It’s entirely possible that an early work by the next Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg will screen on Wednesday night at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. With the 2013 Student Film Showcase featuring the best from post-secondary schools around the country and the Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase kicking off the evening with Toronto-area high-school students’ films, the night will be a coming-out party for a new crop of talent. Judging by the polished creativity of some of the entries, it’s safe to say that young people are more prepared than ever to start telling stories on film from an early age.

According to CBC’s Chris Boyce, the goal of this weekend’s CBCMusic.ca Festival is twofold. First and foremost, the CBC wants to celebrate Canadian music. Second, it wants to celebrate CBC Music, the broadcaster’s online music service, which launched a little over a year ago.

In 1996, Theatre Columbus premiered playwright Michael O’Brien’s “freely adapted” take on the famous Beaumarchais play The Barber of Seville, which was written in 1775. O’Brien’s version mixed in music from the 1816 opera of the same name by Gioachino Rossini, as well as original tunes by composer John Millard. The adaptation also propelled the story forward a couple centuries, with pop culture references galore. With Theatre Columbus co-founder Leah Cherniak at the helm, the musical ended the season with six Dora Award nominations (it won three) and plenty of critical acclaim.

Seventeen years later, Soulpepper Theatre is remounting this zany reimagination of The Barber of Seville, updated once again by O’Brien, Millard, and Cherniak. But, for some reason—the change in decade, or company, or sense of humour—whatever had made the original so magical, has faded, save for a few key performances.

igalsc from the Torontoist Flickr Pool

The Regent Park Daniels Spectrum was packed on Saturday afternoon for the third annual Toronto Parks Summit. The four-hour-long event provided an update on Toronto Park People’s progress improving the city’s parks, and a heads up on what the group is planning to do next.

Toronto Park People is a non-profit, grassroots organization formed in early 2011. It has grown from an outfit with few staff and little money into a conglomerate of 80 parks groups. Its mandate is to inspire new innovations in the use of public space, and to make great parks accessible to all Torontonians.

“It’s really an expanding movement. As people see good things happening in other people’s parks, they want to make that happen in their own parks,” said Dave Harvey, the organization’s director.

This year, the W. Garfield Weston Foundation pledged $5 million over three years to Toronto Parks People to fund new parks initiatives in Toronto. And that’s not the only new development. “We’re expanding our resources,” said Harvey. “We’re bringing in some new staff to help us on the policy front. We’re expanding our outreach resources to help build those new parks groups, in particular with this goal of having a parks group in every ward of the city in two years.”

Keynote speaker Mickey Fearn, the US National Park Service’s deputy director for communications and community assistance, gave an entertaining speech about the virtues and challenges of running a successful parks and rec department. According to Fearn, parks and recreation is the most invisible of government services because its results are hard to quantify. Cities need thriving parks departments, he said, because good parks inspire civic engagement and environmental stewardship.

Collaboration and partnership can be tricky things to maintain. In explaining this, Fearn used a vinaigrette metaphor. Oil and vinegar mix together, he said, but they inevitably separate. In the same way, people get together on initiatives like building better parks, but eventually lose interest and go their separate ways. There must be a unifying vision to keep everyone together. Organizations like Toronto Parks People, Fearn said, act as an emulsifying agent, keeping the oil and vinegar (that is, different organizations and community members) together as a whole.

“The interesting thing is, people are getting together on things to which they feel commitment and power. So they’re willing to work on them because it causes them to feel powerful,” Kearns explained, after his speech.

“There’s these three things: critical mass, force field, and tipping point. You get a critical mass of the people working on things, then this force field emerges, and there’s this tipping point. You see Parks People getting close to that tipping point,” Kearns added.

Capping off the presentation was a series of success stories about four people and organizations that did things to promote public spaces in their communities. CBC Radio One host Jane Farrow interviewed each honoree. Of the four, the crowd favourite seemed to be Fairmount Icemasters, which sets up a skating rink at Fairmount Park every year. After a recent round of funding cuts, a crew of volunteers stepped in to make up the difference, working long hours. They even trucked in snow from hockey arenas to make tobogganing slopes. The whole episode showed that when the City trims the parks budget, local communities are the ones that suffer—and that even in the cold of a Canadian winter, parks can still bring people together.

