For example, measuring how many residents live within a five minute walk of a park or how many hectares of park space a city has per thousand people.¹

While measuring quantity comes with its own complications, it’s much easier to measure than the more amorphous park quality. And yet quality can have just as much, if not more, of an influence on park use and experience.

If a park is within a five minute walk, but it has none of the amenities you need, or you don’t feel safe, or everything feels run down—well, you may be disinclined to use it much. Indeed, the top barrier to visiting parks reported by city residents in our survey was a lack of appropriate park amenities.

The condition of those amenities is another factor that greatly impacts park quality. And every single Canadian city is struggling with aging infrastructure.

There are a few key challenges. One is funding. Current systems of park funding privilege growth-related park spending over investing in the existing park system. Funding mechanisms like development levies are often dedicated to land acquisition or new park amenities. The idea behind this system makes intuitive sense— growth pays for growth. However, the result is that new parks are being built, while existing parks and park amenities fall into further disrepair.

As one park director told us 80% of development levy funding goes towards “shiny new things” while just 20% of funding goes towards existing assets.

However, another challenge is data. While most cities set quantity-based targets for parkland, few collect data on park “quality.” When quality data is collected, it’s often simply about the presence and distribution of park amenities like water fountains, soccer fields, and benches. While this is critical data, it’s arguably quantity metrics in another form.

And yet the largest challenge cities say they face is asset management. If cities don’t fully understand the quality of assets, how are they supposed to strategically invest in park quality?

Taking this further, most cities also do not apply an equity-based lens to their park planning that considers factors such as income, race, age, and historic levels of investment in different neighbourhoods.

Understanding the quality of parks and park amenities and coupling that with equity-based mapping would allow cities to more strategically allocate funds toward the areas where the needs are greatest, and the improvements most relevant to residents.

In the 2022 Canadian City Parks Report, for example, cities reported that slightly less than half of overall parkland was deemed “natural” areas.

However, in the last two years we’ve seen a growing trend towards increasing natural areas, including introducing “micro” naturalized spaces within existing neighbourhood parks.

One reason is that naturalized parkland helps cities meet both climate resilience and biodiversity goals by reintroducing native species’ habitat and creating more complex understory growth as a way to mitigate the urban heat island effect.

Some cities mentioned that naturalized areas require less maintenance and can present an opportunity to save on operational budgets, while others pointed out that certain naturalized elements, particularly green infrastructure like bioswales and rain gardens, require specialized staff training and maintenance to ensure they are working effectively.

These spaces are also growing in popularity with residents, our survey results show. This is not surprising because, as we’ve reported before, many residents increased their use of natural spaces during the pandemic—a habit that has stuck around.

As with the high use of parks in general, however, there are challenges that come with increased popularity and use of natural areas. Cities are dealing with damage to environmentally sensitive areas, including people blazing their own trails.

In some cities this has also led to a noticeable change in wildlife behaviour, pushing animals into neighbouring areas and causing conflicts. Strategies such as formalized trail building and educational signage to increase public awareness can help minimize impacts on sensitive habitats.

While access to quality parks is a key part of equity, this limited vision overlooks inequities in how park space is experienced along socio-economic lines such as race, age, ability, income, and gender. These can have important implications for how park space is designed and programmed, as well as barriers and usage.

Not everyone experiences the same park the same way. For example, in our 2021 report, we found that residents who identified as Black, Indigenous or a person of colour were far more likely to report that concerns about policing, ticketing, and social judgment were a barrier to park use.

Canadian data also shows that poorer and racialized neighbourhoods have less access to green space, which has implications for park use and climate resilience. Many of these neighbourhoods are also listed as urban heat islands where the lack of green space translates into higher temperatures especially during extreme heat events, which can have fatal consequences. However, there is a strong desire from city staff to dig deeper on this issue, particularly in developing more robust data-driven equity responses that layer socio-demographic data with heat mapping and park access metrics.

When asked their perspective on which urban issues the parks sector has a role in addressing, city staff placed reconciliation, anti-racism, houselessness and green gentrification at the bottom of the list. Interestingly, these same issues were the ones city staff reported feeling least knowledgeable about.

Our interviews suggest many city staff recognize systemic inequities exist and are a key challenge for parks, but lack the tools to address these issues or relate them to their own work.

