ILLUSTRATION BY SANDI FALCONER
Linda Besner is a writer based in Montreal.
My husband and I agree: There was something wrong with the park near our old house. Or, perhaps, there was something wrong with us. We couldn’t figure out how to spend time in it. It was a beautiful green space, filled with grand, spreading maple trees and beds of bright flowers. There were groups of older women dancing with colourful Chinese fans, and endless children’s birthday parties. Perhaps we were neither old nor young enough? During the pandemic, I walked through the park nearly every day on my restless perambulations of the neighbourhood, but it always felt like a place to pass through rather than a place to stay.
No park can be all things to all people. But the quality that makes a park into a destination – what researchers call “stickiness” – has been increasingly on the minds of urban planners. Pandemic lockdowns led more of the Canadian population to use city parks as their living rooms, and even though most of us have resumed our prepandemic lives, a 2023 report by the Canadian charity Park People finds that park usage has jumped up to a higher baseline. At the same time, in many jurisdictions, little space is available for creating new parks; we’re going to need to figure out how to squeeze more people and activities into existing green spaces.
Some parks seem to be endowed with that ineffable magic, an “it” factor that’s based in feeling rather than fact. A park might become the accepted meeting spot, even if it’s not on the way to anywhere in particular. Like a dingy bar that has become an institution, a good park is redolent of memories. Perhaps your own, but equally those of strangers; even on a first visit, you can tell you’re walking into a place of importance in people’s lives. But at first glance, an iconic park and a so-so park look much the same: grass, trees, a path of some kind. What elevates a park from a patch of grass into a cultural touchstone?
Parks are inherently political. The most common metaphor for parks – variations on the phrase “the green lungs of the city” have been dutifully repeated by advocates since at least the 1839 publication of public-health expert J.F. Murray’s article Lungs of London – does more than reference the health benefits of access to fresh air. More crucially, it maps city parks onto the body politic. Arguably, there is no public without public space, and urban parks have long been sites for staging diverse visions of the good society. In 19th-century Britain and its colonies, factory workers were crowding into cities, and Victorian reformers worried about what a population divorced from nature might do. As Edwinna von Baeyer writes in the Canadian Encyclopedia, “reformers felt strongly that cities needed space for more vigorous recreation, a place for the landless worker to dissipate dangerous energy that, unchecked, might be channelled into Bolshevism, unionism or intemperance.”
In fact, far from serving as bulwarks against ideas that could upset the status quo, parks are intimately entwined with the history of free speech. In 1866, London’s Hyde Park was the site of a riot in support of extending the vote to working men, in which people broke down the fences and set up an encampment for three days. Not long afterward, an act of parliament set aside an area of the park still known as Speakers’ Corner for the exercise of public address. In the recent litigation surrounding the pro-Palestinian encampments at the University of Toronto, the lawyers defending the protesters argued that the university lawn is “closer in character to a public park” than to private property – meaning that protesters didn’t need the university’s permission to be there.
For a functional democracy, people need spaces where they can become visible to one another. And, as is to be expected, what they want often conflicts. The virtue of a great city park – a park that works – is that it allows people with different needs and desires to overlap, to weave in and out of connection with each other, without anyone saying to themselves, this isn’t a place for me.
“You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park nor reason with it,” wrote the urban spaces scholar and activist Jane Jacobs in 1961. To “confer the boon of life upon it,” she wrote, you need variety: people with different income levels and different schedules. A park lives and breathes through the people who choose to make it their own, inscribing the space – and the city – with personal and collective meaning.