The summit ended with a tour of the Regent Park redevelopment, including the new aquatic centre that opened up last year. Right now, a planned park area is just an open field of dirt and snow cordoned off by a chain-link fence, but soon it will be a verdant public space. The revitalized Regent Park will, it is hoped, exemplify the type of progress that Toronto Parks People strives toward.

Trinity Bellwoods’ greenhouse will host its final discussion group this weekend. Photo courtesy of Gene Threndyle.

For the last few weeks, the greenhouse in Trinity Bellwoods Park has been a hub of prohibited activity. The space has been the site of a Sunday afternoon pop-up café since the beginning of January. Officially labeled a “discussion group,” the café has been selling espresso and snacks without permission from City officials.

Gene Threndyle and Jiva MacKay are the people behind the project, which will have its final Sunday this week. They say they just wanted to create a place for their neighbours to hang out in the winter months, and make better use of a greenhouse that they say spends most of the year being used as a storage shed.

Threndyle, a gardener by trade, says he first came in contact with the greenhouse a while ago, when trying to find a place to store plants for the winter. He admits that, when he first went in, he wasn’t impressed with what he saw. “I couldn’t help but notice that the greenhouse is a little bit worse for wear,” he told us. “One particular guy has been breaking in there and sleeping for years, there were trees growing up [through the floor]. I got rid of those.”

It wasn’t until this past summer that he realized the space’s potential.

“In August, somebody got married in there, and they moved out the really ugly Home Depot shelves they’d had in there, and I couldn’t help but notice how great the space looked when it was empty,” he says. He decided that the greenhouse would be the perfect spot for a pop-up café. It was an idea that struck a strong chord when he mentioned it to his neighbour, MacKay. A trained chef, she says she’d been toying with the idea of a greenhouse café for a while.

“A few years ago, I’d gone to a green roof conference,” she said. “I’d had this vision of putting a greenhouse on a roof, and then putting a little café inside, where people could come in the wintertime and take off some layers and be sunbathed and surrounded by the vital force of all these plants growing. And Gene had the same idea, and said he wanted to put an espresso machine in the greenhouse.”

Threndyle and MacKay initially took the idea to the volunteers at Friends of Trinity Bellwoods, but Threndyle says that they “didn’t really get what we wanted to do.” Then, he spoke with Friends of Dufferin Grove’s Jutta Mason, who has spent years working both with and around the City’s Parks Department to hold unique events at Dufferin Grove Park. She told them that a café probably wasn’t going to fly. “She said ‘Well, they’ll shut you down immediately if you put a coffee machine in there and call it a café,’” says Threndyle. Instead, she suggested that they call it a discussion group, and just serve snacks while they were at it.

Threndyle loved the idea. He and MacKay started readying the space in December, clearing out what he describes as the existing plastic shelves and replacing them with cedar ones he built himself, along with some of his plants. By the first week of January, they were ready to go.

“We lined up a ton of speakers, including her, and she talked about how the Parks Department have the budget for all kinds of gatekeepers that tell you what you can and can’t do, but they have increasingly less and less money to run programs to make the parks more interesting,” he says. “We had [visual artist and long distance bike tripper] Jungle Ling talk about his bike trips, and they all turned out to be interesting little discussions that we’d have, and Jiva would bring in the food around noon.”

He adds that, by running a café out of the greenhouse, he’s not just serving up coffee and conversation. He’s trying to build a sense of community.

“There’s something very civilizing about people eating together, and it seems to be forbidden [in parks] in Toronto,” he says. “You can go across the street and get your coffee or whatever, but God forbid there be a little café in the park where you can get a coffee and meet your neighbours.”

He says that so far he’s had no objections from the Parks Department, even though he’s been bold enough to put a sandwich board out front. That said, he wasn’t really expecting any.

“They haven’t even noticed,” he says. “And I knew they wouldn’t. Someone said to me ‘Well, the Parks Department is going to notice,’ and I said ‘Yeah, I don’t think so. They didn’t notice the guy sleeping in there.’”

The greenhouse will be used to start seedlings in early March, which is why Threndyle and MacKay are getting ready to wrap up the café for the season. That said, they’re not giving up on their dream of communal dining in Trinity Bellwoods—they’re already planning a series of events for this summer.

