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.
Parks are not “nice to haves,” they are critical social, health, and environmental infrastructure for Toronto. City parks are lifelines in extreme heat waves. Social connectors in an age of increasing polarization. Keepers of biodiversity despite ever fragmenting urban landscapes.
To meet the biggest challenges we face in Toronto—climate change, biodiversity loss, social polarization, rising inequality—we need whole new ways to plan, design, manage, program, and govern parks.
This shift requires doing things differently. It requires ensuring proper funding, sharing decision-making power, addressing inequities head-on, and prioritizing action on truth and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
As Toronto faces upcoming municipal elections, we urge candidates for Mayor and Council to accelerate the transition to a more equitable, resilient future for city parks by working with us on the ideas presented in this platform.
All of the ideas in this platform require us to invest more time and money into city parks. In our 2022 survey of residents of Canadian cities, 87% said they support more investment in parks.
Responsible for 60% of Canada’s infrastructure, municipalities like Toronto receive only 10 cents on every tax dollar. That means our three levels of government, each of which has responsibilities for our natural environment and human health, all need to come to the table.
This is easier said than done. The multiple benefits of parks—health, environmental, social, economic—actually make it harder to invest at the scale we need to. Why? Because the benefits of investing in parks are distributed across many different ministries and government departments, each of which is accountable for its own budgets and plans. That is why we need to support governments to pursue an ambitious, whole-of-government approach to investment in Toronto parks.
Investing more in city parks is not an imposition or an obligation. It is an opportunity to transform Toronto for the better.
There is a clear and growing disparity in who has access to quality green spaces in Toronto. As COVID laid bare, equity-deserving communities face complex, interrelated health crises. Toronto must recognize how race, income and the built environment conspire to make parks a pressing environmental justice issue in our city.
Park Policy Directions:
Usable parks are the bar for entry. Toronto’s parks maintenance and operating budget have not kept pace with use and demand. There’s an urgent need to increase park operating budgets to ensure basic amenities like bathrooms and water are the standard in every single Toronto park.
Spending on park operating budgets must start to keep pace with demand. It is basic: amenities like bathrooms and water must be the standard in every single Toronto park, with a priority focus on equity-deserving and high-use parks. Investments in basic amenities that promote park use must include:
Further reading:
Towards equitable parks, Canadian City Parks Report 2020
People living in Toronto will need to adapt to hotter, wetter and more unpredictable climates. Climate change is here and is already impacting our city. With the right investment, parks can serve as climate infrastructure and provide people with critical places of refuge in hot, dense cities where a major health crisis is looming.
At the same time, people are seeking out nature more for its mental and physical health benefits. People want more places to experience nature close to home: 71% of survey respondents said they value visiting naturalized spaces within a 10-minute walk of homes, such as a native plant garden or small meadow. In fact, 87% of respondents said they were in favour of more native plant species within parks—the second most requested amenity after public washrooms. Toronto’s Ravine Strategy offers a strong road map for ensuring these vital biodiversity and natural habitats are safeguarded for the future and enjoyed by residents, but funding has remained limited.
Policy Directions:
Invest in the co-benefits of naturalized spaces as climate resilience infrastructure, urban biodiversity habitat and vital nature connections in Toronto.
Further reading
Deepening the conservation conversation, Canadian City Parks Report 2020
There is an urgent need for new models of Toronto park governance rooted in shared decision-making power. We need a new way of managing city parks that are more inclusive, community-focused, and respects the land rights of Indigenous peoples and the knowledge of communities.
Park planning and design practices
Over the past several years, communities have been actively working to decentralize power in institutional spaces.
It is time for Toronto to give communities more decision-making power on the park issues that affect them most, particularly in equity-deserving communities.
This case study is part of the 2020 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.
________
While small-scale biodiversity projects are important, there’s no question that when it comes to nature, size matters: larger spaces allow for a greater diversity of plants that in turn support a greater diversity and number of species. They also provide critical ecological services, such as cleaning the air, managing stormwater, and mitigating urban heat—all of which only become more important as climate change increases environmental stress.
Cities use different policy and planning levers to protect sensitive urban ecosystems or important habitat links, often designating them as Environmentally Sensitive/Significant Areas. For example, Toronto expanded its ESA’s by 68 areas, Montreal instituted an Ecosystem Management Program for its large parks, and Fredericton released two new large park management plans.
However, with 19% of cities reporting citywide biodiversity strategies in place, and a further 52% who have biodiversity objectives embedded in other environmental plans, there’s a need for more holistic citywide planning that examines key species, develops education and stewardship plans, and identifies habitat corridors.
It’s not enough to have habitat patches—even large ones—if they are isolated.
Whether it’s an urban landscape or a pristine natural area, you need connected networks for ecosystems to function properly, said Pamela Zevit, Surrey’s Biodiversity Conservation Planner.
Connectivity ensures wildlife are not confined to what Zevit called “habitat islands,” which can easily become degraded by pollution, disease, or disturbance, leaving wildlife with nowhere else to go.
