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.
The plot of former agricultural land next to the Parc nature de l’Anse-à-l’Orme, on the western edge of Montreal, is fascinating in many ways. For one thing, it’s home to 270 species of flora and fauna that thrive within a mix of wetlands, woods and meadows. It occupies 365 hectares of land, making it one of the largest undeveloped—and until recently unprotected—swathes of natural territory on this island that more than two million people call home. But perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how few people seem to know it exists.
“At so many of the doors we knocked on, people didn’t even know that right beside them was this massive former agricultural land that was regenerating,” says Sue Stacho, Co-founder of Sauvons L’Anse-à -L’Orme*. In 2015, when a huge new residential project called Cap Nature was announced for this parcel of land, she helped start a group to protect it from development.
“We worked really hard – blood, sweat and tears,” she says. “We had to do so much to communicate why spaces like that are so important.” They knocked on doors, and hosted events like a Mother’s Day walk through the woods and evening stroll to appreciate the frog population: “any type of exposure to the area that we could bring to it.”
It worked. In 2019, Montreal mayor Valérie Plante announced the creation of the Grand parc de l’Ouest*, which will protect the area around l’Anse-à-l’Orme from development. But it goes much further than that: the new green space will be the largest municipal park in Canada, with a 30-square-kilometre expanse that includes active farmland, McGill University’s Morgan Arboretum, existing nature parks and previously unprotected natural areas that were vulnerable to development.
It’s a lesson in how grassroots activism can achieve tangible results. And it’s an opportunity to boost the amount of green space in Montreal, which has only 24 square metres per person, one of the lowest rates among Canada’s cities. But the Grand parc de l’Ouest is also a project of staggering scope, complexity and ambition. Not only does it span an area that is 15 times larger than Mount Royal Park, Montreal’s largest and most recognizable urban green space, it is a hodgepodge of different spaces crisscrossed by roads, railways and watercourses. It spans two Montreal boroughs and three independent towns, encompassing five existing nature parks and lands owned by McGill University.
The Grand parc de l’Ouest brings to mind other large, edge-of-city parks, such as the Rouge National Urban Park near Toronto, Fish Creek Provincial Park in Calgary and the Blue Mountain Wilderness Connector in Halifax. Like these, the Grand parc de l’Ouest has the dual mission of protecting biodiversity while giving urban dwellers access to nature. Those goals are not always easy to reconcile. In 2019, Parks Canada developed a detailed management plan for Rouge Park with the goal of balancing the needs of agriculture, recreation and conservation. The Nova Scotia Nature Trust, a charity that manages land across the province, is taking a similar approach in its stewardship of Blue Mountain.
For the Grand parc de l’Ouest, the challenge becomes particularly obvious when you look at its location on a map. Autoroute 40, one of Canada’s busiest highways, runs straight through the park, and in 2023 the Réseau express métropolitain (REM) metro system will open with a station at l’Anse à l’Orme, with trains arriving from downtown Montreal every 10 minutes. That will make the park very easy to access but could pose a problem when it comes to managing human impact on sensitive natural areas. On top of everything, the Grand parc de l’Ouest will be run not by Parks Canada or a provincial authority, but by the City of Montreal, which has more limited experience in managing natural areas.
All of that adds up to something with extraordinary potential – and no shortage of pitfalls.
“It’s been a long time in Montreal since we’ve seen the willingness to make these big gestures,” says Jonathan Cha, a landscape architect, urbanist and heritage consultant. “The challenge will be grouping all of these different natural spaces together. It’s a project that will require a lot of time, a lot of money – a very long-term project. But it’s a grand vision. There’s almost no space leftover on Montreal Island and this secures it for the benefit and well-being of the population.”
That this natural space came to be left undeveloped in one of Canada’s largest and most densely populated cities is the result of a half-century of effort by environmentalists and community activists. As with other parts of Montreal, the western third of the island – a dangling apostrophe of land buffeted by Lake St. Louis, the Lake of Two Mountains and the Rivière des Prairies – was once a lush broadleaf woodland frequented by people of the Haudenosaunee nations that lived in the region. After the arrival of French colonists in the middle of the 17th century, the colonial administration gave control of the land to the priests of the Sulpician Order, who divided it into strips of property to be farmed by colonists.
Aside from a handful of villages and early railroad suburbs, the West Island remained largely rural until after the Second World War.
“Even the tree-lined seigneurial property boundaries were still in place,” recalls historian George Vassiadis, who moved to the West Island as a child in 1968. Things changed quickly with Montreal’s postwar suburban expansion. “For the first few years after we moved into our new duplex on Spring Garden Road, the view across the street was of fields which had only recently ceased to be cultivated,” Vassiadis wrote in the arts journal Montréal Serai. “By the mid-1970s the fields had been replaced with houses.”
As bungalows and strip malls quickly ate away at farmland, developers turned their attention to some of the area’s last pockets of woodland. In 1977, plans were drawn up to raze the Bois-de-Saraguay, a biodiverse pocket of forest next to an old village, and replace it with apartment blocks, single-family houses, two shopping centres and a marina. Nearby residents successfully fought the plans, leading to the creation of Montreal’s first nature park. In 1979, Quebec’s government gave the regional council, the Montreal Urban Community, the power to develop a whole network of nature parks, including several that will now be part of the Grand parc de l’Ouest: Rapides-du-Cheval-Blanc, Bois-de-l’Île-Bizard, Cap-Saint-Jacques and l’Anse-à-l’Orme.
Conservation is the focus in each of these parks, but they are also popular recreational spots for people from across Greater Montreal. The largest of the parks is Cap-Saint-Jacques, which every weekend attracts thousands of people, most of them arriving by car, although that could change when the REM offers rapid transit access. In the winter, they rent fat bikes or snowshoes and head off into the woods. In the spring, they drizzle maple syrup onto oreilles de crisse – crispy pork rinds – at the park’s sugar shack. And in the summer, a broad, sandy beach beckons with views across the Lake of the Two Mountains.
Although these nature parks already cover a significant amount of land, they were broken up by private property that was long coveted by developers. For decades, much of that land had been protected by special agricultural zoning, but when the zoning was lifted in 1991, a resulting tax increase forced many farmers out of business. Over the years, the now-abandoned lands steadily returned to a more natural state. “There’s a whole range of wildlife that had been returning to these lands that had now been left fallow waiting for a development project to come along,” says David Fletcher, who co-founded the Green Coalition, a West Island environmental watchdog, in 1988. “All these animals that are iconic in eastern Canada, like the fisher and the white-tailed deer, were finding their way back to Montreal.”
Sue Stacho, who has been involved with the Green Coalition since the early 2000s, came across the abandoned farmland next to l’Anse-à-l’Orme one day while riding her bike.
“It’s this amazing place. Natural,” she says. “It wasn’t managed with trails and park benches everywhere. There are thermal pools in the spring. There are wetlands. Every time I went, if I went in a new way, I would find something new to learn about. If you know your way around, you can be out there all day.”
In 2015, a proposal to develop the land was announced. Known as Cap Nature and billed by its developer as “an environmentally responsible neighbourhood,” it would have preserved 180 hectares of the old farmland, but the remaining 185 hectares would be replaced by 5,500 housing units. Stacho and other members of the Green Coalition decided to fight it. Banding together to form a pressure group called Sauvons l’Anse-à-l’Orme, they succeeded in recruiting a host of other environmental organizations – including the Suzuki Foundation, CPAWS Quebec and the Sierra Club – to join their cause.
Citizen support was particularly crucial to their effort, which drew the attention of Projet Montréal, a municipal political party with a focus on sustainable development. “Once they learned about the space and realized there was real momentum growing for the protection of it, they were always around,” says Stacho. When Projet Montréal won a surprise victory in the 2017 Montreal elections, the wheels for the Grand parc de l’Ouest were set in motion.
The announcement of the park in September 2019 was greeted by the threat of lawsuits from landowners, including the developers of Cap Nature. By the end of that year, however, the city had managed to negotiate the purchase of most of the privately-held land in question. “There’s still about 40 to 45 hectares in private hands, but there’s no way a viable project could work,” says Fletcher. He considers the park a victory. “It’s been a very long haul. Quite a tumultuous three decades. We’ve been on guard with those lands for all that time.”
Fletcher gives special credit to Stacho, whose ability to raise public awareness of the old farmland is what opened the door to the new park.
