Connected to public transit, Rouge National Urban Park is accessible to Canadians who may not otherwise reach national parks. Now, the country is getting 14 more.Supplied
Rouge National Urban Park (RNUP) is an anomaly among Canada’s green spaces.
Spanning 79 square kilometres from the Oak Ridges Moraine to Lake Ontario, the Ontario-based park is 22 times the size of New York City’s sprawling Central Park. With more than 10,000 years of rich history, RNUP is also one of Canada’s most biodiverse protected areas, home to more than 1,700 species of plants, animals, fungi and insects.
But perhaps most unique about this park is its location: Set against the backdrop of Canada’s largest city, RNUP sits just 30 minutes from downtown Toronto and is accessible by public transit.
Dubbed the “people’s park,” RNUP is currently Canada’s only national urban park. But not for long. To connect more urban dwellers to nature, the federal government committed $130-million in 2021 to establish more of them across the country – looking at cities such as Windsor, Ont., Edmonton and St. John’s, with the aim of creating six by 2025 and a total of 15 by 2030. Parks Canada believes that creating these parks will improve resident well-being, air and water quality and commemorate Indigenous knowledge and culture. The government also recently announced RNUP’s expansion, scrapping plans for an airport in Pickering in favour of adding to the park’s footprint.
As RNUP expands and new urban national parks take shape, the question of how these spaces should look and function becomes more important. Planners and designers are grappling with how to balance ecological health, accessibility and public use, while also considering the role of beauty and aesthetics.
RNUP was decades in the making when it opened in 2015. At the time, local governments, community members, farmers, non-profits and First Nations groups managed the land, which was divided between multiple jurisdictions.
By 2011, discussions about creating a national urban park were gaining momentum on a federal level. The Rouge National Urban Park Act was passed in April, 2015, formally recognizing the area as a national park and giving it relevant federal protections. Many collaborators were involved in its establishment, says Scott Back, manager of national urban parks and strategic policy at Parks Canada, including The Advisory Circle, a group of leaders from 10 First Nations with connections to the land.
RNUP, with its mix of farmland, wetlands, rare Carolinian forests and trails, wasn’t necessarily designed with aesthetics as the primary focus, Mr. Back says. Instead, planning centred on conserving the region’s ecology, supporting farmers with agricultural land and making nature accessible to nearby urban communities.
But beauty and aesthetics are an inescapable part of any green space – including at RNUP – and are always evolving, says Susan Herrington, a landscape architect and professor at the University of British Columbia. According to Ms. Herrington, though beauty is subjective, North American parks have historically followed a particular aesthetic: one defined by the heavy curation of manicured lawns and formal gardens. This style, which influenced the City Beautiful Movement in the late 1800s, first began in English and European gardens, Ms. Herrington says. The movement started in the United States as a way to make American cities such as New York and Chicago appear aesthetically pleasing. At the time, during the height of the Industrial Revolution, these cities were considered unappealing. Urban planners prioritized this aesthetic as a way to influence moral and civic virtue and improve residents’ quality of life.
These meticulously designed parks also came at a cost. In Winnipeg, during the 1890s, the city developed several parks as part of its beautification efforts. Notable projects included Fort Rouge Park, established in 1893 at $16,531 for 4.85 acres, and Central Park, also inaugurated in 1893, costing $20,000 for 3.5 acres. The value is roughly equivalent to $580,000 and $708,000 today, respectively.
This style was evident in the establishment of Banff National Park in 1885, Ms. Herrington says, where tourism played a major role in the planning. The park, which is located in Alberta, was linked to the Canadian Pacific Railway and featured a luxury hotel with well-groomed gardens near railway stops, an intentional design choice to attract visitors.
However, the shift in landscape architecture, particularly in North American and European parks, began changing 15 to 20 years ago, Ms. Herrington says. Rather than focusing on manicured lawns and parterres, there’s been a move toward wilding architecture, which prioritizes preserving natural ecology.
While people originally criticized wilding architecture for being “messy,” it has become much more accepted of late, Ms. Herrington says. “Even now, people recognize that there is a beauty there in the rich colours, diverse textures, and all the amazing wildlife that’s a part of it.”
RNUP follows this wilding approach. The federal government initially paid $143.7-million for the park’s first ten years of establishment, and planned to pay $7.6-million per year for operations after 2022. However, the government also claims that there are non-market benefits to following wilding architecture. In 2012, the David Suzuki Foundation reported that RNUP and its surrounding watershed produced $114-million a year in value of cleaner air and water, carbon storage and wildlife movement, equivalent to $145-million today.
Rouge National Park was planned with wild ecology, accessibility, and the land’s Indigenous heritage in mind.Supplied
With the wilding architecture movement comes a focus on advancing Indigenous reconciliation and applying Indigenous and ancestral knowledge to preserve these spaces, something that wasn’t considered when heavily curated national parks were established between the late 1800s and early 1900s, Ms. Herrington says. Now, however, there is greater awareness that Indigenous history predates settler history by millennia.
“I think people are keen to learn about Indigenous relationships to plant material, to animals, and all the myriad of practices that they engaged with natural systems,” Ms. Herrington says.
Though aesthetic design wasn’t the primary focus at RNUP, it’s still thoughtfully planned, Parks Canada staff say. Wilding architecture – combined with applying Indigenous ancestral knowledge – is shaping the park’s continuing establishment. Since the land was previously divided and controlled by multiple entities, it was important to design the urban park in a way that made it cohesive under a single authority, while balancing the park’s main goals of conserving the land and making the space accessible to its frequent and local users, says Ashley Creed, project co-ordinator at Parks Canada.
Smaller details, such as plans to incorporate seed beads as motifs on park signage, bridges and buildings, aim to showcase Indigenous art and storytelling within the park while also adding a cohesive look. Larger plans, such as the construction of a visitor centre – which Ms. Creed says is co-designed with Indigenous partners – will feature cultural soundscape installations to highlight the Indigenous history of the land. It serves as both an aesthetic function and educational function for park users, she says.
With the aesthetics comes accessibility for park users, says Faisal Moola, former director at the David Suzuki Foundation and professor at the University of Guelph with a background in forest conservation and management. According to Mr. Moola, many visitors come from nearby urban neighbourhoods primarily from the east end of Toronto, where municipal green spaces are scarce in comparison to other parts of the city.
“I used to spend time with a lot of local community leaders when establishing Rouge National Urban Park,” Mr. Moola said. “One lady told me that the only time that her child had ever seen flowing water was when he turned on the tap to brush his teeth because he had never seen a river or a stream, ever.”
“[Urban park users] are going to be different from the typical people that use national parks,” Mr. Moola said. “You’re in a part of the city which is considerably racialized and has lots of different ethnic communities. These are people that did not have as strong an experience with camping, or cottaging or back country hiking partly because it was just inaccessible to them because it was unaffordable to practice that.”