ILLUSTRATION BY SANDI FALCONER
It’s easy to do a quantitative count of the amenities that might make a park useful: municipalities keep track of sheafs of soccer fields, baseball diamonds, dog parks, splash pads, skating rinks and more. But recently, Canadian cities have been attempting more qualitative research on how people really use city parks. Starting in 2016, Toronto commissioned a series of studies in which volunteers stood around in public areas, including parks, and simply observed the people inhabiting the space. In a blog documenting her hours of volunteer park observation for a 2023 study, an illustrator named Maliha Ali drew pictures and wrote descriptions of individuals she had seen in Ontario’s Western Waterfront Park: “A woman sat by the water’s edge, with the remains of a takeout breakfast by her side”; “An early-morning desi baraat (wedding procession) complete with singing, dancing, and the groom making an entry on a well-dressed horse”; “An older gentleman on a wheelchair sat for a long time, gazing at the water, seemingly in remembrance of someone.” A similar study in Vancouver had volunteers categorizing the types of recreation in which they saw people engaged, whether that was playing cards, reading books, playing music or “showing physical affection towards another person” (making out, like the other pursuits in this list, was categorized as “passive recreation”).
When geographers talk about “place attachment,” they are talking about landmarks on an individual’s psychic map, locations where layers of positive association have formed emotional bonds between a person and a place. I might feel attached to the barn at the top of the road where I grew up, or the laundromat I used when I first moved to the city, or the corner where a Greek restaurant I once worked at used to be. A related concept is “place identity”: the feeling that my relationship to a place makes me who I am. I recently moved back to Montreal from Toronto, and it’s important to me to tell people I am moving back; I need people to understand that Quebec is my home province. Place attachment and place identity matter: they sew residents into the fabric of their community, and they make people treat their physical environment with greater pride and care. For cities that attract a lot of newcomers, it’s vital to design public spaces that foster these forms of connection.
Organized sports are one way to connect with new people in a new place. But there was a surprising insight from Park People’s 2023 report: Respondents to their national survey actually wanted parks to devote less space to structured activities (baseball, spike ball, tennis) and more to that ineffable substructure that makes urban life worth living: hanging out. The main virtue of public space is that it forces us to encounter one another on an equal footing; the dog walkers have no more right to be there than the cricket players, and joggers need to share the path with toddlers. The Vancouver public use study found that 50 per cent of those surveyed in the city’s parks had had an interaction that day with a stranger. I might share a bench with someone, or throw an errant Frisbee back to a group. Probably, I’m asking someone the name of their dog.
Some of the findings from studies that report on what makes a park sticky are more obvious: largely, people are just looking for a free place to sit down. A stickier park might have more benches, but volunteers saw a lot of people sitting on less conventional things, too; there’s a lightly transgressive fun in sitting on a set of wide steps, or the edge of a fountain, or an inviting sculpture. People are also looking for a little bit of nature, somewhere to cool down in increasingly hot cities. As average temperatures increase, there is a vital role for parks as places where people without air conditioning can escape the stifling heat of their apartments. In recent years, parks in Canadian cities have become home to encampments of unhoused people, and the Parks People survey discovered something else of which municipalities ought to take note: Most people didn’t feel that encampments compromised their own ability to use the parks. “The majority of city residents who observe encampments in their local parks are not personally impacted by their presence,” the report reads. Parks People’s recommendation was that cities stop worrying about the small proportion of park-goers who complain, and start adopting a human-rights-based approach to the needs of people living in its parks. The boon of life takes many shapes.
ILLUSTRATION BY SANDI FALCONER
Recently, I spent an hour in the park closest to where I currently live. It’s small, but lively: there’s a fountain, and an almost ludicrously ornate cathedral, weighed down with angels like a woman struggling with heavy shopping bags. I watched a man bouncing his baby to the rhythms of an aging busker playing the French horn; a sudden shaft of sunlight through the honey locusts illuminated a woman in a polka-dot dress. I felt sad; perhaps it was the mournful French horn music, perhaps the shadow of loneliness that passed over me. Oh, a couple making out! They leaned their foreheads against each other. A man in short shorts walked over to a man who had been sitting by the fountain, who stood up; they greeted each other with kisses on both cheeks, then sprinted away together: running buddies.
The longer I sat on my bench by the fountain, the more my sadness dissipated: I was still alone, but I’d become involved in the many micro-stories unfolding around me. The man’s baby fell asleep on his chest, and the making-out couple were wordlessly smiling, he lying with his head in her lap. In other contexts, we would be separated – shielded – by the illusion of purpose. But here, no particular purpose was required to justify our presence. We were here because the place is for us.