“She’s a very energetic woman and her team did a remarkable job in bringing that to a conclusion,” he says. Now the conclusion of one chapter is leading to the beginning of another: the process of actually developing the Grand parc de l’Ouest.
Public consultations began last year, with most activities taking place online due to the pandemic. The challenge now will be to balance different visions of what the park should be. Stacho wants to see an emphasis on conservation, but some West Island residents are eager for more recreational opportunities, with some even raising the possibility of motocross trails in a recent online roundtable discussion. The green space is also used for hunting deer and trapping beavers, which the province recently declined to ban despite pressure from Montreal. “I’ve gone out and seen signs of activity there like shotgun shells and rifle cartridges left on the ground,” says Fletcher. “The kind of trapping taking place there is wire snare – it’s brutal. Absolutely horrific.”
Jonathan Cha points out that, beyond its natural spaces, the Grand parc de l’Ouest includes plenty of built heritage, including stone walls and houses from the French colonial era. “You need a very fine-grained knowledge of the territory to come up with a plan for it,” he says. There’s also the question of active agricultural lands, which make up a significant proportion of the new park. “Who will manage those lands?” asks Cha. “Farmer-proprietors? Co-ops? The city will need to create a new model to manage a park like this. There will need to be an additional layer of expertise on top of what they’re already used to.”
It will be a generational process, he says. “You need to have people around the table who are going to be there for a long time. There has to be a continuity in the process. The challenges are so big and numerous and the area is so vast and complicated there isn’t anyone person who can grasp everything that is going to be happening.”
What it comes down to is something Sue Stacho realized in her fight to save l’Anse-à-l’Orme: parks need people. It was the local community that rallied to protect this land from development, and it was through the collective action of many different people that the Grand parc de l’Ouest was created. Now those same people—and many others—will be needed to shape, sustain and nurture the park for decades to come.
About Christopher Dewolf
Christopher DeWolf is a Montreal-based journalist who focuses on cities and culture. Previously based in Hong Kong, he is the managing editor of Zolima CityMag and a regular contributor to the South China Morning Post, Eater and other publications. His book “Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong” examines the tension between grassroots and top-down views of urban life.
Are you currently running your park group with a growing number of volunteers? Is your group getting more ambitious and looking for some direction around governance? The committee model is useful when your group is too large for a leadership team model or if you are looking for ways to share leadership better and move things along more quickly. How the committee model gets applied varies based on the nature of your group and your goals. We asked the Friends of Roxton Road Parks to give you a flavour of what the committee model might mean for your organization.
It’s no surprise that park groups organize themselves differently from not-for-profit organizations with paid staff. For many volunteers, park work is a ‘side-hustle’ on top of work or family responsibilities. Individual responsibilities can range from light to overwhelming, and the governance model that an organization has a lot to do with moderating workload.
Grassroots Growth, a project from Volunteer Toronto, highlights three models of governance common for smaller organizations like most community park groups. The three most common models to consider for your community park group are Strong Leader, Leadership Team and Committee. This article will illustrate the application of the Committee model, as applied by (FoRRP).
According to Grassroots Growth, with the Committee model “members of the governance structure are organized into various committees or working groups. Each committee is responsible for specialized tasks with respect to the group’s activities. All the committees do work that ties back to the organization’s mission and vision.” The Committee model is useful when your group is too large for a Leadership Team model or you are looking for ways to share leadership better and move things along more quickly.
We spoke with Zac Childs, Convenor of FoRRP in Toronto, Ontario, whose organization takes care of three parks in west Toronto: Fred Hamilton Playground, George Ben Park, and the Roxton Road Parkette. The organization came into being in 2011 when a group of eight Ward 19 neighbours responded to a City of Toronto need for local guidance on upgrades to Fred Hamilton Playground. These eight people formed FoRRP, which started out with a Leadership Team governance model: each member had a distinct duty, but all worked together on a common goal. The Leadership Team model spreads the load amongst a number of members.
As the group’s goals quickly became more ambitious, members were struggling to keep up with all of the duties that their positions entailed. A year after it was formed, the loose affiliation of people sharing a common purpose had officially formed the Friends of Roxton Road Parks, comprising a Board of Directors and distinct committees formed to oversee specific aspects of the revitalization of the three adjacent parks along Roxton Road.
FoRRP moved from a Team Leadership to a Committee model in order to tackle more projects more effectively, spreading the workload amongst more people in an organized fashion. Committees consist of several members who tackle one project area, such as ‘history’ or ‘playground’. Each FoRRP committee has a Chair and a Co-Chair to lead committee activities. Committees may also have other regular members, depending on their size. All committees are overseen by the Board of Directors, which decides on the direction that the organization is going to take. Directors may be Committee Chairs and Co-Chairs, but it is not a prerequisite for being a Director.
Committees pursue various initiatives independently and make their own decisions. Major initiatives are typically approved by the Board of Directors before they are initiated, especially if they require funds from the group or municipal approval. If there are multiple options, Directors may decide to hold a vote.
In all, FoRRP has over 50 members including Directors, committee members and peripheral members who mostly come out to events. The organization also maintains an email list of approximately 150 consisting of members and volunteers, neighbours, park users, and anyone else who wishes to follow the group’s activities.
“The more the better,” comments Childs.
“Groups like ours can use all the friends we can get, so we don’t insist on membership to be in the know about what we are doing. In fact, that information encourages people to join.”
FoRRP holds an Annual General Meeting, open to the public, where Board Directors and Chairs of the various committees are nominated and voted in. To keep silos from forming within the group, the organization also has four Steering Committee meetings per year in which they discuss park activities and the progress of the committees. Some members of the broader group also attend these meetings.FoRRP committees currently include:
Since the FoRRP group officially convened in 2011, some City of Toronto funds were procured and allocated for work beginning at Fred Hamilton Park for maintenance and capital upgrades. Significant park levies from a condo development on College Street have provided additional funds for future upgrades as well, but that was not enough. FoRRP applied for a Live Green Toronto grant, for which they had to become an official not-for-profit (NFP) organization. Since FORP already had a board of directors and a more formalized governance structure, they were ahead of the game in that respect.As part of the transition to NFP, FoRRP decided on four key principles to guide their park husbandry, principles designed to align the growing membership on organizational purpose:
Volunteer groups need to build in resilience in order to operate and thrive. The Committee model helps with that. When there is a change in the group or someone in a leadership position leaves, a benefit of the Committee structure is that it enables another member who is already involved in that aspect of FoRRP’s work to step in and fill the shoes of the member who is departing.
Like most all-volunteer groups, FoRRP has had many people join and step away as their interests and obligations changed. In a bid to facilitate such changes, the group has come up with a few practices: asking for advance notice when someone is stepping down, always bringing in new volunteers, keeping good records, and being open to dropping a park initiative if a member resigns.
As Childs says:
“Ultimately, we want our members to keep doing what they’re doing as long as it’s fun. When you get people working together in committees, it increases their ability to step up and fill a void left by a departing committee member. We’re prepared when people come and go.”
If your parks group is taking on more responsibility and has a growing core team, think about the Committee model of governance. It puts control into more hands and can make it easier to divide the workload to achieve more. It’s also a flexible path to creating a more formalized governance structure. This can ease the way to incorporation if that is a group goal.
Because parks are used by different people whose sense of safety may bump up against one another, the topic of safety is very complicated. What makes one group feel safe, may make another feel unsafe and unwelcome. At its core, safety means inhabiting a predictable, orderly world that is somewhat within our control. After our basic physiological needs are met, the need for safety and security is a basic need for everyone.
How do you create safe environments in parks?
Because parks are used by different people whose sense of safety may bump up against one another, the topic of safety is very complicated. What makes one group feel safe, may make another feel unsafe and unwelcome. We spoke to two community park groups who have faced safety challenges and are working hard to make their parks welcoming, inclusive, and safe places. Here’s what we learned.
When a sexual assault happened in Graham Park in September 2017, the community surrounding the St. Clair West Neighbourhood in Toronto was devastated. People retreated from the park and laneway that was a common access point to the park.
The park had experienced mounting safety concerns over many years and the sexual assault catalyzed the community members surrounding Graham Park to move into action. Feeling helpless in addressing this complex topic, their first step was to connect with Metrac, a non-profit that delivers innovative safety services in Toronto, including conducting safety audits for communities. As they describe, the goal of Metrac’s safety audit is to “improve the environment to make it safer, more inclusive and less threatening for users.”
