Reflections on urban parks
This morning, I went for my first run since moving to our new digs. One thinks of every excuse in the book for avoiding physical activity when the thermometer is topping 30 degrees and the humidex is nudging 40 degrees, but today, after carefully revising the phone # on my toe tag so that if I stroked out in the park they'd know where to dump the body, I hit the pavement.
I ran over to a shared use trail that passes near my house. Once I've got the wonder contraption that attaches more toddlers to my bike (I think for an expenditure of just another coupla hundred bucks I'm there), I can use this trail to get partway to daycare and all the way to work. Today, I tried not to think too much about the fact that this trail, called the Iron Horse Trail, exists because of railroad tracks that were ripped out a few years ago, before it occurred to the bright sparks in power here that an LRT (light rapid transit), following precisely the same route as the Iron Horse, would be just the thing to revitalize the core. Never mind, we'll probably never see an LRT here until the population doubles, by which time I hope to be long gone from these parts.
In my book (still no word from that agent...this longer than average delay could be either good or bad news), one of the things I talk about is the importance of finding ways for urban dwellers to make contact with natural settings by introducing wild spaces into the city. Of course, this is not a new idea -- planners everywhere understand the importance of greenspace for quality of life, though the way that this space is instantiated is often close to useless (I'm thinking of the narrow strips of barren grass that run behind the backyards of suburban McMansions and the flat, lifeless bits of field that serve for not much more than convenient repositories of dogshit and, after dark, good places for teenagers to enjoy those first few illicit beers). What I'm talking about is the kind of greenspace in which you can become disoriented and lost in natural growth, yet never really be out of the city. All the better if you can work the daily exploration of such spaces into your regular routines of movement -- a jaunt to the store, bank, office and so on. Central Park is a good approximation to this, though a bit too 'built'. High Park in Toronto, last time I was there, was actually better, but less central than Central, so not likely to be visited serendipitously. Few urban parks that I've visited come close to the ideal, but good approximations can be found in unexpected places. I found it easy to become lost in a tiny speck of woods near my former home in suburban Kitchener. My wife grew up in a smallish Maritime city that had a large and very wild space that could easily be incorporated into the daily walkshed. As I jiggled down the trail in Kitchener, I noticed that I could force a few moments of disorientation and blissful unfocused attention out of myself, but the main obstacle to this was not the constant visual evidence of car culture (the truck parking lots that back onto much of the trail, for instance), but the uninterrupted sounds of engines. It's very hard to go anywhere at all in the city without being within auditory range of an internal combustion engine. I suspect that one could dramatically enhance the feeling of wildness in the city if there were some way to control the auditory landscape with the same precision used to control the visual landscape. I wonder if the same principle that is used in noise cancelling headphones could be employed on a grand scale to make parks for the ears.
The funniest thing I saw on my run was the big medical gas truck, so busy on this day of multiple air advisories that it had an extra trailer of oxygen tanks hitched to it, sitting in a parking lot, engine idling, no driver in sight (he'd presumably gone to the nearby coffeeshop for a break). If I were not in such a good mood, I would have made this idling truck the subject of my post for the day. But I am. Running, even in air heavy with particulate matter from the Ohio valley, releases endorphins.
I ran over to a shared use trail that passes near my house. Once I've got the wonder contraption that attaches more toddlers to my bike (I think for an expenditure of just another coupla hundred bucks I'm there), I can use this trail to get partway to daycare and all the way to work. Today, I tried not to think too much about the fact that this trail, called the Iron Horse Trail, exists because of railroad tracks that were ripped out a few years ago, before it occurred to the bright sparks in power here that an LRT (light rapid transit), following precisely the same route as the Iron Horse, would be just the thing to revitalize the core. Never mind, we'll probably never see an LRT here until the population doubles, by which time I hope to be long gone from these parts.
In my book (still no word from that agent...this longer than average delay could be either good or bad news), one of the things I talk about is the importance of finding ways for urban dwellers to make contact with natural settings by introducing wild spaces into the city. Of course, this is not a new idea -- planners everywhere understand the importance of greenspace for quality of life, though the way that this space is instantiated is often close to useless (I'm thinking of the narrow strips of barren grass that run behind the backyards of suburban McMansions and the flat, lifeless bits of field that serve for not much more than convenient repositories of dogshit and, after dark, good places for teenagers to enjoy those first few illicit beers). What I'm talking about is the kind of greenspace in which you can become disoriented and lost in natural growth, yet never really be out of the city. All the better if you can work the daily exploration of such spaces into your regular routines of movement -- a jaunt to the store, bank, office and so on. Central Park is a good approximation to this, though a bit too 'built'. High Park in Toronto, last time I was there, was actually better, but less central than Central, so not likely to be visited serendipitously. Few urban parks that I've visited come close to the ideal, but good approximations can be found in unexpected places. I found it easy to become lost in a tiny speck of woods near my former home in suburban Kitchener. My wife grew up in a smallish Maritime city that had a large and very wild space that could easily be incorporated into the daily walkshed. As I jiggled down the trail in Kitchener, I noticed that I could force a few moments of disorientation and blissful unfocused attention out of myself, but the main obstacle to this was not the constant visual evidence of car culture (the truck parking lots that back onto much of the trail, for instance), but the uninterrupted sounds of engines. It's very hard to go anywhere at all in the city without being within auditory range of an internal combustion engine. I suspect that one could dramatically enhance the feeling of wildness in the city if there were some way to control the auditory landscape with the same precision used to control the visual landscape. I wonder if the same principle that is used in noise cancelling headphones could be employed on a grand scale to make parks for the ears.
The funniest thing I saw on my run was the big medical gas truck, so busy on this day of multiple air advisories that it had an extra trailer of oxygen tanks hitched to it, sitting in a parking lot, engine idling, no driver in sight (he'd presumably gone to the nearby coffeeshop for a break). If I were not in such a good mood, I would have made this idling truck the subject of my post for the day. But I am. Running, even in air heavy with particulate matter from the Ohio valley, releases endorphins.
posted by Colin at 3:17 PM
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