Urbanism: Battle at Rowntree Mills
Originally published in The Local and The Walrus. Read the full text here.
As a child in the 80s, Ellie Hudon was rarely indoors. She had eight siblings and an extended family of forty—a clan too big for anybody’s backyard. So they hung out instead in Rowntree Mills Park, a serpentine 92-hectare greenspace that wends its way through Humber Summit, her North Toronto neighbourhood. Her fondest memories were of the relay competitions—epic triathlons, quadrathlons, and pentathlons, which included sack races and egg-and-spoon races—that she and her friends held in the park. “In the summer, I was there every day,” Hudon says. “My dad would load the picnic wagon with sandwiches, fruit, and lots of water. We’d arrive at 11 a.m. and leave at 6.”
When Hudon was a teenager, her parents left the neighbourhood for Mississauga. She moved back in 2008 at age 26, by which time she was a qualified paralegal running her own process-serving company. In the intervening years, Rowntree Mills had become controversial. Residents had complained to their city councillor, Giorgio Mammoliti, about loud music, parties, sex work, and drug deals in the park. In 2009, he responded by closing the space to cars.
The park was still accessible to cyclists and pedestrians, but many residents stopped using it. The road Mammoliti closed leads to three interior parking lots. The centre lot is at the flattest, grassiest region—the one best suited for get-togethers and pickup sports. To host a family picnic after the 2009 closure, you’d first have to drive to one of a limited number of curbside parking spots in the vicinity of Rowntree Mills. From there, you’d have to lug your supplies on foot for as much as a kilometre downhill over rugged terrain—a trip that could be perilous for seniors and exhausting for kids. Some families still made the effort, but many, understandably, did not.
According to Dave Harvey, the founder and executive director of Park People, a national non-profit organization that promotes access to greenspace, getting people into their local parks isn’t just a matter of having the right infrastructure; it’s cultural, too. People go where they feel welcome and steer clear of spaces where they sense they don’t belong. To determine which is which, they take their cues from one another. “Residents often aren’t sure if they’re allowed into a space or what they can do in it,” says Harvey, “until they see other people there.” His analysis helps explain why Mammoliti’s road closure had a chilling effect on park life. As Rowntree Mills got emptier, it began to feel less like a community hub and more like a no-man’s land—barren, foreboding, and strange.
At first, the closure wasn’t much of a problem for Hudon. In the early years of her career, her work kept her busy, and she didn’t have much time to spend outdoors. In the years that followed, Hudon had two more children: two daughters, Izabelle and Ruby, and a son, Iziah. She quit the process-serving business and now works as a radio host, motivational speaker, blogger, and activist. She visits Rowntree Mills nearly every day, weather permitting, with her family in tow. Vast stretches of the park are now overgrown and wild, and on weekdays, the space can be unnervingly quiet. Still, the regular exposure to fresh air and exercise keeps her kids from getting restless and enables them to sleep soundly at night.
What she hasn’t given them, though, is what she had growing up—the experience of belonging to a vibrant park community. So Hudon is now campaigning to reopen Rowntree Mills to cars and to make it as pivotal to neighbourhood life as it was in the 80s. This position puts her at odds not only with municipal bureaucrats but also with other Humber Summit residents, some of whom would prefer that the park—the fourth largest in the city—remain mostly inaccessible to cars.
The Rowntree Mills story is one of changing demographics and messy local politics. At its centre are questions that crop up every time there’s a neighbourhood dispute over common space: What do you do when community members disagree as to how a space should be used? And who gets to call themselves a community member anyway?
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.