When Julian Back contacted Metrac, they set up a one-day training followed by a safety audit. The audit was open to everyone in the community and to any park users. Key government and park staff were also invited.
The core of Metrac’s safety audit process is a facilitated walk around the entire park, giving everyone a chance to reflect on their experiences and feelings of safety while at specific locations within the park.
As Metrac points out, “lived experience informs the outcome of the audit.”
To this end, Metrac strongly encourages groups to go the extra mile to ensure that people from different ages and backgrounds participate in the audit. This is anything but simple to put into practice. But, they encourage groups to go beyond the general principles of good outreach to ensure a range of perspectives are welcomed and heard. A solid approach is working with community leaders who have the trust of the community. Providing them with some training and key messages to address any concerns will help ensure diverse representation.
Even if there’s not a version of Metrac in your city, it’s critical to have a facilitated discussion about the challenges the park is facing. An experienced facilitator can make sure voices are respectfully heard and that no one group or individual feels like the “target” of the discussion, even if conflicting perspectives of the park emerged.
For example, youth who gather on the picnic benches may justifiably feel unsafe when adults throw accusatory glances or make disparaging comments. On the flip side, the adults may feel unsafe when large groups of youth congregate on park benches. It takes careful facilitation to make it possible to recognize and acknowledge differing and conflicting perceptions of safety, but it is possible.
“The safety audit is an opportunity for the community to learn how to better resolve conflict, together.”
Linda Frempong, Safety Audit Coordinator at Metrac.
Another Toronto park group, Friends of Masaryk Park and Melbourne Parkette formed to help improve conditions in the park which had been neglected for years and was in a horrible state of disrepair, including broken benches and playground equipment, dead trees and broken lights.Masaryk Park is in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, where people struggling with addiction live alongside the largest concentration of Tibetans outside of Asia. It’s also a community that is quickly gentrifying.
Friends of Masaryk Park and Melbourne Parkette took concrete steps to get input from as many people in the community as possible.
Very quickly, Susan Armstrong, the group’s founder, learned two valuable things:
Approaching the challenges of the park through the lens of safety ensures improvements will move more quickly with the Municipality.
Community members need to participate in the process since they know their park best and are at risk of feeling alienated by the very people who are trying to help.
Armstrong kicked off the new Friends group by launching a petition asking the city to replace a broken-down play structure. The petition included pictures of the structure in a state of disrepair. The petition gave the park group a reason to connect to the community and to make it known that they were actively working to engage the city. They also communicated that a meeting in the park would follow the petition to discuss next steps.
“The truth is, more affluent residents tend to be more vocal and therefore don’t leave a lot of space for the rest of the community,” says Armstrong.
The Friends group addressed this challenge by decentralizing the input process by allowing people to share their views on potential changes in the places where they spent time. A small group of volunteers approached residents one by one to let them know of the potential changes to the park and to get their input. It is a great way for park groups to meet neighbours and to reach out to residents who you might not hear from. They also posted notices of the changes at the library, the community centre, the Community Health Centre, at a series of community meetings and of course, right in the park.
Metrac’s 40-page report on Graham Park highlights numerous recommendations on improved lighting and visibility, the park’s features, the quality of maintenance and access to the park and the beautification of the park to create a space that is engaging and inviting. The report was shared with the Councillor and policeJulian Back knows that it will take time to implement the changes and is confident that key structural changes will happen over time. But he also realized that quick wins would help build momentum for the park.
One of the key recommendations from the report was to make the park entrance much more inviting. Previously, a park sign forced people to enter the park through a narrow, roughly paved entryway that made them feel unsafe. Now, the entrance to the park has been significantly opened up by moving the sign and electrical box and the pathway has been repaved. Because the park’s entrance is ostensibly the doorway to the park, the change made a significant impression on the community.
Another finding was that the alleyway at the back of the park was tagged with graffiti, making the view into the park uninviting and ominous.
With funds from a community-driven crowdfunding campaign and the support of the city, local community members Julian Back and Kim Lesperence engaged with Wall Expressions and Street Art Toronto and 40 walls and garages were painted with vibrant artwork–all in a single weekend. It was a painting blitz which resulted in a vibrant “outdoor art gallery.”
Julian and Kim invited the whole community to join in a celebration in the Graham park while the painting process took place. The celebration helped launch the new murals which brought much-needed vibrancy to the park.
Susan at Masaryk park drives home the importance of small changes.
“Once residents see a few improvements they will take notice and start to view the park differently.”
After the petition was submitted, the park’s play structure was replaced within 6 months. Next, the city removed a fence and dense shrubs and lowered a hill to improve sightlines and make the park feel more open and accessible from the street.Over the next 2 years, broken benches were removed and replaced, and finally, more garbage bins made a huge difference in getting garbage out of the park. A small but mighty way to make a difference.
Susan’s experience has taught her that while it’s important to have a plan for changes to the park, you have to be willing to be flexible.
“Keep asking the City nicely and stress the need for safety” she advises.
Of course, Masaryk park still has a very long wish-list but an iterative process has benefits: people feel the history of the park is respected and they get to see how small changes impact park use.
Safety comes with getting more people to come to the park. Generally, a busy place is a safe place. This goes back to what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street.”
Masaryk park has a long history of collaborating with local organizations to animate the park. Greenest City, a local non-profit has a flourishing community garden, called HOPE community garden, in the park and they have partnered with Friends of Masaryk Park to host parties, art projects, potlucks in the park and provide support for the summer/fall Good Food Market.
In addition Friends of Masaryk Park and Melbourne Parkette has collaborated with the local library to host kids book readings, sourced drums from the local Community Health Centre to run community-led drumming lessons, and worked with the Greenest City to host a Good Food Market in the park.
The Friends of Masaryk Park also hosts their own programs in the park-like family pizza parties, a pumpkin parade, the annual 50 Cent kids book sale, movie nights, and splash pad Water fight nights.
Susan’s advice is that it can literally take years for programs like these to catch on, so be patient and give programs time to grow and iterate.
Since changes at Graham Park, Julian has seen more young children using the park and more summer camps use the park for activities. It’s the beginning of a long journey to restore a sense of safety within the community, but it’s already making a difference. also a flexible path to creating a more formalized governance structure. This can ease the way to incorporation if that is a group goal.
As a child growing up on the westside of Vancouver, the railroad track along the Arbutus Corridor ran behind the tall hedges of our backyard. My sister and I would play along the tracks with neighbourhood kids, often leaving pennies behind to discover them flattened by passing trains the next day. Children have a way of turning any space, even an industrial rail line, into a place for social gathering and play. Almost 40 years later, many cities around the world have adopted out-of-the-box thinking, converting underused industrial land into public spaces. This innovative approach to park design includes the Arbutus Corridor, which the City of Vancouver purchased in 2016 and is working to transform into the Arbutus Greenway, a ribbon of pathways and parks through the heart of Vancouver’s westside.
“The Arbutus Corridor has a history and it runs through parts of the city that in everyone’s minds are already developed. Converting it to a greenway was an act of tenacity and creativity, working with the community to see the world in a different way, and to see a park there waiting to be discovered.”
Antonio Gómez-Palacio, a partner at DIALOG, the urban planning firm that led the design and engagement process for the project.
The Greenway’s history spans over 100 years – from its beginnings as a railway for passengers and local industry, to contentious negotiations between the City of Vancouver and CP rail for its purchase. Today, it is an active transportation pathway that runs from the tourist destination of Granville Island to Vancouver’s southern edge, overlooking the Fraser River. In the future, it will become a multimodal corridor linking a series of destination parks and public spaces, and in the meantime, the local community has found creative ways to bring people together along its path.
The Arbutus Corridor, originally called the Vancouver & Lulu Island Railway, was built by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1902 to connect Vancouver to the Richmond community of Steveston, home to a bustling fishing and canning industry. In 1905, the BC Electric Company leased the line from the CPR, electrified it, and began running a passenger rail service called the Interurban. It departed from the north end of the Granville Bridge, travelled through the westside neighbourhoods of Vancouver, and ended in Richmond. Interurban trains ceased operation in 1952, but short freight trains continued to use the Arbutus Corridor until 2001 (one of its last customers was the Molson Brewery). After that, the tracks remained dormant for 15 years.
