Greening the city: Hamilton pop-up park

NRU
July 19, 2017
By Sarah Niedoba

It can take years for an approved park plan to become reality, so Hamilton has built a temporary green
solution, with the creation of its first-ever pop-up park.

Funding to replace a parking lot with a park at the corner of John and Rebecca streets will be included in the city’s 2018 budget. Meanwhile the lot has been temporarily overhauled, with artificial turf covering 20 parking spaces to create room for seating, bike racks, and a small tricycle track.

“I see this as an outside of the box, unique and progressive idea,” Ward 2 councillor Jason Farr told NRU. “This is proof that we do have a desire to mitigate the size and scope of our surface asphalt, and create green public spaces for our community.”

Farr says he is impressed with how quickly the project came together - first proposed in February by staff and funded by Farr’s office and the McNally Foundation - it only took seven months to become a reality.

“The area itself is already zoned as parkland, which makes something like this possible,” says Farr. “It’s a great opportunity to show residents that we are able to create community spaces in a short amount of time.”

Farr says that he believes the pop-up will add value to the neighbourhood, for both its residential and commercial residents.

“There’s really no way to overstate how important a project like this can be to an area, in terms of value,” he says. “It’s something I think a lot of areas in the city could benefit from.”

Planning and economic development general manager Jason Thorne told NRU that staff consulted with various neighbourhood groups to get an idea of what the pop-up should include.

“We heard that people wanted greenspace and seating, but we also got some pretty unique ideas, including the tricycle bike track, which we ended up including,” he says.

Thorne says that the pop-up, which will remain in place until the fall, is designed to be packed up and moved. This means that it could be located in a different area of the city next spring.

“We really want people to start looking at different areas of their city, and thinking about ways in which they could become greener public spaces,” he says.

Farr says that plans to develop the area into a permanent park will begin after the 2018 budget, but says that the pop-up will help residents imagine what a future park could look like.

“For now this pop-up will serve as a symbol of what is to come, once we are able to fully develop it into a park,” says Farr.