Hostile by design: How Toronto’s public spaces reflect a city that doesn’t welcome you
THE GREEN LINE
ACTION JOURNEY STORY
Hostile by Design: How Toronto’s Public Spaces Reflect a City That Doesn’t Welcome You
From the concrete expanse outside College Park to the noise-polluted corner at Parliament and Bloor, Toronto’s design choices keep people moving, not gathering.
Riverdale Park West under water after Don Valley Parkway flooded on July 16, 2024.
: JAY COCKBURN/THE GREEN LINE.
Jay Cockburn
Journalist who writes and makes podcasts about cities and the people in them. Originally from the UK's Lake District, now in Cabbagetown. Obsessed with sci-fi and cycling.
November 18, 2024
One day after Don Valley Parkway flooded on July 16, I walked across the Gerrard Street Bridge, gawping at the washed-out cars blocking on- and off-ramps.
Then I headed down the hill to Riverdale Park West; there, I saw dogs swimming and a determined cyclist pedal-deep in flood water. The park had become Toronto’s biggest pond.
The day after that, I went back for another gawp. The DVP was cleared — cars were flowing, order was restored, floodwaters tamed.
But Riverdale Park West remained underwater.
That’s not really a surprise; it often floods, just not in the peak of summer. For as long as I’ve lived in Toronto, this park has been waterlogged for all of spring and fall, only becoming dry in the peak of summer and frozen in the dead of winter. I’m no landscape engineer, but building a boardwalk so that the park’s footpath sits above this swamp doesn’t seem too difficult, and is it really so hard to provide drainage for a park that’s right next to a river?
Toronto has now handed responsibility for maintaining the DVP to Ontario, but the contrast still couldn’t be starker: a free public space that people are battling to use even when it’s a foot underwater next to a rapidly restored highway.
People shop at The Well, a new mixed-use commercial and residential space at Front St. W. and Spadina Ave., on Aug. 25, 2024.
: ALOYSIUS WONG/THE GREEN LINE.
NO FUN ALLOWED
I like to think that public space is not just the space between a city’s biggest buildings: it’s a mirror.
Our parks, sidewalks, ravines and pathways are an expression of our values as a city.
Unfortunately both the quantity and quality of public space in cities are in a period of historic decline.
“Parks are a source of connection in the city,” says Erika Nikolai, executive director of national nonprofit Park People. “I am in my local park two or three times a day, and it's one of the only places in my neighbourhood where I meet and hang out with my neighbours.”
When I look in Toronto’s park-shaped mirror, I have to admit that I don’t feel particularly inspired. Our public spaces can veer into the openly hostile. Take the exterior of the shopping mall College Park at College and Yonge Streets, for example. There’s a wide expanse of concrete that would be perfect for arts installations, seating and even an outdoor café. Instead there’s a single planter, complete with metal bumps, to ensure nobody can lie down or skateboard along the edges. No seating, no reason to stay.
Montréalers walk and bike down L'Avenue du Mont-Royal (Mount Royal Avenue) in August 2023. This street is one of several designated as pedestrian-only zones by the city over the summer.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
In comparison, I was in Montréal in July, and the city has a vibrancy that Toronto just refuses to match. Pedestrianized streets in the summer are dotted with art installations and seating, inviting you to pause and enjoy the city — one that actually wants you to gather. I even stumbled into a free comedy festival, though my lack of French got in the way of the punchlines. The parks in Montréal, too, are adorned with fountains and benches. They reflect a city that takes pride in itself, and understands the value of the spaces between.
It’s not particularly new for a Torontonian to be envious of Montréal’s public spaces. What I didn’t expect was to feel envious of Calgary. Yes, as a true Toronto snob I was shocked to learn that Cowtown is indeed quite nice. The waterfront of the Bow River in downtown Calgary is used beautifully in the form of Eau Claire Park, which is packed with greenery and benches. Crossing the car-free Peace Bridge gives a view of another park on Prince’s Island, a large portion of which was devoted to a music festival during my stay in July. Both of these parks are lush with vegetation and wildlife. In fact, Calgary has 6.7 hectares of parkland per 1000 people. Toronto, the “city within a park,” according to our park signage, has a measly 2.9 hectares per 1000 people.