Throughout that time, the idea of developing a greenway along the corridor was part of Vancouver’s future plans. Council passed the Arbutus Corridor Official Development Plan in 2000, which proposed turning it into a multi-use transportation greenway. In 2014, the City of Vancouver was finally in negotiations with Canadian Pacific (CP) to purchase the land, which runs through some of the most valuable property in North America; however, they couldn’t agree on a price. As a result, Canadian Pacific threatened to run trains along the line and started tearing out adjacent community gardens in preparation. This action hastened negotiations and an agreement was reached in March 2016, with the City buying the Arbutus Corridor for $55 million. At the time, then-mayor Gregor Robertson said the 42 acres would be used as a greenway with the possibility of light passenger rail in the future.
The City didn’t wait for those plans to be finalized before making the corridor available to the public. Within a year, Vancouver built a temporary 9.5 km asphalt path along the rail line that connected six communities on the city’s westside. The interim design for the Arbutus Greenway has been in place for over four years and is widely used and embraced by the local community. It now attracts thousands of people every day, providing an opportunity to walk, bike, and roll from False Creek to the Fraser River. According to a health study of the Greenway conducted by INTERACT from 2016-2019, the usage grows exponentially every year and, overall, it is seen by the community as a safe natural oasis in the city where you can go for an uninterrupted, smooth stroll and have informal social interactions.
“It has opened up a new avenue of meeting and greeting people and getting to know neighbours.”
Study participant from the Marpole neighbourhood.
“It just feels spacious and open. I feel like I’m suddenly in the midst of nature in the middle of a very busy city, and it’s just peaceful.”
Study participant from Kerrisdale.
In 2018, Vancouver City Council endorsed enhancing the path to give people more places to gather, rest, and enjoy the surrounding landscape. This decision kicked off the planning process to create the Arbutus Greenway. The Greenway’s ambitious plans are not expected to be completed until 2034, but in the meantime, many local organizations have worked to activate the existing space with grassroots projects that demonstrate its potential.
The Arbutus Greenway Neighbour Hub dubbed a local “lending library of things,” was created by Neighbour Lab, a design and urban planning cooperative, in collaboration with the Thingery. A seating area and a bulletin board were set up to enable the community to share information. The showpiece installation was a hand crank that passersby could use to produce kinetic energy to charge cell phones.
“We launched the Neighbour Hub to create a community hub and gathering spot along the Arbutus Greenway,” says Stephanie Koenig, Content Developer for Neighbour Lab. “We designed and built the project together with a neighbourhood stewardship team. We also had a neighbour passing by as we were installing who ended up helping build a free library on the side!”
The next step in the Greenway’s evolution will be to implement the permanent transformation of this space, so that it becomes not just a pathway but a multifaceted destination both for the many neighbourhoods along the route and for people across Vancouver.
In the words of the City of Vancouver, “The Arbutus Greenway is a defining element of Vancouver’s urban landscape. It is envisioned to be a destination inspired by nature and stories of the places it connects.”
Greenways are linear parks for pedestrians and cyclists that connect nature reserves, cultural features, historic sites, neighbourhoods, and retail areas. Vancouver’s most popular greenways have typically been purpose-built and along the waterfront, like the Stanley Park and False Creek seawalls. The Arbutus Greenway is the first greenway connecting the north and south side of Vancouver through an existing built-up area, using repurposed industrial land. The plan for the Arbutus corridor is part of a growing urbanism trend toward transforming obsolete infrastructure into public space. One of the most famous examples is the High Line in New York City, a 2.33 km-long elevated linear park created on a former New York Central Railroad spur. Since opening in June 2009, the High Line has become a tourist attraction that, by 2019, had eight million visitors per year. Projects like the High Line and Vancouver’s Arbutus Greenway exemplify the challenge of finding park space in the built-up city. When there isn’t a parking lot to convert into a park, cities get creative to find other underused pockets of land. In Canada, Toronto’s Meadoway is turning a hydro corridor in Scarborough into a 16-kilometre stretch of urban greenspace and meadowlands. The city also launched the Bentway to turn previously unused space under the Gardiner Expressway near the lakefront into a linear park. In 2020, the need for more urban parks like these reached a fever pitch as cities struggled with citizens in lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic demanding more access to nature. It became clear that parks aren’t just “a nice to have,” they are necessary to our wellbeing.
According to a Park People survey in June 2020, 80% of Canadians said parks had become more important to their mental health during the pandemic. As one respondent wrote, “Living alone has meant that walks and outside visits are the only social contact I have had for 4 months. I would have been a mess without access to parks, ravines, trails, and the waterfront.”
In 2017, the City of Vancouver worked with DIALOG, a Canadian urban planning and design firm, to kick off a large public engagement campaign on the future design for the Arbutus Greenway Before the City launched the official public engagement process, there was already buzz and excitement at the community level. City staff initially put out markers along the Arbutus Corridor to start the conversation on its future and received a large volume of responses from local residents. Overall, people wanted the Greenway to be a safe, accessible transportation route with opportunities to socialize and connect with nature:
“It should be a car-free corridor with plenty of opportunities for people to slowly travel its length, stop and enjoy nature, have a bite to eat at nearby restaurants. Parks and open spaces to relax.”
“I would like to see re-introduction of local wildlife if it all possible, more birds, more pollinators. I want to feel like I’m out in nature while in the middle of the city.”
“That is why making the Greenway a people place, instead of just a multimodal corridor, became such a priority,” says Mr. Gómez-Palacio. “There was already so much grassroots involvement and it kept that spirit of park and placemaking front and centre throughout the design process.”
As part of the planning and design process, the Arbutus Greenway project team had 7,000 touchpoints with members of the public at over 50 events, including a multi-day design workshop, numerous stakeholder workshops, open houses, and online surveys. Community organizations such as the Vancouver Public Space Network were involved in the public engagement process from the start, to ensure that the Greenway would include vibrant public spaces and meet the needs of pedestrians and cyclists.
“We advocated for a design that had a strong pedestrian-primary focus, consistently separated ‘all ages and abilities’ bike routing, clear routing for the future streetcar – and, yes, lots of greenery for the greenway.”
Naomi Wittes Reichstein, Arbutus Greenway project lead for the Vancouver Public Space Network.
Reichstein’s mention of a streetcar references a major factor in the design for The Arbutus Greenway: future plans for a light rail transit (LRT) line. Although plans for an LRT remain part of the overall vision for the Greenway, the project’s focus has always been people.
“We have been involved in many designs like this and the biggest vehicle always wins. The Arbutus Greenway project was flipped, the first priority was making it a people place, not the streetcar. I have not seen this before or since,” says Gómez-Palacio. “We’ve made sure that any community programs are not lost when the streetcar is eventually built.”
The City of Vancouver summarized the consultation process in this way:
“The vision for the Arbutus Greenway was born out of significant public engagement on both what people’s aspirations for the greenway were and what they valued in terms of uses, activities and experiences. A number of overarching themes emerged over the course of the planning process. These include a desire for: safe, comfortable, and accessible design; places for social interaction, play, and relaxation; and opportunities for urban ecology and urban agriculture.”
The Arbutus Greenway connects several Vancouver neighbourhoods including Kitsilano, Arbutus Ridge, Shaughnessy, Kerrisdale, and Marpole. Reflecting this diversity, the long-term vision for the greenway is divided into eight distinct character zones that offer respite and reflect the look and feel of these surrounding neighbourhoods. This vision includes activated spaces that create a place for movement and a place to linger.
One zone in a retail section of Arbutus Ridge will become an “Electric Alley,” referring to the presence of utility poles and its adjacency to Broadway, a busy retail and movement corridor. This zone will provide an urban backdrop with two plaza areas that eventually connect to SkyTrain’s underground Broadway extension, as well as large overhead frames for public art, lighting, and weather protection.
“We wanted to build on the existing character of these communities,” says Lindsey Fryett-Jerke, urban designer at DIALOG. “At the future Electric Alley, we observed kids selling lemonade and people selling clothing, so a theme of informal commerce emerged and we designed long, wide benches where people could display things.”
“At the Greenway’s southernmost point,” says Fryett-Jerke, “people watch planes landing at the airport, so we created a lookout tower.” That final zone, dubbed “The Lookout,” will boast a multi-storey viewing platform that provides views of the Fraser River Delta, Vancouver International Airport, and the San Juan Islands.
