below:Occupy Toronto camp in St James Park, 2011 Protesters in Christie Pits Park during the Toronto Garden Strike, 2009 opposite: Point Pleasant Park five years after Hurricane Juan, 2008
institutional misrule Many of Canada’s public parks shelter residents forced out of cities by privatising forces and economic pressures. In 2013, The Vancouver Sun interviewed residents of Stanley Park where several dozen homeless people live—some have been there for more than a decade. Toronto’s Don River Valley interconnected park system has long been a refuge for the city’s homeless whose makeshift shelters constructed from recycled clothing and building materials are easily discovered. Often (falsely) linked with litter, promiscuity and crime, the use of parks by itinerant populations recalls depression-era debates as parks became home to many urban unemployed. Not all informal occupations can be ignored: in July 2014 homeless residents of Vancouver’s beleaguered and low-income lower east side constructed a camp in nearby Oppenheimer Park to protest their neglect by city officials. Despite numerous eviction notices and citations from the fire department, 400 displaced residents remained in the park, referring to its relative safety over the squalid condition of city shelters. Over the course of the three-month long occupation, a maelstrom of negative press aimed at past efforts to address homelessness forced the City of Vancouver to announce an additional 100 shelter spaces and 157 interim housing units to meet homeless needs. And in another example in the pursuit of social justice, in June 2009, Toronto residents came to the defence of their public space when 24,000 members of the Toronto Civic Employees Union went on strike and the City used parks as a convenient and free location to open temporary dumpsites. As the smell of rotting garbage heated by high
summer temperatures increased, protesters tried to block contractors from spreading rat poison over the heaps of foetid garbage. After 36 days of strike, 48,900 tonnes of trash had accumulated inside the city limits as media and public debate centred on the City’s misappropriation of public space.
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R J: subversion and pleasure are not mutually exclusive - the kinds of pleasure afforded by natural (or at least naturalistic) landscape are not necessarily an opposition between civil pleasure and uncivil behavior. Is it possible to reconcile the pleasure of enlightenment that city parks sell to citizens and the subversive pleasure of concealment and rule breaking that those same citizens find in the wooded glades and behind the ornamental shrubs meant to add depth and structure to a phantasm of natural repose? Post-Sandy waterfront
redevelopment projects in New York are an example of landscape manipulation, as well as various ‘unbound’ park initiatives and contemporary art engagements to get a more complex idea of the issue of changing approaches to park space that are more flexible to different social and ecological condition. Cary Wolfe’s essay on the Downsview Park redevelopment, ‘Shifting Ground’, shows an alternative view on park design, its relationship to architecture, and the formal aspects of the social issues discussed here.
Monica Gupta
Finally, as an aside, did you know that squirrels did not find their own way into American cities? they were introduced in the 19th century as a possible way of pacifying unruly city youth by encouraging their engagement with a particularly pacific sort of natural creature.
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