Looking for parks in unexpected places

As the city's population overwhelms its traditional parklands, a little creative thinking can go a long way.

Thestar.com
April 22, 2015
By Edward Keenan

Toronto likes to call itself “A city within a park” - it’s a slogan emblazoned on all sorts of city facilities, bragging about the 13 per cent of the city’s surface area that’s dedicated to parkland.

And why not?

From the vast natural preserves of the Humber Valley and Rouge Park, to landmark neighbourhood-defining acreages like Riverdale Park and High Park, to small creative rests in the urban landscape like Yorkville Park and the Jazz Garden, the Toronto’s rest and recreation areas are part of what make it an amazing place to live.

But as time goes on and Toronto’s population explodes, it seems the city within is bigger and the park is getting relatively smaller and more crowded. Especially downtown. To the extent that the quality of life we’re all so proud of is becoming threatened by a simple lack of public space.

Part of the solution to that problem is just to open our wallets and buy space for new parkland; there’s no doubt about that. But a report from the charitable group Park People suggests another part of the solution is to open our thinking about what a park is, and look at in-between spaces - under expressways, in lanes, on school grounds, and even on sidewalks and streets - as public spaces ripe for what we might call parkification.

Coincidentally, the problem under discussion has been particularly well documented in an ongoing series of investigative articles published by Spacing magazine this month. There, journalists studying access-to-information requests, city documents and census figures reveal that while the population of downtown Toronto has ballooned - the population of Liberty Village, for example, grew by 143 per cent between 2006 and 2011 - the city has not been adding much parkland in the areas people are moving to.

It’s not a lack of cash that’s the problem, as Spacing reports the city has more than $200 million from developers earmarked for parks sitting in an acquisition fund. The problem is that, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the city isn’t spending it.

The Parks People report, which will be unveiled Wednesday night at an event at Fort York, makes clear that big destination parks are needed. They point to examples such as Waterfront Toronto’s Corktown Common, built as the magnificent anchor of a new community on the west side of the Don Valley, as the cornerstones of a park network.

But they also suggest getting creative when we think about the “network” part, the rest of the city in between the big parks.

“Parks cannot be planned as isolated green islands within the city. Instead, our parks should flow through our neighbourhoods and connect with each other through a variety of open spaces that serve different needs,” the report’s authors write.

Drawing on examples from other North American cities and examining case studies here in Toronto, they suggest looking at much of the city’s public space as potential parkland of some kind or another.

People want parks for various reasons: a place to sit, to walk a dog, to play sports, to look at interesting views, to have their children play, and so on.

“What’s important is understanding how people want to use their parks and open spaces and devising a plan to meet those desires,” the report says. “This may mean obtaining new spaces, but it also may mean using existing spaces in new and different ways, establishing new connections between parks and the people that use them, and thinking about how the parks and open space system functions as a whole.”

Underpass Park, built in 2012 under the Eastern Ave. bridge, is cited as an example of this kind of thinking, where dead space under a road was turned into a playground and basketball courts, connecting residents to the north, including those in social housing, to the Corktown Common anchor park farther south. In a similar vein, they point to some successes in repurposing industrial spaces, such as railway corridors in the case of the West Toronto Railpath, and propose a new park in a hydro corridor.

They also point out that in New York, where hyper-density has crowded out parks, school property has been repurposed as community parkland - an idea with resonance in Toronto as school boards look at divesting property, and fights over putting sports domes over fields ignite community battles.

The thinking goes further still, into the streets: the report points out that 22 per cent of Toronto’s area is made up of streets. That represents mostly lost opportunities to create park-like public spaces.

The report points to a successful project by the Dundas West BIA to create tiny parkettes with landscaping and benches along the area west of Lansdowne. It also sees hope in pilot projects, such as the pedestrianization experiments recently attempted on Yonge and John Sts., which included planter boxes, movable street furniture and other amenities to help people engage in park-like activities.

These kinds of infill public space improvements won’t replace the need for big forested parks with soccer fields, cricket pitches and dog runs.

But they liven up the city on their own, making it a better place to live in every moment walking down the street. As the city undertakes to develop a new park planning process by 2017, it could do to pay attention both to the problems Spacing magazine has called out and the suggestions Park People are putting forward.

The idea of a “city within a park” is that, no matter where you are in Toronto, you are inside the park, surrounded by it. A little creativity shows how we could make that slogan a more obvious daily reality.