The other 6 zones will feature spaces to socialize and commune with nature. The “Harvest Table,” themed around food, will feature edible landscaping, long community tables for dining al fresco with neighbours, and a flexible space for pop-up activities. “The Ridge” and “Woodland Bend” will create nature sanctuaries, while the “Garden Path” will provide a wetland, boardwalk, and community kiosk. Gathering and activation areas will be created through large plaza spaces at “Kerrydale Pass,” the largest retail and civic hub on the greenway, and at the “Marpole Meander,” with a large community garden, ping pong and game board tables, a giant chessboard, hammocks, a bike skills course, a community “sharing” shed, and overhead frames for lights and public art. It is anticipated that Greenway construction will occur across four successive capital plans (developing two-character zones with each plan).
“The Arbutus Corridor was always considered the backside of the neighbourhoods it ran through,” says Gómez-Palacio. “With this new design, we are flipping it to the front and converting it 180 degrees to make it safe, welcome, and open for everyone.”
Over thirty years later, this hidden play space from my childhood will be transformed into a destination that spans the entire city for people of all ages and abilities to enjoy.
About Jillian Glover
Jillian is an accredited communications professional specializing in transportation and urban issues. She is a former Vancouver City Planning Commissioner and holds a Master of Urban Studies degree from Simon Fraser University. She was born and raised in Vancouver and writes about urban issues at This City Life —named one of the best city blogs by The Guardian.
How can you make sure the next group of volunteers are well-prepared to step into their roles? Diane Dalkin, President of Calgary’s Friends of Reader Rock Garden Society (FoRRGS) has made a point of planning for the next volunteer board President, long before she’s ready to step away from her role with the non-profit volunteer advisory group. Here’s Diane’s candid advice on succession planning to help your group with volunteer ‘futureproofing.’
From day one, Diane Dalkin, President of Calgary’s Friends of Reader Rock Garden Society (FoRRGS) operated under the principle that her time at FoRRGS is finite. She openly discussed this with the Board of Directors and has used it as a guiding principle in her role. Diane admits that this approach fundamentally changed how her group operates. Built-in succession planning pushed her team to be deliberate about codifying practices and documenting historical information. For example, FoRRGS had a long-standing verbal agreement with the City of Calgary whereby the City provides the group with free access to space and marketing materials and in return, FoRRGS leads educational programs on the site and helps raise funds for the park. Soon after starting, Diane requested that this verbal agreement be formalized with the City and suggested an annual Letter of Understanding with the City, to ensure that future members of the group and City staff could understand and benefit from the mutual agreement, regardless of staffing changes.
Diane believes that leadership potential can come from anywhere in the organization and that welcoming new people is key to succession planning. That’s why she implemented strategies that made it easier for people to join Friends of Reader Rock Garden Society. Here’s her advice:
Diane and her group changed the member structure to allow people to join the Friends of Reader Rock Garden Society without joining the board. This way, new members can ease into the organization, contributing time and talent in small, convenient increments and learn the ropes. This also helped new members fall in love with the purpose of the group, before making the time commitment required of board members. Diane says this strategy has helped attract several new people to the group and has become a gateway to deeper engagement.
FoRRGS has a great story to share about this historical garden park – Diane realized this early on and helped get that story into important marketing platforms like their website. Recognizing that technology is such an important vehicle for today’s communication strategy (i.e. social media), Diane made it a priority to find tech-savvy members to create their website and social media content. Diane believes that the group’s strong online presence featuring the park’s legacy, history, plant life, news and events is essential to attracting a broad range of new audiences.
In the past, the group was predominantly made up of history buffs. Diane and the FORRGS team recognized that there was an opportunity to attract different park users to the group. Diane and her team enlisted plant enthusiasts, educators, photographers, bird-watchers and people who just had a love of the park to become more engaged. Today, the team is comprised of Master Gardeners, retired teachers, engineers, geologists, yoga instructors, artists, communication professionals, financial advisors, and students, to mention but a few. The diversity of the group keeps ideas interesting and helps generate programs that appeal to a wide range of park users.
Diane has put practices in place to ensure that important information exists in more than one person’s institutional memory. For example, team members are encouraged to work in pairs, with a focus on information sharing. This way one member mentors the other in a particular skill. And, if one person can no longer commit to the volunteer group, someone else is prepared to step in and keep projects moving forward. Of course, no one likes to think of endings. But, by building the end into the beginning of your volunteer role, you can make sure that the final chapter is a happy, successful one, for everyone.
This resource will help you join the growing number of people helping improve their local park. It will show you how to get involved with your existing local park group and the step-by-step process you can follow to launch a new one.
By creating a community park group, you are showing that you care about parks and communities and want them to be better. There have been community park groups doing great work in their parks for decades. Park People is helping to grow the number of groups and build a connected network of groups across all of Canada.
Anyone can join a community park group! You can find an up to date list, contact information and links for many community park groups on the website of your city.
Many cities support park stewardship through Adopt-A-Park or Park Ambassador programs. If that’s the case, contact the Adopt-a-Park program coordinator in your city; he or she will be able to tell you if there is already a group in your park. If you’re not sure if you city has any stewardship programs, start by contacting 311.
In most Canadian cities, there is no official process for starting or registering a community park group. In some cities, adopt-a-park or other city-run park stewardship programs provide a formal process for getting involved – call 311 to learn more. While you may not need permission to start a community park group, it is always important to build a good relationship with your local city councillor, park staff and residents.
There are no formal rules or guidelines on how a community park group should be organized and operated. Just as every park is unique, every park group is unique and you will have to find the structure that works best for the members of your group. Here is a list of tips to keep in mind:
When you are starting out, keep it simple and easy. Unless you are getting into significant fundraising or cash flow, there is no need to incorporate as a non-profit.Becoming a legal charity that can issue tax receipts for donations is very time-consuming and expensive. If you are considering doing fundraising for your park, there are far easier alternatives than becoming charitable.Even if you don’t incorporate as a non-profit, your group can get a bank account, sometimes with low fees for community groups.
As citizens, we all have a say and a responsibility for our shared public spaces. Often these spaces are municipally owned parks, but they can also be social housing lands, schoolyards, electric transmission corridors or civic plazas. It’s important, before undertaking any work in the park, to find out who owns the land and who runs the maintenance operations. Connect with your councillor before undertaking any park projects. Your role as a community park group is to:
Ask any local community park group and they will say that one of the keys to their success has been building a constructive relationship with the staff who oversee the park. Find the park staff person whose job it is to monitor and stay on top of all key problems and issues in their assigned parks.Build a relationship with your park staff by:
Your priorities will depend on the needs you identify in your park as well as the talents and interests of the people involved. One person can’t do it all – try assigning key people to specific initiatives. Here are just a few examples:
Fundraising is never easy but it’s a critical way to show that there’s support for your project in your community. Here are a few ideas that have been used by park groups across Canada.
You are not alone and there are many people who want to help you succeed! Park People is here to support and guide you every step of the way. Sign up for our newsletter and check our Facebook and Instagram feed to stay on top of new developments in parks across the country. Attend our in-person or virtual events to meet and learn from other park groups.
We look forward to getting to know you.
“You are the spark! Share your dream for your park space with your closest friends in your neighbourhood and start the fire. Organize a community meeting with your councillor and advertise with flyers in your local paper. Collect emails at the meeting and ask each person on that list to invite one other neighbour to get involved. Set up your park group on Facebook and ask everyone to join. Now you are ablaze! Nothing is impossible!”
Dawn Chapman, Friends of Moncur Park
Working with a charitable trustee is a common, and very important step in your group’s growth. If you’re hoping to raise funds for events or park improvements, you’ll need a charitable trustee to receive funds and provide tax receipts. However, the benefits of having a positive relationship with a charitable trustee far exceed fundraising objectives. When well aligned, a relationship with a trustee will help both groups flourish.
As a small, community-based organization, how do you raise funds to do the things you need to do? You need to bring on new members, undertake projects that may involve hard costs and publicize the events you hold. And when you want to do something ambitious, you really need to get creative about fundraising. Grassroots organizations in Canada can take the form of an Association, a Trusteeship, a Not-for-Profit, or a Charity. Only two of these will enable you to issue donor tax receipts and to apply for most forms of publicly available grants. They are trusteeships and charities. Establishing a charitable trusteeship is the simplest, fastest way to issue tax receipts and access grants. In essence, you align your organization with a charity whose mandate is somewhat similar to yours. Tax receipts are important to donors, especially larger donors, because a portion of funds donated gets deducted from their taxes. We spoke to Julet Allen, Program Director at Delta Family Resource Centre, a grassroots, non-profit, community-based agency in Toronto’s Rexdale community.
