‘Emotional detoxification’: Vaughan’s green spaces have positive effect on residents' wellness

A greener city improves quality of life for all, say residents, experts

Yorkregion.com
May 3, 2023
Brian Capitao

As Vaughan continues to develop and urbanize, the city's residents are stressing the importance preserving green spaces has on their physical and mental well-being.

Pharmacist Hatem Abu El-Neel lives near The Country Club, a former golf course in Woodbridge, and has his own appeal alongside Keep Vaughan Green, an organization formed in 2017 in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to protect the property from development. In his opinion, replacing green spaces with steel and concrete has a negative impact on people living in urban areas.

“There is a lot of research showing that this kind of environmental change leads to severe deterioration in mental health of human beings,” El-Neel said, adding that, for him, accessing green space is a way of doing “emotional detoxification.”

It helps him decompress after working long hours at his job, he said, but more than that, it helps him with creative problem-solving in dealing with complicated patient cases. For him, his sunroom is a sanctuary where he can reset.

“For my work, usually I come home with a patient's problems that, sometimes, I don't have the chance to work on or solve during the daytime,” El-Neel said. “Most of the days, whenever I get the chance to sit in this glass room, when there is a daylight, (there’s) a major impact on my level of stress or capacity to come up with new ideas to solve complicated situations and things like this."

Family physician, and member of Keep Vaughan Green, Daniela Costantini, agrees on the importance of natural areas. For her, allowing development on green spaces, when there aren't enough to begin with, is a bad idea.

“I think Vaughan is in need of areas of green for our own ecology, for the health of our people, for oxygenation in our communities,” she said.

And while the link between green space and mental health may seem intuitive, natural areas also affect our physical well-being, according to University of Guelph Dr. Faisal Moola, an expert on urban green space and public health.

“What we know is, for example, that access to green space can help to improve cardiovascular health,” he said.

El-Neel knows first-hand how green spaces can boost physical health.

"I do most of my physical exercise next to this green space," he said. "I cannot really explain how this has this positive impact, but just by being next to a green space, I get this motivation to get over the inertia, to start the physical exercise."

According to the City of Vaughan, trails planned properly, together with the right amount of development, can give a more modern feel for a burgeoning city.

“Nature trails established through green space help preserve important natural landscapes within urban settings, protect natural features such as plants and wildlife habitats, and in some cases offer an opportunity (to) reduce flooding and erosion," a city spokesperson said over in an email. "They also contribute to moderating the urban heat island effect."

For people living in environments lacking green space, "the urban heat island effect is particularly bad," Moola said, adding "extreme heat is really problematic for vulnerable communities.”

These disparities can sometimes take a toll on already marginalized people.

“If we do not do this right, if we do not protect our green spaces, if we build a lot of new units, but they are exposed to environmental threats through heat or through pollution, the people who are going to move into these houses are the ones most probably who are less able to pay higher housing prices,” said Michael Drescher, associate professor at the school of planning at the University of Waterloo.

Vaughan’s proposed 100-kilometre super trail may be an indication of how the city is planning to mitigate turning the landscape into a concrete jungle.

But Drescher said the city needs to proceed with caution. Many newer cities use stormwater ponds to manage runoff and there is emerging evidence to suggest that these can have negative environmental effects.

“The emerging evidence is that depending on the conditions in the landscape, these stormwater management ponds can actually be sort of significant sources of greenhouse gases,” said Drescher.