“We’d like to have a more permanent set-up, which is very difficult with the bureaucracy,” says MacKay. “But we have the idea of doing suppers…of setting up tables under the trees one night a week, and I’ll do food.”

Ciclovía in Bogotá, Colombia. Photo by Cidades para Pessoas.

In the future, people will be able to travel around Toronto without the aid of cars and public transportation. They can have brunch in Leslieville, fly over to hike in High Park, and enjoy dinner in Etobicoke without turning on the ignition or even doling out subway fare.

Perhaps you’re envisioning a far-off space age, each of us with a jet pack. But if you are Gil Peñalosa, the executive director of 8-80 Cities, and Kristyn Wong-Tam (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale), the future is almost here. And that self-propelled vehicle? It’s you. On a bike. Or maybe roller blades. On foot. Or who knows, maybe on a dog sled or snowshoes in the wintry months.

Peñalosa and Wong-Tam are trying to bring ciclovías (see-clo-VI-as) to Toronto. Spanish for “bike path,” the original Ciclovía was created in 1976, and ran through part of Bogotá, Colombia. In the mid-’90s, Peñalosa, then Bogotá’s commissioner of recreation, decided to revive and radically expand the Ciclovía, to dramatic effect.

The new ciclovía is a simple concept: the city opens up certain streets to non-motorized traffic, and people are free to do as they please in the public space. Essentially, it turns long stretches of the city into a paved park. Cars are permitted to move through the city, but they are restricted to certain routes. (When you talk to him about it, Peñalosa is quick to say that the city is opening up to the people instead of being shut down or off to cars.) In Bogotá and other Colombian cities, they do this from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays and holidays; hundreds of thousands of people come out and take part. Other cities around the world have started introducing them as well.

“Streets are like a forbidden place,” Peñalosa says. “Almost nothing scares you as much as when your parents say ‘Watch out! A car is coming!’” But with the ciclovía, the streets “become open so people can enjoy the forbidden place.”

In Bogotá, the ciclovía is used to promote public health: exercise classes are taught in city plazas, dance parties are held in the street, and thousands of people stroll down the boulevards. But Peñalosa says that whatever happens, happens—people are more than welcome to set up small shops, pop-up schools, art fairs, and picnics. Loosen up the streets, loosen up the city.

“People are so hungry for public space,” said Peñalosa, “that when they have it, they’ll take over, and things will develop!”

Photo by TheFutureIsUnwritten.

The benefits of the ciclovía are great. For starters, the streets are already paved and well kept, so most of the infrastructure is ready and in good condition. “In a time of economic crisis, you don’t have to go to the City to ask for millions,” Peñalosa points out. There are no socioeconomic barriers to ciclovías—anyone with even a few spare minutes can participate. And unlike some special events like marathons (which also block traffic from specific parts of the city), everyone can participate. Ciclovías are open to everyone and can be in every neighbourhood, kind of like a city-wide Pedestrian Sunday.

In Bogotá, 120 kilometres go car-free, but Peñalosa says he’d like to see just a few kilometres dedicated to a ciclovía in Toronto for the first few events. Eventually the goal is to ramp up to 50 kilometres, in every part of Toronto, and encourage residents to explore. “Next Sunday you say ‘I want to go here…’ and this will connect all of these magnificent parts of the city.”

Studies have shown that pedestrian and cycling traffic are beneficial for a local economy; those who arrive by foot or bike are more likely to spend more money in a neighbourhood’s shops than those who drive [PDF]. It’s something cycling advocates pushing for bike lanes often point out; it’s likely to also apply with large numbers of people exploring new neighbourhoods and visiting businesses out of their normal terrain.

In Canada, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary, Hamilton, and Ottawa have all hosted ciclovías or similar events. Ottawa, notably, has been holding its Alcatel-Lucent Sunday Bikedays since 1970. All of which makes it surprising Toronto hasn’t already hosted a ciclovía yet. There is no reason why it wouldn’t be successful; New York, a city Toronto fancies as its American equivalent, shuts down Park Avenue for its version of the event, and Los Angeles, the car capital of North America, regularly hosts its CicLAvia, to the delight of citizens and proprietors alike.