The process of signing on a trustee is straightforward.
First, find a registered charity that does something similar to what you do. For example, if your mandate is to take care of and improve a local park, you could align yourself with a charity that has an environmental mandate, even if it’s, for instance, preserving wilderness areas across Canada.
Next, approach one or more organizations with a proposal. You will want to find an advocate within the organization. At some point, you will probably need to explain what you want to do to their senior staff or board of directors.
To establish a charitable trusteeship, you will need a Letter of Agreement that outlines the terms of the partnership and the roles and responsibilities for your group and for the charity. That’s pretty much all you need. There’s a sample letter below.
As far as responsibilities go, your group would typically be responsible for finding and writing grants, managing the deliverables and funding, managing the relationship with the funder and reporting back to them. The trustee would provide legal charitable status, history and credibility that you can mention in future proposals, a bank account and the financial infrastructure to manage money. As a charity, they will have a legal governance structure that likely includes a board of directors, audited financial statements and an annual report. These are things required by most funders.
As Julet emphasizes, being a trustee is a commitment that takes time:
“Ensure that the organization you want to work with has the same vision for you as you do for yourself…and that they have time to work with you.”
The main reason that a potential trustee would take you on is to further their own mandate.If they want to educate the public about wild places while working to preserve them, they may see the value of your mandate to maintain the integrity and enjoyment of a local park. Likewise, if they work to improve living conditions in a high needs neighbourhood, they may understand the important roles a safe, enjoyable park plays in terms of outdoor recreational and mental wellness.Trustees get to further their mandates, but they also get a small portion of funds you raise—typically 10% to 15%. That may seem like a lot for not much, but keep in mind that the charity has infrastructure to maintain, returns to file, cheques to process and bookkeeping to perform. By taking you on, they are also taking on reputational risk.Another kind of risk, legal risk, is something to discuss before signing a partnership agreement. Are you going to be covered under their insurance policy? If so, they will have to contact their insurance representative and may incur additional cost. Or they might ask you to prove that you have liability insurance of your own.
You might be thinking: ‘well, if we register as a charity, we can keep all the money we raise’. You would be correct, but there is a reason why most grassroots organizations progress the way they do. Here are the steps that most groups take:
The reason is that becoming a charity takes years, requires a lawyer and comes with obligations such as forming and keeping a board of directors and filing a charitable tax return every year. Most grassroots organizations find that in the early stages, these are not responsibilities they want to take on.
Any group that is a charity can be your trustee as long as you have something in common with their charitable mandate. We often advise park groups to find local organizations to partner with: if they are local, they can partner on doing things together. So if the charitable organization is having a street festival, you could complement it by putting on a park festival at the same time. As Julet aptly states: “Trusteeship goes beyond the financial. A trustee can provide guidance, like how to plan a budget or get funding. Trustees have resources that you can tap into.”
Not everyone knows where to find local charitable organizations. The best place to start is with precedents: park groups are often trusteed by local community health organizations, church groups and other neighbourhood organizations.
Before you enter into an agreement, it’s important to find the right fit. Part of that involves having clear conversations with a potential trustee about your mandates, your planned activities and your goals. It’s a good idea to document those conversations through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) or a Letter of Agreement, also called a Partnership Agreement.
A trusteeship is hands-down the best way for a smaller organization to gain the important advantages of a charity without all of the work and up-front cost. If you choose to go down that path, we wish you the best of luck in your quest! We’re looking forward to seeing you grow.
Click here to see a sample of trustee agreement.
Partnerships can be fruitful, but finding and building the right partnership can also be challenging and time-consuming. If the organization you want to work with is not on the same page, a partnership can even be counterproductive. The key to any worthwhile partnership is sharing the same vision and building trust.
Building partnerships with other groups in the community can help you achieve your goals more quickly and effectively. We spoke to Shahina Sayani, a Community Planner with the City of Toronto who shared her insider tips for making community partnerships work.
Does the local community organization you want to team up with share your vision? Start by clearly articulating your vision as an organization and your vision of the project on which you want to collaborate. If you don’t have your vision quite clear in your mind, don’t hesitate to say so. Some of the most successful partnerships are built when organizations start with an idea and build a vision and a plan together.Insider Tip: If the group you want to work with has a website or other materials, read up on the organization to see whether their focus and vision dovetails with yours. If it appears to, clearly articulate your vision for the project in your first meeting and gauge the other party’s reaction.
Trust takes time to build. In a true partnership, both parties have to be able to invest time in working together. If you can both commit sufficient resources, you’ve cleared the second hurdle.
The next part of trust is respect: all partners have to have an equal seat at the table. Yours may be a small, informal grassroots organization composed of dedicated volunteers. Now, imagine that you are entering into partnership with a local church group, a Rotary club or other established community organization. Will you have an equal say in the project on which you wish to collaborate? Partnerships that work best are built on an equal playing field.As Shahina says:
“Successful partnerships are built on an even playing field. Be committed to creating an equitable platform for collaboration.”
Equity in the relationship percolates down to things like education, volunteerism (versus professionalism), race, age and gender. How do both parties deal with the diversity at the table? Is it valued? Are a volunteer’s in-the-trenches lived experiences considered as valuable as academic achievement or professional experience? It is imperative that everyone feels comfortable, that everyone is heard and valued, and that the process is inclusive.
Insider Tip: Trust is something that you feel, so engage your “spidey senses” as soon as you start interacting with a local community organization. Are your ideas embraced? Do you and your colleagues feel empowered and valued? Discuss amongst yourselves after the first meeting. Chances are high that your instinctive reaction is the correct one.
It goes without saying that effective partnership includes clear communication. People on all sides of the table need to know up front what expectations are regarding:
Insider Tip: Be clear about this part of your vision early on in the process. Communicate how you see roles being allocated, what your timeline is and what would constitute success for you. Also be clear about the need for regular meetings and other communication, and who is going to be the communication point person on each side!
Milestones tell you whether you and your partners are on track. Shahina makes an important point when she says: “Clarity is critical. Make sure that everyone knows up front what expectations are on all sides.”
If you are building a flower bed, for example, milestones might be:
Insider Tip: Draw up a list of milestones, put them into a timeline and secure partner commitment on checking in regularly to ensure that each milestone—no matter whose responsibility it is—gets met.
Did your project succeed? What did you learn from each other? Recognizing cross-learnings are both critical and exciting when you’re partnering. And coming together to celebrate your achievement is uplifting—it’s the cement that solidifies a partnership and makes future joint actions a happy prospect.Insider Tip: Either meet with partners at project completion to celebrate your joint achievement on the spot, or meet up afterwards to evaluate how well it went, what you learned from each other and how the project could have been improved. Don’t forget to express your thanks! That can mean anything from bringing muffins to the meeting to sending a formal letter of appreciation and acknowledgement, to presenting the results of the project to your community organization partner’s members.
This past year, parks have been used more than ever, but their benefits have not been equally enjoyed—a point highlighted in our 2021 Canadian City Parks Report.
The onset of COVID regulations and their enforcement have given rise to a growing culture of surveillance, policing, and fear that could easily become part of our “new normal” if not recognized and resisted. A new report by Toronto’s ombudsman provides insight into these realities and offers lessons for moving forward. The report, released earlier this month, found that COVID-related rules in Toronto’s parks were unfairly communicated and enforced during April and May 2020.
We know city resources have been stretched throughout the pandemic. Staff have had to deal with fast-changing situations and public health recommendations—all while under-resourced. For example, 60% of cities in our Canadian City Parks Report said COVID has impacted park operation budgets, making it even more challenging to do more with less. There is an opportunity, however, to look at past and present actions, as the ombudsman has done, to understand a new way forward.
The ombudsman report’s findings include that Toronto’s guidelines on use of certain park amenities were unclear—for example, benches were not listed on the city’s website as a closed amenity, yet people were issued tickets for using them. The ombudsman concludes that:
“Because of confusing and inconsistent messaging, some people were afraid to use our public parks at all, for fear of being ticketed. This was unfair.”
The report also found that bylaw officers were directed to adopt a “zero tolerance” approach to enforcement—an approach described by the ombudsman as “unacceptable, unclear, and unfair”—leaving some officers feeling that they had to abandon their usual discretion in favour of ticketing in all cases.