While quantity is important, for me, it’s a qualitative issue. Calgary and Montréal’s public spaces are clean, well-maintained and have fixtures that look built to last.
A fountain sits at the centre of Parc Lahaie (Lahaie Park) in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montréal.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
“A very different built form drives very different ways that people use parks,” says Nikolai, referring to the urban environment of these two cities. “There are a lot of trails in Calgary. Montréalers, amazingly enough, use their parks as their living rooms."
Meanwhile, the park at the end of my street in Cabbagetown is a glorified lawn with a broken set of goal posts at one end. There are some notable exceptions, but Toronto’s parks often feel coldly functional and cheaply built. I’ve never once considered using this park as a living room. It’s more of a dog toilet.
Our city’s approach to public space is siloed in ways that separate out purpose from cost, according to Nikolai, who adds that when we think about parks as spaces to maintain — rather than as critical health and social infrastructure — we don’t invest in them in that way. “We invest in them in a way that is a lot more narrow and it's often about grounds maintenance,” she explains.
In other words, you end up with a lawn.
A man sits alone on a rock, as people bike past Coronation Park near Toronto’s waterfront.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
Toronto’s low park-to-person ratio comes down to a quantity-over-quality attitude from our municipal and provincial governments, according to Eunice Wong, lead researcher of inclusive city-building at Monumental Projects, a social purpose business focused on fair and just cities.
“We stopped caring about public spaces,” they say. “We've just been building them. I think there's a lot of this attitude in government of, ‘If we build it, they will come.’ It's much more about the quantity of space.”
They add that a risk-averse municipal government leads to a neutral public space, and the city interprets neutrality to be inclusivity. “But what that actually does is totally go against the intention of the word public.”
The public, of course, encapsulates all forms of diversity, from dog-walking nonprofit execs like Nikolai to people who need a place to sleep for the night. It means you need space for raucous cookouts, quiet picnics and children playing. The easy option is to provide one blank canvas — a lawn. But in attempting to provide a space for everyone, Wong says, the city ends up providing a space for no one.
“We stopped caring about public spaces.”
EUNICE WONG
LEAD RESEARCHER, MONUMENTAL PROJECTS
In Toronto, development pays for new parks. Most new buildings have to either provide some public space or hand over dollars so that the city can acquire new parkland.
When a developer provides public space, it’s often in the form of privately owned publicly accessible space, or POPS. There’s one of these POPS near where I live at the corner of Parliament Street and Bloor Street East. If you stand in the right spot — that is, if you put your back to the road and wilfully ignore the seven lanes of traffic that is the Parliament and Bloor intersection — then this looks like a quiet collection of chairs and tables surrounded by trees. But turn around and take your fingers out of your ears, and you’ll see why you’re choking on gasoline.
I’ve never seen a single person sitting on those chairs.
Daniel Rotsztain, who co-lead plazaPOPS, an initiative to turn privately owned parking lots here into popup public spaces, says he doesn’t know of any POPS that are “hugely successful as gathering spaces” in downtown Toronto.
“I think that there's a deep cultural suspicion about dwelling in Toronto” he says. “That really manifests in the inability to design a comfortable sitting space.”
Under the shade, people sit and chat at tables located in the Village of Yorkville Park in downtown Toronto.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
Wong agrees. “It's squeezing out the leftover space to become public space,” they say. “[The city does] their math and they do the spreadsheets of how they're going to build this development here, and then whatever is left over, they carve out that little alleyway or corner that's super noisy and dirty to become their public space.”
If a developer doesn’t provide public space, they can instead hand money to the city. That then gets earmarked for new parkland, according to Nikolai, but the government isn’t able to reallocate the funds for the ongoing maintenance and operation of parks.
That means, she explains, the city ends up building new parks without looking after the parks they already have. “They often come without a plan of how to maintain those public spaces…but it's complicated because the development charges are meant to offset density and to provide valuable green space” she says.
A homeless encampment is set up on some of the green space at Bathurst Quay Common, a park in downtown Toronto.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
Of course, if a developer can’t find a way to provide public space within their own development, that doesn’t necessarily mean the city will have space nearby either. Toronto’s restrictive zoning means areas that allow dense development, like the downtown core or Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue East, end up packed with as many tall buildings as possible while leafier, low-rise neighbourhoods remain protected. Yet, it's those high-development areas that are paying for the parks.
With over 2,300 projects in Toronto’s development pipeline, there’s money coming in — it’s just not necessarily making it to the park-maintenance budget.
Of course, we’ve all seen the news that came out of the auditor general’s report about how park-maintenance money is spent. Parks, forestry and recreation staff were found to be significantly overreporting the time they spent on park maintenance, with GPS trackers showing an average of over two hours per day spent unaccounted for or resting in non-parkland locations.
Children ride bikes and scooters at The Bentway during a September afternoon.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
DONATIONS, NOT TAXES?
But there’s a secret third way to fund public spaces: philanthropy.
Dave Carey is co-executive director of The Bentway Conservancy, an independent nonprofit that works with the city and locals to reimagine space under and along the Gardiner Expressway.
The project began with a $25 million donation from Judy and Wil Mathews. But Carey admits that unlike the U.S., such as with The High Line in New York City, Toronto and Canada broadly don’t have a strong history of philanthropic support for urban public spaces.
People look across the Hudson River from the High Line, a park and public space created from a repurposed elevated railway line on the west side of Manhattan in New York City, on Aug. 11, 2024.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
Phase one of The Bentway project is a cathedral-like open space at 250 Fort York Blvd. You might expect something bunker-esque hunkered under a highway, but there’s little evidence of the traffic roaring above. Greenery adorns a figure-eight skate trail. There’s also a boardwalk for pedestrians and an amphitheatre for performances.
“Our phase-one site acts as both a backyard park for local residents and a growing destination park,” Carey says. “So, if you're a local living in City Place or Fort York, then The Bentway is where you'll go to start your morning run or walk your dog or have your kid's birthday party. If you're living beyond [a 15-minute walk], you're coming to The Bentway to be surprised, to be entertained, to be inspired, to come to see great art or great performance projects and to see the city in a new way.”
Toronto artist Heather Nicol’s Wind Ensemble, a "sound and soft sculpture installation" which features sound components for passersby to interact with during the day, was part of the Softer City exhibit at The Bentway. It was open to the public from May to October 2024.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
It’s not just a beautiful space, though. Carey says The Bentway is designed to be radically accessible, and describes it as a site that’s built for and welcoming to everyone.
When he tells me this, I can’t help but think of the “no camping” signs I see in Toronto’s municipal parks, the private security at Allan Gardens and the loud-music speakers that malls near Dundas Square, like The Tenor, use to stop people from sleeping nearby.
Carey tells me that the ethos of The Bentway’s space is is evident in the foundational early work done by Toronto design firm Public Work, which he says set a standard in resisting “defensive and hostile architecture” by building seats, loungers and benches that are meant to be sat or laid on.
Community event outside the Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre.
: Jane/Finch Community and Family Centre website.
DIY PUBLIC SPACE
Still, I can’t shake the feeling that relying on the whims of rich people to provide us plebeians with pleasant spaces isn’t the best way to manage a city’s public realm, and Nikolai of Park People seems to agree.
“Often, what we see in American cities where philanthropy has become a way of funding parks, philanthropy often goes into a park instead of a park system,” she explains.
Perhaps I’m getting it wrong by focusing on money and how it's distributed. Wong of Monumental tells me that good urban design doesn’t have to be about how we spend. They say Torontonians over-romanticize what good urban design should be because we see cities like Copenhagen and their visible signs of investment, such as unique pavers and public art. But, Wong emphasizes, “I don't think that necessarily equates to good public space.”
Maybe I’m also focusing too much on parks. After all, public space isn’t just greenery. Wong tells me about Corner Commons at Jane Street and Finch Avenue West, a parking lot outside of Jane Finch Mall that local residents took ownership of in 2021.
“It was just a bunch of volunteers — kids — who just wanted to try out power drills for the first time.”
EUNICE WONG
LEAD RESEARCHER, MONUMENTAL PROJECTS
“The Jane-Finch Community Centre, with volunteers, just got some paint, got some wood and built this kind of tactical urbanism: benches and shade structures and a stage to formalize that public space,” they say.
Corner Commons has always been an informal public space because it’s by the bus stop that serves Jane Finch Mall, and previously hosted spoken word events, two artist residencies, a market and a pop-up vaccine clinic.
“It took money and applying to grants and looking for funding, but it wasn't this beautiful shiny public space,” Wong says. “It was just a bunch of volunteers — kids — who just wanted to try out power drills for the first time.”
That’s not too different from what plazaPOPs does: adding seating, greenery and events to create community-friendly space on suburban parking lots. Executive director Rotsztain says the key to making these spaces successful as gathering places is flexibility and community consultation. He and the plazaPOPS team achieves that by piloting their spaces with cheaper materials and easily movable furniture.
For example, at its Wexford Heights site in Scarborough, they initially had one main seating area that was consistently well-used, but community feedback painted a suboptimal picture. “A lot of the community said, ‘We want to hang out there, but we feel like there's one group that is kind of taking over,’” Rotsztain explains. In response, the plazaPOPS team redesigned the space with “lots of nooks and crannies,” enabling many groups to use the space at once.
Pedestrians take over Kensington Market on Aug. 25, 2024.
: Aloysius Wong/The Green Line.
LET'S HAVE FUN
Our public space matters because it tells us whether or not we care about things that aren’t easily measured.
Of course, there are health benefits to having good, green and accessible outdoor space, but these are also spaces for joy. These are places where first dates and birthday parties and picnics and tipsy walks home happen.
Why live in a city at all if we aren’t having fun? This isn’t just one journalist pontificating. The value of public green space in cities has been recognized as far back as the Romans and proven by study after study in the millennia since.
On Sunday, Sept. 22, I found myself standing at one end of a trail of chalk-white knee-high dominoes at Niagara Street and Wellington Street West. They snaked off for 2.5 km down streets, through houses and grocery stores, across Lake Shore Boulevard and eventually to the edge of Lake Ontario. There’s no good reason for this — it’s just fun.
“Dominoes” was a temporary artwork organized by The Bentway Conservancy that was showcased on Sept. 22, 2024.
: The Bentway website.
“Dominoes” was a temporary artwork organized by The Bentway Conservancy. They were pushed over at the appointed time, and for the next 20 minutes, the organizers say a crowd of 20,000 watched the dominoes fall. Some particularly enthusiastic watchers and a couple of TV cameras actually chased the topple.
But I was less interested in seeing the dominoes fall than the statement it made. This delicate, ephemeral piece of public art wasn’t behind glass or even a rope. There were neither guards nor signs. Crowds were freely stepping over and through the dominoes. A couple fell early, but safeguards were there to make sure the whole thing wasn’t ruined (a gap of one domino in about every 10 was left to avoid the whole thing being knocked down prematurely).
the funniest stupid outcome: after 200 years of Protestant hand-wringing, Toronto now finally has this “pilot program” that lets you legally have a beer in the park. But because of sign bylaws or council or something, we now have giant signs everywhere saying ALCOHOL IN PARKS pic.twitter.com/tpG3vLqKCy
— Alex Danco (@Alex_Danco) August 12, 2023
In a city that put up huge warning signs about alcohol in parks, this was a radical statement saying: We trust you. Come have fun with us.
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International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
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