Peñalosa notes that Winnipeg was the first Canadian city to adopt the idea (in 2009), and that Paris stages a weekly ciclovía year round—the concept isn’t limited to warm-weather cities. And Toronto, with its gridded streets and fairly flat landscape, makes an ideal home.

Hopefully, now it’s only a matter of time. Pending a review by the City’s top civil servant, due in April of this year, there’s a chance we’ll see our first ciclovía in 2014.

A park unlike any other at Queen and Soho Streets. Photo by Corbin Smith/Torontoist

The corner of Queen and Soho Streets looked a little different on Friday. What is usually a parking space had been turned into a makeshift park, complete with a spot to sit down and, interestingly, a balloon canopy.

The project was part of (Park)ing Day, an event where people in cities around the world put money into parking meters and then, using the time they’ve paid for, turn parking spaces into temporary public parks. While (Park)ing Day has been taking place in various places around the world since the event started in San Fransico back in 2005, this was the first time a group from Toronto got involved. The local installation, entitled “Park Yourself Here,” was spearheaded by local designers Andrew Chiu, Timothy Mitanidis, and Marek Rudzinski.

“I started reading [the (Park)ing Day] website on and off and on, and decided to do it myself,” he said.

Park Yourself Here provided a chair for you to do exactly that. Photo by Corbin Smith/Torontoist

Chiu said that even though this is the first (Park)ing Day–affiliated event in Toronto, he’s by no means the first person in the city to try to turn a parking spot into a miniature-sized public square. There have been similar efforts by P.S. Kensington. That said, he and the rest of his team have backgrounds in design, which means their interpretation of the word “park” was a little different from the usual.

“We tried to use our backgrounds and basically build a pavilion,” he said. “The design is a mirrored box, and the underside of the mirrored box is cut out in the profile of a car. When you pass it, you watch the disappearing of the car.”

Over the course of the day about 300 passersby stopped to sit down, examine the structure, take pictures, and ask questions. Chiu said the project was initially met with skepticism by some pedestrians.

Inside the makeshift park. Photo by Corbin Smith/Torontoist

“People are used to people trying to sell something on Queen West, so some people were like, ‘What are these guys trying to sell me?’” said Chiu.

Members of the public were invited to decorate the balloons that made up the canopy. At the end of the day, the balloons—and the messages that had been scrawled on them—were released.

“One person took a yellow balloon and wrote it up like a parking ticket,” he said. “People wrote birthday messages, and kids just drew whatever they wanted.”

Chiu hopes that his installation got at least a few people to think about the amount of space we dedicate to cars, and the other ways in which that space could be used.

“If you take away a car, which is serving no one, because it’s parked and empty, then that space can be used to serve hundreds of people,” he said.

CORRECTION: September 25, 10:10 AM The display was spearheaded by three local designers, Andrew Chiu, Timothy Mitanidis, and Marek Rudzinski, not just Andrew Chiu, as previously stated. The correction has been made above.

As Olympic tourists trudge along London’s sidewalks this summer, they won’t just be burning off the butter chicken and chips: they’ll also be generating electricity. British company Pavegen has installed kinetic tiles in the corridor between the West Ham tube station and the Olympic Stadium. What the tiles do—besides prove that British ingenuity didn’t end with the steam engine—is create electrical power from the kinetic energy of pedestrian feet walking over them. The amount of electricity generated isn’t huge; even with Olympic-scale pedestrian traffic, the 30 tiles essentially light the walkway itself, with any left-over juice going to batteries. (The Pavegen website provides a running tally of the power being generated.)

But even if the tiles won’t be powering a Large Hadron Collider anytime soon, they’re capturing energy that was just scuffing up shoe soles before. And because the tiles are designed to be weather-proof and can be added to existing facilities, they could, if deployed on a larger scale, help save money while greening up high-traffic environments, like transportation hubs and shopping malls.

Renewable energy has had a low profile in Rob Ford’s Toronto so far, but there has been some progress. Witness Councillor Josh Matlow’s (Ward 22, St. Paul’s) recent motions at city council, which secured endorsements for a variety of solar panel installations across the city. And while as far as we know no power tile projects have been proposed for Toronto to date, there are numerous locations where the technology could work: the Eaton Centre, Pearson airport, the PATH system, and the Entertainment District. (Unlike solar panels, the effectiveness of kinetic tiles wouldn’t be affected by dousings of blood, vomit, and Axe Body Spray.)

Hogtown is at least as well suited as London to kinetic panel installs. Both cities have relatively compact cores, and both boast impressive walkability scores. It just remains to be seen whether business or government might be interested in taking a flyer on the technology.

Phone booths at Dupont Street and Lansdowne Avenue, redecorated as part of the Tel-talk project.

A brightly coloured chalk drawing reflecting the day’s forecast and a familiar saying, at the base of the booth.

Geometric paneling, reminiscent of a stained-glass window, surrounding those who enter to make a call.

A large, white wrapping covering the entire structure, with the words “Transformation Booth” replacing “Telephone Booth.”

Those are just a few of the ‘art interventions’ that appeared across Toronto over the past few months, part of a project called Tel-talk. Starting last September, various artists were tasked with choosing a telephone booth and creating something with it.

The different installations are chronicled online and at an exhibit featuring the project now on display at the Telephone Booth Gallery in the Junction. Some reflections were also written and published in a book titled Tel-talk: art interventions in telephone booths, edited by Paola Poletto, Liis Toliao and Yvonne Koscielak, the team that also coordinated the project.

In the inaugural blog post about Tel-talk, the project is described as a hunt for a once-iconic symbol that is increasingly rare in a world where people use cell phones, and where automation is replacing face-to-face customer contact.

The project is also a reflection on seemingly private moments in public spaces, something that Telephone Booth Gallery director Sharlene Rankin says extends to the exhibit itself. “[It’s] a place where people can come and just be quiet and think and figure out what the artist is trying to communicate to them.”

And with participation from numerous artists in various media, there is an eclectic mix of approaches and ideas to consider.

Dyan Marie chose a booth at Dupont Street and Landsdowne Avenue—one that she says is still used often.

“Many of the people who live there, who live in that area, can’t actually afford a phone, so they use that phone,” she says. “So in the phone booth you can see families there. You can see people dealing with their landlords. You can see people doing drug business. You can see people calling people for their various reasons. And often it seems fairly dramatic.”

Inspired by many of the old churches she saw on a visit to Rome, and the idea of quiet spaces for thought and conversation, she put up translucent, coloured panels, not unlike stained glass windows.

Her palette came from photographs she took of the area, and especially of a man who frequents the neighbourhood of the telephone booth.

“In this one, I’m glorifying the fact that those services are still available to people who actually need them, in an area that is well used,” she says.

Artist Dyan Marie at the Telephone Booth Gallery.

Denise St. Marie and Timothy Walker, who call themselves TIMEANDDESIRE, looked for a booth that was less noticeable. They settled on one at Spadina Crescent, in the University of Toronto area. Walker, a student at the school, says he’d passed that particular telephone himself many times without seeing it.

They wrapped the booth in white cloth. “It’s essentially a large papier-mâché project,” Walker explains.

Inside the cocoon-like structure, they left a notebook posing a series of questions about social change, asking people to write down their responses.

Walker says they hoped to get people thinking about how the city is constantly in flux and the ramifications of that.

“The idea was just to get people who are going by probably thinking ‘I need eggs, I need orange juice, I need to meet up with Bill’ or whatever, and then they see this thing, it pulls them in, they enter it, they’re reading these questions about change, and now their mind is kind of operating on a new level. They’re looking at the city with new eyes.”

The piece was up from May 21–25, and Walker says in that time they received numerous handwritten replies, ranging from the “absurd” to “thoughtful.” Many are included as part of their Tel-talk exhibit.

One comment: “Before cell phones, people used to get really, truly lost. Like, middle of nowhere lost. Not anymore…”

A work on display at the Tel-talk show, at the Telephone Booth Gallery.

This concept of getting separated also emerged in Tara Cooper’s project. Her artwork was done at telephone booths on the Toronto Islands.

“You can really feel like you’re being stranded when you’re on the island,” she says.

She was surprised to find so many telephone booths there—27 by her count.

From May 20–26, she chose different telephone booths on the island and drew with chalk on the ground, incorporating a common phrase or saying about the weather that related to the day’s forecast: for instance, “the calm before the storm,” “shoot the breeze,” and “watch out for fairweather friends.”