This enforcement had a disproportionate impact on poor, marginalized, and unhoused park users, the report found. Independent investigations confirmed two serious incidents of racial discrimination in enforcement between May and June 2020.We’ve seen similar cases play out across Canada. In Montreal, for example, a group of five women of colour were singled out and fined in a busy Jeanne Mance Park. In Ottawa, a Black man was assaulted by a bylaw officer while out in a park with his seven-year-old daughter. A report by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association found that similar instances of discriminatory enforcement were widespread, often taking place in parks.
Findings from our 2021 Canadian City Parks Report confirm that these issues extend across Canada and beyond the early stages of the pandemic. Of the 32 cities we surveyed for the report, 84% said that they increased by-law enforcement in response to COVID-19 physical distancing measures.
This increase in enforcement has coincided with increased barriers to park use—barriers that are not evenly experienced.
In our survey of nearly 3,500 Canadians, respondents who identified as Black, Indigenous, or a person of colour (BIPOC) were more likely to report experiencing social judgement from other park users (28%), fear of ticketing/policing (24%) and harassment/discrimination from other park users (22%). The response from white Canadians was lower on all counts at 17%, 15%, and 8%, respectively.
Given these barriers, it is perhaps unsurprising that we also found BIPOC Canadians were less likely to experience health benefits of parks during the pandemic. For example, 88% of respondents who identified as white said that parks had a positive impact on their mental health, compared to 69% and 72% for those who identified as Black and Indigenous, respectively.
These findings highlight the concerning impacts of the growing securitization of parks—a trend that existed before the pandemic but has since accelerated. Sometimes, this plays out subtly. Consider benches with middle armrests that prevent people from lying down—a classic example of defensive design. This can also manifest in “ghost amenities”—a term coined by scholar Cara Chellew that refers to the absence of features like washrooms or sheltered gathering areas that are thought to attract “undesirable” behaviour. As some cities closed park washrooms during the pandemic or removed group seating to support physical distancing, it will be essential to ensure these amenities return to parks as restrictions are lifted.
Or consider the culture of interpersonal policing (i.e. neighbours watching neighbours) that has crept into parks, fuelled by COVID “snitch lines.” Since April 2020, Toronto has received over 30,000 complaints related to COVID rules in parks. Not only does this strain staff resources, but also comes with “considerable risk of unfounded complaints, overfocus on marginalized people, and discriminatory enforcement by police and by-law officers,” experts argue.
Although outside the scope of the ombudsman’s enquiry, few examples illustrate the securitization of parks more clearly than last month’s eviction of encampment residents in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park—a brutal show of force that involved hundreds of police officers, private security guards, and city staff overseeing the eviction of only a couple dozen encampment residents.
The city repeated this again on July 20 in Alexandra Park when it surrounded the park with police and security to evict encampment residents, including arresting nine people and barring journalists from entering the area.
This type of enforcement causes direct harm to encampment residents. As we explored in our 2020 Canadian City Parks Report, research shows that encampment clearances often uproot support networks, push people into more isolated locations where they are subject to increased safety risks, and violate the rights of Indigenous peoples, among other damaging consequences.
Actions like these also contribute profoundly to the stigmatization of homelessness. As part of the Trinity Bellwoods eviction, the city erected fencing, patrolled by security guards, around the perimeter of the former encampment to allow for “environmental remediation,” effectively barring people from using the space.
Similar fences have been put in place at other former encampment parks, including Toronto’s George Hislop Park and Vancouver’s Oppenheimer Park. While surely the grass in these parks would benefit from some TLC, the same can be said of many other parks across the city that remain fence-free. It’s hard not to imagine there are ulterior motives—namely, keeping unhoused people out of the parks.
The fences have not only a functional role in preventing access to the park, but a symbolic one—they deepen existing hostilities by contributing to a blame dynamic where housed people attribute the “loss” of their park to environmental damage caused by their unhoused neighbours.It’s not uncommon for homeless communities and the environment to be pitted against each other in parks conversations, but we need to keep things in perspective: the environmental impact of a person experiencing homelessness is likely much less significant than any housed person with more disposable income to participate in consumption (just witness the environmental impact caused by the hundreds of partiers in Trinity Bellwoods over several weekends). These cruel actions frame homeless communities as destructive to the environment, positioning them as scapegoats when the real attention should be on our collective failure to realize the right to housing for all.
The ombudsman’s report offers 14 systemic recommendations that the city has committed to implementing, including directing the Municipal Licensing & Standards (MLS) division to develop an anti-racism strategy, as well as a plan “to hear directly from community organizations, particularly organizations serving vulnerable and marginalized people,” to ensure their feedback informs enforcement activities.
Building on these recommendations and drawing on past Park People research, we offer the following advice to help create parks that do not rely on enforcement and securitization:
Park rules can be helpful—even outside the context of a public health crisis. Past Park People research has found that a lack of clear rules can create anxiety about whether certain uses are welcome, inhibiting people from engaging with a park. By contrast, positive rules—those that are framed in terms of what you can do—can be enabling, by helping to remove the guesswork. In other words, rules can be freeing—as long as they are clear, reasonable, and culturally appropriate. For example, placing a sign in the grass that says “have a picnic here” rather than wrapping picnic tables in caution tape.
But rules need not be coupled with punitive enforcement. A McGill University report exploring COVID-related enforcement highlights that there is weak empirical evidence to support the effectiveness of monetary fines as a strategy for gaining compliance. Moreover, as the report authors argue, such measures “can be reasonably believed to cause greater harm than good, especially for marginalized populations.”
Rather than aiming to push homeless communities out of parks, recognizing unhoused people as legitimate park users in planning, programming and engagement processes can help us build more inclusive parks and learn how to better co-exist together. We can learn from the work of organizations across Canada that are showcasing possibilities for more inclusive approaches: from hiring a park-based social worker to facilitating outdoor art workshops that build bridges between housed and unhoused neighbours, to employing homeless community members at a park cafe that celebrates Indigenous cuisine.
These strategies not only protect unhoused park users from violence but serve to support their basic needs. In addition, programs like these help establish community-based bonds between housed and unhoused park users—cultivating greater empathy and understanding that is difficult to foster in other settings.
Strengthening relationships and communication channels between city staff and community groups is a recommendation offered in both the ombudsman’s report and our own Canadian City Parks Report. As the ombudsman writes, the city is “missing a critically important opportunity to listen to voices from Toronto’s communities when designing and evaluating its enforcement activities. This should be a priority, especially with vulnerable and marginalized communities.” Rather than relying on punitive bylaw enforcement, cities should instead prioritize building relationships with local community park groups—over 1,000 of which exist across Canada—and partner organizations. These groups can provide valuable information about on-the-ground needs and realities, help spread information about safe gathering practices, and collaborate on programming that gets people back to enjoying the park together.
On an early spring day in Calgary, Flyover Park buzzes with activity and playful laughter. Surrounded by friends, a couple of teens sway off a face-to-face swing, while tweens leap through a bamboo jungle (a three-dimensional climbing course not for the faint of heart).
Sheltered by the shade of a flyover above, a family competes in a fierce ping-pong game while, behind them, a mother helps her youngest go up the hillside playground. An assortment of languages fills the air: English, French, Spanish.
In this context, it can be hard to believe that just three years ago this space was a dingy field of gravel. “It was full of litter, graffiti, needles, people’s clothes—it was just not safe,” says Ali McMillan, planning director at the Bridgeland-Riverside Community Association (BRCA).
Built in 2020 with funds sourced by Calgary’s Parks Foundation, a non-profit whose mandate is to support the creation of new parks for the enjoyment of all Calgarians, Flyover Park materializes the vision of a group of engaged residents who dared to think outside the box and reclaim an underutilized space full of potential.
“We didn’t really have an idea where it was going to go,” McMillan says about the group’s initial vision. “We wanted to do some tactical urbanism to basically get people’s minds thinking differently about the area,” she explains.
Launched by residents as a small intervention, the project would morph into a lasting change for the community—and the first project of its kind in Alberta.
Located at the south end of Bridgeland, between the neighbourhood and the Bow River, Flyover Park sits under an overpass known as the 4th Avenue flyover. It’s part of a complicated interchange of roads and bridges that connects Calgary’s northeast across the river to the city’s downtown and East Village.
The site where Flyover Park is today sat empty for nearly two decades. “A lot of us didn’t know that the flyover was even there,” says Miles Bazay, a student who used to go to Langevin School, a K-9 school located just 300 metres north of the site.Year after year, thousands of Bridgeland-Riverside residents would drive, walk, or cycle by this derelict space.
