Just as the warm weather was setting Toronto’s parks free from layers of snow, participants at the Toronto Parks Summit were setting free their ideas on how to make the city’s parks even more welcoming.
The fifth annual event, held last week at Regent Park, brought together 400 park supporters, including city staff and volunteers from local park groups. They shared innovations and achievements that have come from residents getting involved with improving and programming parks. I asked Dave Harvey, director of
Toronto Park People, what impressed him most about this year’s summit.
Creative ideas. From a container café in
McCormack Park to an urban angling program to an Orchard Park project where residents made cider from apples picked there, advocates think outside the box. “These are really great ideas for public space and none of them cost much money at all. They just need the community working credibly with the Parks Department to say yes.”
Some ideas catch on like wildfire. When Toronto Park People was founded in 2011, they were regularly getting calls from Torontonians who envied the Ping-Pong tables they were seeing in parks in several US cities. “We were pushing the idea and were getting nowhere. Finally we found a private funder willing to fund a Ping-Pong table in Mel Lastman Square in 2013 and once the first one got in, it led to a couple more. This year there are Ping-Pong tables flying in everywhere and the city is paying for them.”
Parks aren’t just for sports. A partnership with the Toronto International Film Festival
presented four movie nights last year. This year TIFF in the Park will present 10 movie nights—and 61 park groups have applied to host them. “People used to go to parks for organized sports or getting away, but now they’re social gathering places, places where you grow food and eat food. You see movies, you hear music.”
Park advocacy isn’t just for downtown types. There’s now at least one parks group in every ward in the city. “The best park is a park that meets the community’s needs and every community is different.”
Sharing and networking produce real results. In the past, parks groups could get frustrated, feeling like they were reinventing the wheel or wading through red tape in isolation. Now groups can share strategies and results. One parks group can point to what the city did for another group and expect to be able to do the same thing. “Particularly after amalgamation, there was a hangover of different rules for different parks and people being told different things about what’s permitted. Now people are feeling they’re part of a bigger movement and the Parks Department is working with them to support what they’re trying to do.”
Writer: Paul Gallant
Source: Dave Harvey
Photo: Debapriya Chakraborty