Many of the booths were not covered ones, Cooper notes, meaning the forecast may be particularly relevant to the caller, as both they and the drawing are exposed.

“There’s an immediacy about that, and I like that the piece itself gets affected by weather. So if it ends up stormy, that advice becomes less evident,” she says.

The weather may have washed away Cooper’s work, but a collage of her project, including photos of the drawings, is on display as part of the Tel-talk exhibit, which will stay up until July 14, 2012.

And though the red telephone booth in the front of that gallery is a permanent fixture, Rankin’s involvement in the project has made her nostalgic for telephone booths throughout the city. “It makes me kind of sad to see them go,” she said.

The High Line in New York City. Photo by {a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/31998658@N06/5859380380/"}Ed Kwon{/a}.

Robert Hammond didn’t know he was a park person when he looked up at the abandoned steel structure—once home to a freight railway line—cutting through his New York City neighbourhood. He only knew he didn’t want the thing torn down.

Now, almost 13 years after Hammond and fellow abandoned-railway-line lover Joshua David met at a community meeting, the two are responsible for turning that 1.45-mile industrial relic into the High Line, one of New York City’s most celebrated public spaces.

Though Hammond is officially the co-founder and executive director of High Line, he hesitates to take much credit for the project. “We just raised the flag, and people came to us with ideas,” he said in his keynote address at Park People’s second annual Toronto Park Summit at the Evergreen Brick Works on Saturday.

When Hammond and David teamed up, they were a pair of busy New Yorkers. David was a travel writer and Hammond was a “part-time artist and internet businessman.” They had, according to a Hammond, “no money, no plan, and no relevant experience” when it came to their new pet project, but it’s that killer combo of cluelessness and pennilessness that he credits in part for the High Line’s success. That, and the fact that they didn’t let those things stop them from starting something, even if they didn’t know what the something was. Hammond says a collaborative, bottom-up approach helped shape the High Line into what it is now.

Listening to Hammond praise collaboration, it’s easy to understand why Park People, the local organization that produced the Toronto Park Summit, chose him as the keynote speaker. As Park People Executive Director David Harvey said in his opening address, the organization, which serves as an umbrella organization for local park volunteer groups and advocates for parks across the city, is quickly becoming the “citywide voice for parks.” And that’s kept the group pretty busy in its first year of existence.

Robert Hammond delivers his keynote. Photo courtesy of Park People.

Staying true to the organization’s themes of collaboration and community building, the walls of the meeting room at the Evergreen Brick Works were adorned with interactive posters and maps, encouraging people to identify their local park and share ideas for park improvement. (Under “Ideas to get more people into parks,” a sticky note written in the unset scrawl of a child said, simply, “A slide!”) And after Hammond had finished speaking, Jane Farrow moderated what she called “speed dating with people who make differences in parks,” which can also be described as brief presentations and discussions from local park groups, including the people behind the East Lynn farmers’ market, Mabelle Arts, Jeff Healey Park, the Wabash Buildling Society, and Trinity-Bellwoods’ Adopt-A-Tree program.

Emily Atherton was technically at the summit for work, but she came away from it seeing park work as people work, too. Atherton works for the St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood BIA, which is in the midst of redesigning St. James and Berczy Parks, so she was happy to hear from the presenters and audience alike. “It was nice to hear what local parks are doing,” she said. “To hear what works for them, and what could work for us.

“I think it’s great that there’s a whole bunch of people who are so dedicated to parks,” she added. “And it’s not even neccessarily people who work in parks, like for the City; it’s just people in the community who want to make their parks a better place.”

The park people that came out for Saturday’s summit ranged from volunteers representing “Friends of…” park groups, to city councillors, to landscape architects, to artists, to kids, to Toronto Sun columnist Sue-Ann Levy.

Park supporters, much like parks themselves, come in all shapes and sizes.

photo by {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/krisxcouture/5826821767/”}Zebb Keziah T{/a} from the {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/”}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

Toronto is a city that loves its parks. When the weather gets warm and the leaves begin to unfurl, it can seem like the entire city is out lounging on the various grassy lawns and park benches and splashing in the wading pools. But not all parks are created equal, and getting a dynamite neighbourhood park takes a lot of work.

That’s where Park People comes in.

Park People works to engage Torontonians with their parks, providing support and guidance to neighbourhood groups, and advocating for better parks. The organization is the brain child of David Harvey, author of “Fertile Ground for New Thinking,” a report on the state of Toronto’s parks that’s well worth a read. As it finishes up its first year, Park People has acquired Anna Hill, who will be acting as Park People’s community outreach coordinator. We spoke to both as the organization gears up for its second annual Park Summit, taking place this Saturday at the Evergreen Brickworks.

A Friend in Need

“Parks aren’t as good as they can be,” Harvey says. “We’ve been taking our parks for granted.” But, he adds, “there’s this appetite in communities to get involved in parks and there’s been people doing great things in their parks for decades. It’s about building that network up into a higher level and getting better parks.”

One of the ways that Park People sees this happening is by fostering the creation of “Friends Of” groups, which are created by community members who are interested in taking stewardship of their local park. These groups do a variety of different work from organizing farmers markets and community gardens to small festivals and pizza nights. Some of them, like the Friends of Trinity Bellwoods or Friends of Dufferin Grove have been very successful in activating their parks and serve as models for other groups.

“There’s 1,600 parks in Toronto and just over 50 Friends Of groups,” Hill says, “So there’s more work to be done.”

“But,” Harvey says, “That’s 10 more than there were last year.” Harvey says that Park People has lent a helping hand in the creation of these new groups and expects even more to crop up in the next year.

Park People encourages these new groups by connecting them with other groups and sharing information, but also through a handy do-it-yourself guidebook that explains everything from the organizational structure of a Friends Of group to working with City staff to fundraising tips. Hill is particularly proud of the guidebook. “It’s a consolidated resource book of information, stories, tips, and a list of the different types of development you can do in parks that makes it a lot easier for new groups to get off the ground.”

“Generally,” she says, “the parks that have the Friends Of groups are much more activated and tend to be more developed as well, so it’s really important for people to take ownership of public spaces and help to shape them.”

photo by {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/bensonkua/4333313419/”}Benson Kua{/a} from the {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/”}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

Financing the Parks We Want

One of the most pressing concerns Harvey identified for Toronto’s parks was maintenance. “By and large as a city we’re very well served by the number of parks. The big issue now is that the parks are fraying around the edges, and there’s this capital backlog and the backlog is getting bigger.”

Concerns over maintenance also affects the design of new parks, Harvey says. “With increasingly limited funds for park maintenance and support, the City is going to this concept of building the easiest-to-maintain park, so it’s just a little bit of grass a couple of benches and a tree and that’s not serving the community’s needs.”

As often happens with municipal issues, the conversation shifts to one of funding. “I think there needs to be a thoughtful consideration of how to find new funding sources for maintenance in parks,” Hill says. She mentions an idea to use Section 37 money, the funds the City gets from developers who are going through a re-zoning, to fund future park maintenance. (Currently, Section 37 money is only available for capital projects.)

Park People has also previously advocated, in one of their park solutions papers, the idea of mobilizing private capital for park funding, an idea that may make some Torontonians uncomfortable, but which is used in many U.S. cities. “I think there are ways that we can bring in private sector funding that don’t involve major advertising in parks,” Harvey says. However, he says, “we can’t let the City off the hook for being the core funder, the core responsibility for new parks and park maintenance across the city. This can’t be about bringing in private sector funding for parks because the City is cutting back funding for parks.” Any private sector funding, he says, should be above and beyond the City’s own funding, allowing parks to be more animated and have better programming and amenities.

Investment in our city’s public spaces can improve private residences and neighbourhoods, Hill adds. “It’s really worth nurturing our parks for many reasons beyond having a nice park,” she says, “A great way to develop a neighbourhood is to develop a park.”

“Or,” Harvey adds, “conversely, a great way to ruin a neighbourhood is to have a horrible park. It can really make it a place you don’t want to live.”

photo by {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/superdubey/3732888932/”}Superdubey{/a} from the {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/”}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}

Diverse City, Diverse Parks

Toronto is an incredibly culturally diverse city, but do our parks reflect and provide opportunities for that diversity? “No,” Harvey says, “I think there’s still a lot of work to be done on that.” Park People hopes to work more in new immigrant and diverse communities “to help form citizens’ groups or Friends Of groups in neighbourhoods that don’t have them so that these communities can really articulate what it is they need in a park to fully activate that park for the community.”

Having good parks is especially important for new immigrants, as they provide a space to socialize and meet people in their community. Parks “really are the areas of the city that are great democratic areas that anybody can get into and anybody can use,” Harvey says. “They’re these real mixing areas.”

Hill, who is originally from the United States, knew no one when she arrived in Toronto. “Everyone I met in my first year in Toronto I met in my park,” she says. “And if it wasn’t for my local park, I’m not quite sure how I would have met people, so I think that parks are critical places for new immigrants. Especially new immigrants that have young children. You need these public spaces, the places where new immigrants can go to kindle the beginnings of a first relationship.”

There is also a disparity between more and less affluent neighbourhoods and their parks. “Often the more affluent areas are in more dense neighbourhoods so people use their park more actively,” Harvey says. “Where you are in inner suburbs, there’s a lot of green space, but it’s not set up to be all that activated.” There’s also the issue of funds, of course. “In the more affluent neighbourhoods the Friends Of groups can do some fundraising or they’ve got that capacity to make a difference with their councillor because they’re politically connected or they’ve got people who can write grant applications and know where to submit for grants.”

The vast majority of the Friends Of groups in Toronto are located in downtown parks, Hill says, but she is hoping to change that as she works on building connections in the city’s priority neighbourhoods and new-immigrant communities. She mentions Dallington Park as an example, where mothers from Albania and Pakistan sit on the steering committee for their local park group.

Both Hill and Harvey are excited about rolling out some new programs in the coming year, while continuing to spread information and connect park groups across the city. It’s great to see so many people engaged in their communities and working to make their public spaces the kind of places that work for them. Because in the city within a park, we’re all park people.

Photo of the TD Centre cows by {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/a590is/3817432675/sizes/z/in/photostream/”}Wai{/a} from the {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/”}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

Toronto: City as Urban Playground (as part of Jane’s Walk)
Meet at the central fountain in Berczy Park (by the Flatiron Building)
Saturday, May 5, 10 a.m.
FREE

Picasso once said that every child is an artist. It’s a famous quote, with a famous conundrum: “The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Certainly, there’s a distinction between a kid’s approach to the world and that of an adult, a fundamental divide in daily life and how we approach it. It’s what led architect David Butterworth to plan Toronto: City as Urban Playground, a Jane’s Walk targeted at children aged 5–12 and centred around one of the city’s least likely play spaces—the financial district.

Butterworth, the father of two young children, conceived of the tour while considering the design approaches of downtown landmarks. “If you look at any of the spaces in downtown Toronto, they are specifically designed with a child’s perspective in mind,” he explains, citing the invitingly climbable cow statues outside of TD Centre as an example of public art whose charm lies in its knack for teasing out childlike impulses in its viewers.

Children don’t want to simply observe a place the way adults do. “They want to know, ‘What can I do in it? What can I use, what can I play with?’” Design, from a kid’s perspective, is all about interaction—the ability to infuse a space with character and connectivity.

It’s also about creating reference points. “When children see a space, they don’t see space,” says Butterworth.“They start going, ‘Man with an umbrella.’ ‘Pigeons.’ ‘Tall post.’ What they’re recognizing is things that they understand…not the big picture. They’re recognizing something that they establish as a control point.”

Butterworth hopes his walk will join those elements of mental map-making with a sense of accessibility, highlighting the everyday playfulness of urban architecture and design through some of the downtown core’s most familiar locales—the Royal York Hotel, Brookfield Place, the Flatiron building, and the PATH system among them. It’s part education, part experiment.

“Kids, as they get older, 12 or 13, invent a way to play,” he says. “They’re challenging themselves to do something with the space, they’re trying to be creative. A kid at five, six years old, they just want to run around, kick a football.” By targeting children from both ends of this developmental spectrum—and, of course, their parents—Butterworth’s tour aims to draw attention to the breadth of spatial interaction.

“We’ve got a couple of fun things, theories, that we’re going to test on this little walk—doing it in spaces that we think are going to engage [the walkers] and make them think at the same time.”