Book Review

This family of co-authors has lived next to Victoria Park in East Vancouver for over 25 years. They know both the good and bad of urban parks. In their book, they aim to confront their own colonial attitudes towards land and examine their relationship to their local park. Matt Hern concedes that it is a fraught process in which there are no easy conclusions. It starts with some myth busting about urban parks, challenging assumptions, and asking questions – difficult questions that can make us uncomfortable, you know that sort of feeling you get when confronted with the sticky truth?  These questions start a conversation, one that Hern suggests makes sense to have at the level of your local park.

The main point of the book is that city parks, whether a small urban patch of grass or a sizable conservation area, are occupied land, embodying the social constructs of settler or white colonization, such as land boundaries, control over nature, and acceptable outdoor behaviours. Most park land was acquired through the disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples, and here is the crux: parks continue to act as mechanisms of domination through current park management, programming, and revitalization efforts.

To challenge our assumptions, we need to bust some of the myths we have come to accept. While walking through your local park, you are probably not thinking much about the politics of space but consider the following simple narratives that we assume hold true.

First, the narrative that parks are natural space. Urban parks are not natural green space; they make up just one aspect of city-shaping and are like any other part of our formalized urban infrastructure like paved roads and sidewalks. This is important because many equate parks with natural space and will use this as an argument to keep their ideas about parks—how they are used and who gets to use them—unchallenged; a bulwark against losing something perceived as theirs.  

A second myth is that parks welcome and benefit all people. They do not. Decisions about parks inevitably favour one group of users over another. Related, a third myth is that parks are inherently “good”. Depending on your background and lived experience, this could be your reality, or the opposite could be true. Parkland is strictly managed and people’s behaviour in parks is highly regulated; since urban parks play host to many groups of people, they cannot respond to the wants and needs of everyone.

In Toronto, this has evolved into what has been described as a culture of NO and, depending on the park, this could mean no drinking, no music, no busking, no feeding animals, no skateboarding, no bicycling, no selling, no picnics, no sitting on the grass, no laying down blankets, no smoking, no dogs, no sports, no gardening, and absolutely no 25-cent lemonade stands! These rules are not subtle in their message that there are those who are welcome and those who should just move along. The book does not talk about defensive architecture, a practice that has taken hold in urban planning where public spaces are designed to discourage people from using them, but this is how these regulations manifest themselves in today’s city parks – built right into its infrastructure, like handrails in the middle of a park bench. To be fair, some regulations are not about stopping people from doing these things, it is to protect the city from litigation should something go wrong while people do these things. But they do make you wonder, who are city parks actually for?

That’s just the first of many questions. Here are more. What is the contemporary relationship of Indigenous peoples to land: ownership or custodial, or something else? What does it mean that settlers occupy it? If on treaty land like Toronto, what does this imply? In 2010, the federal government and the members of the Mississaugas of the New Credit reached a land settlement. It was generally acknowledged that the sum paid was compensation and not payment for the land—the value of the land included in the original “Toronto Purchase” would have been so astronomical as to be unpayable.

Since this settlement agreement did not affect any current ownership of property, what responsibility do landowners have to the Indigenous community? Is a transfer of money for compensation enough? What is the next step? Is the concept of private land ownership to be poked at? What are the key instruments in place today that perpetuate colonial assumption of land? What does decolonization look like in our parks? What does indigeneity look like in our parks?

More specifically, what can “Friends of” groups do to develop reconciliation practices? How do we move beyond land acknowledgements and our consideration of our heritage as settlers? How do “Friends of” groups help educate visitors to the park about these truths?

Certainly, there’s work here for anyone to study and reflect on. The answers may not be easily forthcoming, but in the process of asking questions, we open ourselves up to an alternative way of thinking of land, our relationship to it and our part in perpetuating the unfair use of lands, especially those deemed as “public”. As Daisy Couture states in the book, “non-Indigenous people who live on this land cannot pretend ignorance any longer”. But the truth and the facts are uncomfortable and being okay with not having the answers is also an unsettling space to occupy. We must be willing to accept or come to terms with this kind of uncertainty.

Matt Hern reminds us that the development of parks as we experience them today is not that old. “Parks are relatively recent inventions, and we don’t have to be trapped into a calcified and colonial rendition of what they might be.” That is a comfort. That we can make space for.

He also writes that the civil disobedience in parks, one of the spaces where people do seem to ignore many of those rules, is a small sign that we can be open to alternative land relations:  “the ongoing disobediences in the park—and in almost all parks—are promising: they gesture towards larger possible refusals and re-ordering in hopeful ways”.  At first, this seems like a meagre way to contemplate what decolonization might look like in parks, but when one considers the substantial and difficult shift settlers must make in our deep and unconscious beliefs about the land we inhabit, it does start with being more open-minded about the things that we might perceive as acceptable or unacceptable behaviours in our local parks.

Without challenging our assumptions about parks, asking questions to better understand our own complicity in furthering the domination of public space for the privileged, we cannot do the work needed to imagine what a new welcoming park paradigm looks like on the ground on any given day of the week. We are all visitors in a park; the weight of our footsteps equal in worth to all others who walk along its paths.