Blanshard - Fisgard Park - Part 1 - Why We Don’t Need It
I was totally caught off-guard by the 1-2 punches coming from the City on Thursday. First, we heard what I think has the potential to be exciting news, that the City is looking for opportunities to create new pedestrian spaces by closing roads. I wrote about this idea last May, you can read that post here. Depending on where and how this is done in each instance, it could be really interesting. The second story that dropped was even more shocking and not in a good way. The City announced it was buying two lots along Blanshard Street to create a new park. When I first read it, I assumed I had stumbled into a Nanaimo Beacon article, but no, after reading a couple more articles, I was certain that this was real. I slumped back in my chair and thought about all of the problems there were with this plan. I have a lot of thoughts about this so I think just to make sure that I am able to be somewhat succinct in my writing, I am going to break this into two separate articles. This first article will go into why I think this is a terrible idea. In a few days I will have my second article on the park plan where I will go into what I think we should do with the space if we must have it.
Despite the title of this article, this park which has just been announced, does not have a name, and I am certain that it will not be named after either Blanshard or Fisgard Street (which is definitely for the best). But as that is the best way to identify the park now, I will use its location as its name. Just so that you can get a sense of this story from a more unbiased source, I would encourage you to read one or more of the articles that have been published on the announcement (Capital Daily, Times Colonist, Victoria Buzz). In short what was announced was that the City was buying the Urbana Kitchens and Romeos Properties along Blanshard for about 11 million dollars. These properties sit along Blanshard in-between Fisgard and North Park Streets. Not included in the purchase is the Philippine Bayanihan Community Centre which is right in the middle of the proposed park space. I have three big issues with this purchase: Park space is not an innate public good; the area already has a significant amount of public space; and finally the city should enhance what we have first. I will speak in detail about each of these thoughts.
The Blanshard - Fisgard Park as it looks today.
Park Space is Not an Innate Public Good
I feel like I say this all the time. I have certainly written about it a lot. You can check out some of these previous articles here, here and here. Creating public space in and of itself is not a net positive in our world. It needs to be made that way through work, happenstance and necessity. And I know that Jane Jacobs is falling out of favour with many as her work has been used by NIMBYs a fair bit to attempt to quash new housing, however when it comes to parks, I couldn’t agree more with her perspective. I would strongly encourage anyone that hasn’t read Chapter 5 of Death and Life of Great American Cities recently to go back and give it another look. That said, it gives almost all of it away in the first paragraph:
Conventionally, neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around and consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred upon them.
Jane Jacobs - Death and Life of Great American Cities
This seems to be exactly what is occurring here. A “deprived” part of the city is being given the gift of a new park. However, it is neither a deprived part of the city nor is it a gift, I will get into both of those aspects as we work through this but I want to quote a little more of Jacobs because it is just so on point with even the City’s messaging on this space.
In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion… Ask a houser how his planned neighbourhood improves on the old city and he will cite, as a self-evident virtue, More Open Space. Ask a zoner about the improvements in progrssive codes and he will cite, again as a self-evident virtue, their incentives toward leaving More Open Space. Walk with a planner through a dispirited neighbourhood and though it be already scabby with deserted parks and tired landscaping festooned with old Kleenex, he will envision a future of More Open Space.
Jane Jacobs - Death and Life of Great American Cities
I am really amazed that while there are problematic parts to Jacobs writing, that she could still be so relevant more than sixty years later when it comes to how people speak about public spaces and parks. And it is very pertinent to the City’s decision to create a park here along a very busy Blanshard Street in 2024. As I said, just by its existence a park is not a benefit, indeed as we have seen for the last many decades with Centennial Square, a place needs to be used to be beneficial. We need to see current spaces near here overflowing with use to demand more space and I am not seeing that. I also think that choosing a space along a six lane major arterial is not going to make this an easy place to demonstrate the apparent need by the surrounding neighbourhoods for public space. We have a lot of underused public space in Victoria and it is often that way due to the nature of the surrounding spaces Reeson Park is a great example as is the Bay and Government Parkette. But I think even more compelling is the fact that there are other places to go.
