth tend to be the connection to the Canadian English-speaking world. They tend to be the translators, and in many ways, have a big leadership role,” he said. This is a finding echoed in recent Park People research that explored barriers to park engagement in Vancouver’s equity-deserving neighbourhoods.
Another learning from the process is that despite the breadth of audiences involved in the project, it’s been important to hold space to go deeper through small group workshops centred on equity.
Some workshops included visioning exercises guided by Bob Goulais, an Anishinaabe facilitator, where participants closed their eyes to envision the future of the Islands. “It’s a much different way than bureaucratic engagement, where we’re going inwards and acknowledging a little bit more of the soul and the spirit,” said Muñoz.
Other initiatives included an “equity and belonging deep-dive,” and a video interview with activists and historians about the LGBTQ2S+ history of Hanlan’s Point, a clothing-optional beach on the Islands.
At these sessions, “the turnout would be smaller, but the conversation would be much richer. None of these conversations ever went the way you thought that they were going to go. And they always were incredibly meaningful,” Muñoz said.
What other cities are doing:
Zahra Ebrahim, Co-founder of Monumental and Park People Board Chair, said that when it comes to deepening engagement, in many ways cities are “set up to fail.” Through research to inform the Making Space toolkit—a resource for engaging equity-deserving communities in planning processes—Ebrahim and her team learned that cities may face internal barriers to implementing meaningful processes.
However, many of these issues could be addressed through “simple intervention points,” Ebrahim said: