What's a Park For?

In July the Globe and Mail Opinion section ran several articles about the purpose and uses and communal value of public spaces. The illustration above took up two thirds of the front page, a pleasant image, and the banner What's a Park For? was perfect. 

We're big on parks in all their manifestations. We cycle regularly along the Belleville waterfront trail and our nearby grandkids have favourite parks to visit when they come for sleepovers. 

We had a family camping trip in a provincial park, then a canoe-in couple of days in a Conservation Area, the only one in our region allowing overnight stays. In June we made a trip into Haii Gwaanas, the spectacular national park in the Pacific Ocean off British Columbia. During our Newfoundland trip we're hoping we can spend a day in Terra Nova. We've visited a dozen national parks in eight provinces and loved them all. 

It's great that in urban High Park in Toronto we once came upon an end-of-Ramadan extended family picnic and that so many immigrant groups are spending time in Algonquin Park and others.

In one of the articles Linda Besner offers: 

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.”

I'm also convinced that parks are inherently spiritual. While the term "park" isn't used in scripture there are "gardens" at the beginning and end of the bible and Jesus spent the final lonely hours of his life in Gethsemane, still an oasis of green in Jerusalem. When we visited Israel last year we spent a lot of time in national parks, a highlight of our time there.

I'm working through what it means to have public spaces that have become home to the homeless in many places across Canada. How do we ensure that those parks are for everyone? We all need them and must do our best to ensure that there is access for all.