This is why Surrey has spent so much energy planning what it calls its green infrastructure network: a series of cross-city habitat corridors connecting larger habitat hubs. While important at the city scale, planning must also connect within regional networks—after all, animals don’t stop at city borders—so Surrey has made sure their network matches up with the natural systems of neighbouring cities.
“Surrey has a very strong desire to be a leader,” Zevit said. “So we made this effort early on to connect a lot of the dots and we’ll be able to fit into whatever happens over time at the regional level.”
Within its own borders, the city is also working towards approving its first biodiversity design guidelines. The guidelines will cover not just natural areas but places in what Zevit referred to as the “urban matrix”—all those other land uses outside of parks and natural areas that have an impact on biodiversity.
“The [guidelines] are this long overdue, comprehensive approach to linking all the existing design guidelines and construction documents and everything that we have around us and saying how do we integrate biodiversity objectives into everything that the city does,” said Zevit.
Calgary is another city that has been working hard at restoring natural spaces and ensuring connectivity through a biodiversity strategy the city approved in 2015.
Over the past two years, the city has identified and evaluated the components of its ecological network so it could prioritize restoration and enhancement projects. It has even produced a guide on how to naturalize existing parks.
Until this evaluative work was underway, Calgary didn’t have “a mechanism to set citywide priorities for biodiversity conservation or habitat restoration,” with actions largely done as needed over time, said the city’s Landscape Analysis Supervisor, Vanessa Carney. Like many Canadian cities, she said, urban development happened neighbourhood by neighbourhood, meaning environmental planning has occurred largely at the local scale, rather than comprehensively across the city or region.
“While this approach helps to conserve highly biodiverse and landscape diverse parcels of land as public, we’ve been missing that ecological backbone that allows us to look at how neighbourhood development contributes or constrains citywide and regional connectivity,” Carney said.
To perform its evaluation, the city examined the permeability of landscapes for wildlife movement, the size of habitat areas and their adjacent land uses, and how integral the space was to the functioning of the overall ecological network.
Despite the citywide view, Carney said that both small and large parks play a role in connectivity. The larger parks serve as “biodiversity reservoirs,” while smaller parks—whether natural or manicured—provide habitat for smaller species, serve as stepping stone habitats, and allow people to connect with nature in their everyday lives.
At this smaller scale, cities can turn to development policies to preserve and enhance connectivity. For example, through its Greenway Amenity Zoning, Langley Township ensures every community includes green corridors and buffers to support biodiversity and Red Deer creates Ecological Profiles for new subdivisions to ensure natural features are protected.
Riparian areas (habitat along waterways) are particularly rich areas for biodiversity and can help create important habitat connections. They are also important for climate change mitigation as flood protection from increased extreme weather damage.
Surrey’s Nicomekl River Park project will restore and enhance unique riverfront ecological zones into a 3km linear park, aiming to combine nature with art, heritage, recreation, and social space. The city has released a heritage plan and public art strategy, along with a management plan that highlights opportunities for recognition of Indigenous history, practices, and plants through programming, signage, and naming.
Led by Waterfront Toronto, Toronto is also undertaking a massive restoration project in naturalizing the mouth of the Don River, which flows into Lake Ontario. The project, which also includes creating biodiverse “park streets” as part of new neighbourhood development in the area, will create flood protection and restore lost landscapes.
At a smaller-scale, Vancouver is moving ahead with daylighting a creek through Tatlow and Volunteer Parks, restoring a waterway into English Bay. The creek is one of many that have been buried throughout Vancouver’s development—something many cities did as part of urbanization.
The project acts on priorities in Vancouver’s new parks master plan, VanPlay, for restoring wild spaces and increasing connectivity. Restoring the creek to aboveground will create new aquatic habitat, manage stormwater, improve water quality, and create habitat for birds and pollinators.
The often large swathes of mowed grass in hydro corridors that cut for kilometres through cities are also increasingly being seen as areas ripe for habitat connections.
Take The Meadoway, a project of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority in partnership with the City of Toronto, Hydro One, and philanthropic funder The W. Garfield Weston Foundation.
Already partly constructed, the plan will naturalize a 16km hydro corridor across Scarborough connecting two large natural areas on either side: Rouge National Urban Park and the Lower Don Ravine. When finished, The Meadoway will feature hundreds of acres of meadow habitat with restored wetland areas, a connected trail, and social gathering spaces. An online visualization toolkit showcases the potential of the project, which is expected to be completed by 2024.
Montreal has also announced plans for a biodiversity corridor in a Saint-Laurent borough hydro corridor. “Climate change issues are requiring us to act quickly with innovative solutions,” said the borough’s mayor, Alan DeSousa, calling the project a “laboratory” from which others can learn. Ultimately constructed on 450 hectares of land, the project will include native habitat, trails, and green roofs installed on neighbouring buildings.
Here’s what other Canadian cities are doing to create and enhance large nature parks and increase habitat connectivity:
Destination Danforth is part of a suite of ActiveTO programs, designed to support the City of Toronto’s restart and recovery response to COVID-19. These programs were part of a period of unprecedented rapid program implementation and deserve careful evaluation.
The Destination Danforth Intercept Survey Evaluation Report was designed to provide diverse perspectives on safety, accessibility, and user impact of the new street installation and to assess the success of the program’s goals to support businesses and increase safe and equitable access to active modes of transportation.
Perspectives on safety, accessibility, and user impact of the new street installation
Park People’s ‘Making Connections’ report proposes strategies for creating a network of parks and open spaces that can connect our parks, ravines, hydro and rail corridors, streets, laneways, schoolyards, and other public spaces.
“As many Toronto neighbourhoods continue to develop and intensify, the need for an expanded and improved parks and open space system grows. Encouraging flexibility and experimentation both in designs and funding as well as in how we engage with communities. Underpinning all of this is the need to make connections— connections between different types of parks and open spaces, between communities and partners in those spaces, and between city divisions and resources.”
Strategies for creating a network of parks and open spaces.
One of the oldest parks in the City of Toronto, Allan Gardens and its historic conservatory provides a unique space in the heart of downtown Toronto amidst a diverse and bustling neighbourhood. With these assets, Allan Gardens represents an unparalleled opportunity in the city to create a truly vibrant, active public space for the surrounding community, the wider city, and visitors to Toronto—an opportunity that a renewed focus and energy can help bring to life.
The report recommends that a new partnership model focus on the conservatory and adjacent gardens, with a full-time project manager needed to engage with the community, the City, and potential funders to lay the necessary groundwork for a success.
“The key to unlocking Allan Gardens’ potential is in establishing a new governance model for the park. This new and creative partnership is needed to not only deliver the capital improvements required, but to activate the space with rich community-based programming around horticulture, food, and the arts. A new partnership dedicated to Allan Gardens would help focus community input in the park and drive new investment into both capital improvements and programming.”
Unlocking Allan Gardens’ potential with a new governance model
Green City looks at how parks, once thought of as places of relief from the urban condition, should be viewed as integral with city form, helping to make our cities more sustainable and resilient in the face of climate change. The paper is a refreshing and accessible discussion of how parks have shaped the relationship between nature and society, and calls for a new approach that links good environmentalism and good urbanism through park systems.
“New tools, techniques, and ways of understanding nature in the city are required. Parks, once thought of as places of relief from the urban condition, should be viewed as integral with city form, and as having important roles to play in sustaining life, in addition to providing places for recreation, entertainment, and aesthetic enjoyment. Parks and parks systems are part of our very survival, providing countless environmental functions and giving cities greater resilience to withstand the unpredictability and extremes of climate that are now more common and catastrophic.”
Beverly A. Sandalak, Landscape architect & Planner
A new approach linking good environmentalism and good urbanism through park systems.
With the intensification of many communities in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (ON), we are seeing a change in how people use parks. Parks in higher-density areas are heavily relied on by urban residents who no longer have access to private backyards for outdoor exercise and social and cultural activities. This requires a change in the way parks have historically been planned and designed in many of these municipalities.
Thriving Places is designed as a case study toolkit highlighting new urban parks and open spaces in the Greater Golden Horseshoe that showcase creative ideas for planning, designing, programming, and engaging community in public spaces in intensifying neighbourhoods.
“We don’t always need to look to cities such as New York, Vancouver, and San Francisco for creative park ideas when so many municipalities across the GGH are stepping up with innovative projects.”
Explore inspiring new urban parks in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (ON).
It’s become a familiar urban experience. Heavy rain, flash floods, rising water levels, and, ultimately, flooded parks, streets, and homes. With climate change leading to extreme weather—both hot, dry periods and heavy rain—it’s imperative that we design our urban environments to mitigate these impacts.
In this report, Park People explores the challenges and opportunities facing city parks in Canada by offering inspiration, best practices, and key strategies for moving forward.
“Green infrastructure at its core is about creating spaces that help manage stormwater, but these projects also bring a host of other benefits—from habitat creation to providing new spaces for people to gather. Much like parks, the benefits of green infrastructure are deep and layered, touching on the environment, economic, and social.”
Challenges and opportunities facing city parks in Canada
Financing City Parks in Canada surveys the landscape of park funding in Canada, exploring options to ensure reliable and sustainable funding for Canada’s parks. The paper asks questions such as: How much should be spent on parks? How should they be financed? Who should pay? It outlines the major strengths and weaknesses of approaches and breaks down which are appropriate, realistic, and sustainable.
There is no singular or unequivocal business model that addresses the best way to finance capital and operating costs of city parks. There are, however, a number of possibilities; some are used in different cities in Canada and elsewhere, and some may be used in the future.
Explore the landscape of park funding in Canada
Toronto has amazing parks. There are more than 1,500 of them and 80 square kilometres of parkland and natural spaces in the city. Half of the people in the city visit a park at least once a week and almost 14% visit a park every day.
But our parks are not as good as they could be.
Executive Director Dave Harvey used his Fellowship with the Metcalf Foundation to research and write this report on improving our parks. This paper identifies a number of problems facing Toronto’s parks and explores opportunities and recommendations to overcome them.
The report was very well received and became the inspiration for launching Park People.
“We’ve taken our parks for granted, neglected the need for improvements, and they are languishing. […] Toronto’s parks are fertile ground for fresh new thinking.”
Explore opportunities and recommendations to address issues in Toronto parks