Even if they have the tools, most city staff reported that the overwhelming amount of work on their plate means it’s challenging to prioritize embedding an equity lens. We also heard that staff hired for equity-focused roles are at risk of experiencing burnout faster due to carrying the weight of being both the public face of challenging equity issues as well as being relied on for cultural translation roles within the city. While it’s a positive sign that cities are hiring for these roles, the responsibility of addressing inequities must be shared across staff.

There is a need for stronger training and support for park staff to apply strategies for unpacking inequities within parks, including planning and design, community engagement, by-law enforcement, and maintenance.

Are they calm spaces for relaxation and connection to nature? Recreational spaces for sports? Social spaces for community events? Productive spaces to grow food? Increasingly, the answer is yes, all of these—and often within the same space. There are a lot of factors at play—many of which we’ve written about. These include increasing and changing use of parks driven by demographics and a culture shift during the pandemic, growing populations and intensification, and scarce land for new parks—especially larger ones that can more easily accommodate multiple uses.

City staff find themselves playing catch up to new trends, which often clash with older ways of using parks. For example, the rise in pickleball has sent cities scurrying to find space for courts to satisfy demand, often turning to underused tennis courts, which then cause conflict with tennis players.

Long the “third rail” of park design, dog parks are also high on the list of amenities that cause conflict. As we’ve written before, these conversations can get extremely heated. Cities have tried various avenues, such as deeper community engagement and community involvement in dog park operations to try to bring the tension down.

At the heart of it, however, is often an issue of both restricted physical space and different cultural norms—and an increasing need to engage in public conversations about what it means to share space in ever-densifying cities. Sometimes sharing space actually means ceding space to prioritize the needs of equity-deserving groups, while other times it’s about finding the right balance or designing spaces flexibly to accommodate multiple uses.

For example, off-leash dog areas that are open during certain hours or courts designed to accommodate multiple sports. More and more, park design is going to become an exercise in layers that can support multiple uses at different times and in different seasons. Many cities simply do not have the space to afford to let areas of parks, such as outdoor courts, become dormant in the “off season.”

These types of designs are, again, an example of focusing on park quality. As one park director pointed out, designing spaces for flexibility is a marker of designing high-quality parks for the future.

What hasn’t grown, however, is funding for parks departments to achieve these benefits through park systems that keep pace with growth, include high quality materials, and provide support for sustained community involvement. This lack of appropriate funding has had numerous deleterious impacts on parks and park staff, including delayed projects, unmet maintenance standards, reduced community programs, and inadequate staffing levels which can in turn lead to staff burnout.

The reality is that budget cuts to parks are not immediately felt in the same way that cuts to other city services are felt. When you cut the library budget, reduced operating hours mean you encounter locked doors at your local library.

But cuts to parks often take months or years to materialize before residents start to encounter fields that look mangier, benches that have gone unrepaired, broken water fountains, and overflowing garbage bins.

How can we ensure one of our most important resources—public space—has the financial support needed for these spaces to thrive?

We heard from city staff that more cross-departmental and jurisdictional partnerships are needed to combat siloed funding and decision-making. Whether it’s housing, public health, community development, economic development or another city department, there is likely an opportunity where a park project aligns with their own strategic goals.

The structure of parks departments can also have an impact. Every city we spoke to structures their parks department differently. Some are housed all together in the same department, while some split planning and capital staff up from operational staff and still others have recreational staff in other departments. While there is no one right way to structure things, we did hear from staff that having planning, capital, and operational staff in different departments can have an impact on internal culture, priorities, and collaboration opportunities.

A bright spot in this area has been growing relationships between transportation and parks departments, which together oversee the vast majority of public space in cities between roads and parks.

Multiple city staff we spoke with mentioned increasing collaboration between these departments has led to innovative projects that realize multiple benefits. For example, Vancouver pointed out that collaboration between the Park Board and City Engineering on the Rain City Strategy has led to projects that reduce stormwater runoff while creating new green space for people and wildlife habitat.

In Toronto, collaboration between Transportation Services and Parks has led to redeveloped parks, like Berczy Park, that include redesigning adjacent roadways as flexible public spaces to help visually and physically expand public space, while also calming traffic.

These collaborations result in spaces that are more functional and beautiful, while also helping achieve the goals of both departments. While we should be advocating for increased park budgets, cities also need to support more collaborative projects between city departments where goals overlap and budgets can be shared.

The work of parks will not become simpler over time—it will become even more complex. There is much work to be done to live up to the long-proclaimed idea that parks are the democratic spaces of our cities where all people can come together to celebrate our commonalities and our differences. Building internal cultures of support and collaboration within parks departments and with other city departments is critical to realizing that potential.