“This is the first thing a lot of people see when they come from downtown into our community, and the impression was not good because it was just basically a dirt patch. This unsightly welcome didn’t reflect the unique character of the neighbourhood”.
Ali McMillan, Planning Director at the Bridgeland-Riverside Community Association (BRCA).
Filled with homes that predate the 1960s, modern multi-family buildings, and an assortment of locally-owned shops and restaurants, Bridgeland-Riverside is one of Calgary’s most vibrant inner-city communities. These characteristics have attracted a young and diverse population to the neighbourhood.
Improving the condition of the empty space under the flyover would connect the neighbourhood’s parks, community gardens, sports fields, and bike lanes to Calgary’s Bow River Pathway system, a 48-km long network of multi-use trails. Nearly a quarter of the community’s residents walk or cycle to work, many of whom use this network.
Despite this connectivity potential, the City of Calgary had no plans to activate the space. But in 2016, inspired by the work of Jason Roberts’s Better Block Foundation, McMillan decided to spearhead her own tactical urbanism intervention.
“It opens your eyes to how you see your community and that your voice matters,” she says.
Tactical urbanism is a citizen-led movement that gained force in the 2010s. The movement encourages residents to test ideas that reclaim and transform forgotten public places into vibrant community hubs—one temporary intervention at a time.
Installing pop-up parks in neglected spaces is a common tactic used by residents to test their ideas, and many of these projects lead to permanent upgrades. Flyover Park would become Calgary’s first tactical intervention to become permanent.
Under McMillan’s direction, the BRCA created a task force to put together a plan to enhance the space.
The goal of this plan was “to design an enjoyable public environment” and “to create a gateway into the community of Bridgeland-Riverside.” This thorough document outlined the design considerations and aesthetics that would guide the project through completion.
To improve the public realm, the task force drew ideas from projects in cities around the world such as Superkilen Park in Copenhagen and Drapers Field in London.
But despite the successful precedents, getting the project off the ground was no easy feat.
“It’s a really unique site there—we have not done an urban park in the ‘left-over’ transportation infrastructure anywhere in Alberta,” McMillan says, emphasizing the initial skepticism from a number of stakeholders, including the neighbours themselves.
“A lot of people couldn’t see past what the area actually was… It was a lot of fighting perception and trying to show people it could be different.”
In 2017, McMillan and the task force carried out the first tactical intervention in the space.
“The first thing we did was a windmill garden. We put like 20 windmills—just stuck them in the ground in the middle of winter,” McMillan recalls. It helped catch the attention of future partners.Over the course of a year, these kinds of small interventions led the BRCA to partnerships with the City of Calgary, Bridgeland’s Langevin School Grade 6 students, and the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. The inclusion of the Grade 6 students in the project would prove to be integral to the development of the project—and an educational opportunity not just for the children, but for everyone involved.
In 2017, the transportation department at the City of Calgary had just completed the city’s pedestrian strategy, but while the council hadn’t yet allocated any funding to it, the department was keen to support a low-budget grassroots initiative.
When Jen Malzer, a transportation engineer at the City of Calgary, learned about the BRCA’s efforts to transform the space under the 4th Avenue flyover and connect Bridgeland to the river pathway, she and her team seized the opportunity.
“We didn’t have funding to hire consultants, which is normally how we might approach a project,” Malzer says. Having the Langevin School Grade 6 students and the University of Calgary landscape architecture master’s degree students on board, Malzer’s team took a different approach. “We could just enable students to dream about the parts of the project and give expertise where we could,” she says—an unusual role for city staff.
Accustomed to the back-and-forth of stakeholder engagement sessions, for Malzer’s team this project was an opportunity to “give up some of the control.”
Furthermore, as part of the pedestrian strategy, the city was developing a tactical urbanism program; participating in the flyover project helped city staff gain an in-depth understanding of the process.
“This really gave us a good insight into what the city’s role should be when we’re working with communities. We learned about the power of elevating different voices.”
Jen Malzer, Transportation Engineer at the City of Calgary.
And in this case, it was the voices of the Grade 6 students. While children are always welcome to join engagement activities led by the city, Malzer says, they rarely actually do so. The Grade 6 students would become front and centre for the project. “It was a really cool experience. I never thought that we could get to do something like that,” says Bazay, who was part of the class.
Sixty Langevin School Grade 6 students were able to take part in this project thanks to the foresight of their teachers. “ was looking for some students to be involved in working with the city and just talking about areas of Bridgeland that are a little bit neglected,” recalls Kate Logan, one of the teachers. She and Elaine Hordo, her partner teacher, jumped at the opportunity. “We were looking for something to get these kids involved in some kind of action project, something to make a difference in the community,” Logan adds.
Excited about the potential of the space and the learning opportunities for the students, Malzer helped coordinate educational sessions with an assortment of city departments, giving students a solid background that would inform their vision for the space. “I was able to bring in a lot of different experts: urban foresters, designers, water engineers, to give students a little bit of context about what are some of the things to think about,” Malzer says.
This experience enabled the children to think about the possibilities for the space.
“We spent a lot of time at the flyover site, just looking around,” Logan says. They also visited other parts of the city and observed the different uses a vacant space could be given to revitalize it and build community.“Our class decided to do something with that space,” Bazay says. “It was a really good space, it just wasn’t being used in the right way.”
When the University of Calgary graduate students led a design charrette in the spring of 2017, the children were more than ready to provide their input. During the initial design session, Ben Hettinga, then one of the University of Calgary students, recalls being impressed by the ideas of the Grade 6 students. “There were normal kid things like playgrounds and fun pieces, but their focus also seemed to be on making the space welcoming and safe for everyone.” This sentiment is echoed by Malzer, “the students were really clear that the project should make play fun for everyone, not just kids.”
Integrating all of the students’ knowledge and ideas, the design produced by the landscape architecture students went on to earn an honourable mention at Calgary’s Mayor Urban Design Awards and win a National Urban Design Award. “We were just having fun with it—ideas that we thought would just brighten up the space,” Bazay says humbly. “We never really thought that it would get built but then we got funding and it was really exciting for our class.”
Through this experience, the Grade 6 students learned valuable lessons on city building, an opportunity few Calgarians get to experience at such a young age. According to Logan, this project taught her students about the importance of civic engagement, “knowing that as a citizen you have a responsibility for yourself and others and that the decisions you make impact others.”
The involvement of the Langevin School was also key to gaining momentum, McMillan says, as the participation of the Grade 6 students led to project seed funding from the Calgary Foundation. “With this funding, we painted the road and bought chairs and picnic tables; we built planters and that sort of thing,” she says.
And this action was key, as it was an opportunity to test their ideas and to prove the community’s interest in such a space. The success of the temporary improvements in the summer of 2017 solidified the partnership with the Parks Foundation and led to further improvements such as the painting of a mural and the installation of a ping-pong table.
In the spring of 2019, Calgary’s Parks Foundation announced the construction of a permanent urban park was moving forward thanks to a donation from the Alberta government.
“I never thought that we could have such a big impact in the community,” Bazay says.
Although the design of the space went through several subsequent iterations, and a number of features were scrapped at the construction stage, Flyover Park does capture the essence of the youth who helped propel the project.
“It’s not your typical playground. We tried to design something for everyone in some of those groups that didn’t have a place to be.”
Ali McMillan
Besides playground equipment for all ages, the design layout includes an esplanade to accommodate food trucks and outdoor events, providing recreation opportunities for adults and kids alike and reflecting the spirit of inclusiveness shown by the Langevin School students.
The tactical nature of the project also helped it move forward swiftly. By contrast, the Bow to Bluff corridor in Sunnyside, a similar project in Calgary’s inner-city also spearheaded by community residents but taking a more conventional approach, has taken nearly a decade to materialize.
These tactical interventions have also helped inform other city-led improvements for the community’s main streets, such as the 1st Avenue NE Streetscape Master Plan, which aims to improve the pedestrian and cycling experience and connect Bridgeland’s amenities, including Flyover Park, with the Bow River Pathway.
But ultimately, the BRCA did more than transform an empty space into a vibrant community hub—the efforts of the community also helped empower a young generation of city-builders.
“I think we definitely learned a lot about what we can actually do to change our communities,” Bazay says. “And if more students could get involved with projects like this, I think that would be really great for the community.”
About Ximena González
Ximena González is a freelance writer and editor based in Calgary. Her work has appeared in The Sprawl, The Tyee and The Globe and Mail.