Current and Planned Public Spaces
One of the items raised in the articles about this park is that there is a need for park space in this neighbourhood especially with the two new large buildings across the street. This line of thought is incorrect in so many ways, but I don’t think it is accidental, rather just playing to the natural way people think about tall buildings. As I have written about extensively in the last couple of years, downtown Victoria is going through a significant contraction of people with the loss of office workers. While we may wring our hands about the amazing amount of new residential construction, the loss of office workers has greatly reduced our daytime population and it will take a doubling or tripling of current planned residential buildings to make up for that loss. That said, when you look at the new buildings at the Hudson you see big buildings, and they are, they are the two tallest buildings on Vancouver Island. Overall though in those two buildings we may be looking at an additional 400 - 600 people living in them and that would be at the high end. Even if there were no public spaces nearby, I am not sure that a small number of people such as this would warrant a new park space. There is more to this though, because even the developer knows some of the questions that will be asked of them as they build such large buildings, so they included there own park space within the footprint of the buildings. You can actually walk up and see it from the Hudson Carriageway across from the public market. There is a children’s park space and a dog park already there. I could be wrong, but if I were a resident of one of these buildings, my first choice of a park space would be the one at the bottom of my own building versus going across the street to this new proposed space. So I think we can eliminate the residents of the Hudson project as the basis for needing a park here. Looking at the blocks to the east in North Park, there are already two very good public parks with Central Park and Franklin Green Park. Neither of which are so overrun that a new park is warranted. On top of all of this is a vast amount of current and already planned public space in the neighbourhood that is either currently good but underused or could be improved to make it a draw for those in the nearby neighbourhood. I have said this many many times before, a park is more like a grocery store than anything else when it comes to planning where they should go. You need to make sure that there is a need for your store in the neighbourhood and that there is not a lot of competition from other nearby stores. This new park fails on both these fronts. There is not a demonstrated need for the park and there is a ton of competition. There is one other option that can work for a park even if it has a lot of nearby competition and that is for it to be unique and offer something that none of the other nearby parks offer. I will talk about the possibilities for this in my next article on the Blanshard - Fisgard Park.
Just to illustrate the current and planned spaces that I can think of in the surrounding area I pulled together the map below. Yellow is underused private / public space; dark green is current public space; light green is proposed public space and orange is proposed private / public space. The new park is in red below. I didn’t include the two private / public atrium spaces, but I could have as they are wonderful spots near here to read or write, even in the middle of winter. Below the map are some pictures of the current spaces, most of which already sit empty most of the time, further emphasizing why ‘more open space’ is not the answer.
Work With What We Have First!
When I heard that we were spending 11 million dollars on acquiring these new lots, one of the first things that sprang to mind is that is a lot of money that could be invested into other park spaces to make them great. We have created quite a few public spaces and then done little with them. In other instances we have perfect opportunities for a great park and done nothing. And finally there is Centennial Square which was all the talk a year ago and now is quiet again.
Probably the largest project that seems to have disappeared from any conversations is Peter Pollen Park (Formerly Laurel Point Park) in James Bay. There was quite a big plan for it following the large clean-up of the land and then nothing has happened since then. It remains a big bald spot on the harbour. Similarly, there was much fanfare a year and a half ago when Songhees Park opened. While at the time I had much the same feelings as I do with the Blanshard - Fisgard Park, I thought the space had potential if we saw further activation, but to date I haven’t seen anything else happen. You can read about some of my thoughts on the space here and here. Of course the biggest difference is that there is a major attraction already at Songhees Park with the view of the harbour and connections to great pathways like the Goose and Westsong.
Not too far from the proposed Blanshard - Fisgard park is a complete park ready to go with a full tree canopy and even a bench. The only challenge is that it is surrounded by roads and does not have any park infrastructure to allow it to be actually used. It is also larger than the proposed park. I am talking about Harris Green at Cook and Pandora. This has been a true park opportunity for as long as I have lived in Victoria and remains one of the most unused green spaces all year round. You can read about my plan for turning this space into a park here. 11 million dollars could easily make Harris Green a beautiful place to visit and it is there already ready for everyone.
And of course there is Centennial Square which is about 200 metres from the planned new park. We have been concerned about the chronic underuse of Centennial Square for fifty years in Victoria and with the current council talking about doing some things to activate it in the last year, I had hope that we would see something happen (even if I disagreed with the directions they were going). To now put a brand new park just a block away from it is absolutely bizarre and completely contradictory to what needs to be done to further activate Centennial Square. Both spaces will pull people away from each other making both of them less used. Again had we seen the investment from buying this park used in Centennial Square instead, we could go a long way to making it actually busy.
I live and work near this new park and I will be watching its development intently. I am sure that many of you are looking forward to this space and I would love to hear from you on why it is important and what you would like to see here. As I said, I will be doing a second article on this proposed park space on what could happen here to perhaps make it work, though I think it will be an uphill battle. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.