Dustin Valen: On the merits of bad behaviour in public parks

Rules posted in Montreal’s Parc Mont Royal, 2015Recently, after recommending a walk in Toronto’s High Park to a visiting friend, I was duly informed that large caches of condom wrappers were concealed in the trees and shrubs not far from the park’s well-worn paths. What are we to make of this seemingly non-event? Should we be alarmed or indifferent? How about optimistic?

In The Experience of Landscape, geographer Jay Appleton argues that our attraction to landscape is the result of deep-seated psychological and biological urges.1 In his prospect-refuge theory, the pleasure we take in viewing and entering landscapes (both real and pictorial) comes from our latent animal urge to ‘see without being seen’. We covet both expansive prospects and the intimacy of shady groves, because they elicit feelings of safety.

As a way of thinking through contemporary public parks, Appleton’s theory raises several questions. First, besides offering individual enlightenment, parks embody many collective desires, from beauty, harmony and order, to morality and health. Can the prospect-refuge theory include these contemporary values? Second, whereas Appleton’s approach is fundamentally aesthetic, the values placed on contemporary landscapes cover social, political and ecological concerns.

Parks are a steadfast institution of the modern city that embody some our most cherished civic values. But they are also riddled with paradoxes: truths and rumours about public parks abound, they harbour an illicit sex-trade, attract petty and violent crime, and are often sites of disorder and unrest.  Here the double-edged consequences of a psychological approach are equally clear; where better than in the safety of a refuge to act out these socially-transgressive behaviours? And where better to transgress than in these value-laden landscapes? Parks attract the same subversive pleasures and civil disobedience that they are meant to literally and symbolically expunge.

If parks reflect our Edenesque desires, discovering bad behaviour in parks is like looking into the mirror and seeing a blemish on the face of reality. Not only is bad behaviour in parks inevitable (according to Appleton and the historical record), it shakes us to our psychological core.  As landscape studies shift from questions of aesthetics to issues of power, identity, gender and race, the merits of bad behaviour become apparent. In the interplay between individuals who transgress park rules and the social and political consequences, bad behaviour brings our landscape values into sharp and often discomfiting relief. In the past it has also led to social and political change.

control of the unruly individual
Canada’s public parks have long been at the centre of debates over the preservation of a moral and equitable society. In the 1900s, park planners and civic reformers championed landscape as a cure for the degradations of pollution, alcoholism, vice and labour strife prevalent in many Canadian cities.2 Parks were treated as a social experiment to improve the behaviour and appearance of the working class and the poor. Under vigilant surveillance, strict rules of conduct and composure required park users to adopt acceptable behaviours prescribed by elites who made up civic administrations.3 Fences and gates, opening and closing hours, a ban on liquor and foul language; sports, gambling and other working-class pastimes were prohibited, and where swimming pools were provided, men and women were separated. Infractions were frequent and often deliberate; justice was meted out swiftly: vagrants were taken away and anyone caught picking flowers or damaging park property was arrested, fined, sometimes even jailed.

Disputes over the role of parks were fierce: workers wanted better access, lawns for sports and popular entertainments. Social elites lamented the loss of their parks to delinquents and vagabonds.

Public pressure to democratise parks increased in the 1920s and 1930s; authorities yielded to new demands, constructing playgrounds, sports fields and dance halls.4 In St. John’s Bowring Park, where clashes erupted between wealthy automobile owners and working class pedestrians choked by trailing clouds of dust and splattered by mud, park users successfully petitioned the City in 1931 to ban automobiles from the park on Sundays and holidays.

Decades after these hard-won battles, parks continue to play an important role in struggles over economic and social parity. After a global day of action on October 15, 2011, campers occupied city parks across Canada. Unlike other countries where protesters crowd into city streets and squares, Canadians set up tents in public parks across the country to protest things such as the systematic failure of government to regulate financial systems and curb corporate greed. By reclaiming these ostensibly public landscapes, protesters send a clear message about the corruption of public values by excessive private powers.

Occupy Toronto camp in St James Park, 2011
gentrification of the underbrush
The relationship of individuals who transgress park rules and the consequences of actions perpetrated by public officials, is another critical consideration. Like the moralising impulse of early twentieth century reformers, the use of landscape by authorities as a gentrifying force has been persistent, and at times intense. In 1945, the rape and murder of a nine-year old boy in Montreal’s Parc Mont Royal catalysed Jean Drapeau’s political career as a moral crusader. As mayor, Drapeau rallied public opinion against the city’s so-called ‘perverts’ and ciriminals as part of his effort to transform Montreal’s image into that of a world-class city. Known as the morality cuts, underbrush and trees were removed from Parc Mont Royal to improve surveillance and to discourage illicit activities perpetrated by gay men for whom the mountain was supposedly a preferred rendezvous. As erosion and other environmental consequences wrought more devastation on Mont Royal, the mountain’s balding appearance served as a constant reminder of Drapeau’s dictatorial politics, leading to a reforestation campaign during the 1960s.

Such cleanups in public parks are not confined to the past; a report by Calgary Municipal Land Corporation in May 2010, cited the long gone-wild St. Patrick’s Island as difficult to police and harbouring undesirable behaviours such as drug use and gay cruising. In 2012 underbrush was removed from the park as part of a 20 million dollar redevelopment plan.

Efforts to prevent unwanted social activities in parks represent a different order of bad behaviour, this time committed by institutions against disenfranchised individuals. Individuals, for their part, have resisted and even reversed this trend by defending their park against the regressive actions of public officials. Half a century since Drapeau’s morality cuts, park users remain defiant – the parking lot near Beaver Lake is an after-hours dogging rendezvous, a clear and persistent flaunting of perceived authoritarian rules.  
    
institutional misrule
Many of Canada’s public parks shelter residents forced out of cities by privatising forces and economic pressures. In 2013, The Vancouver Sun interviewed residents of Stanley Park where several dozen homeless people live—some have been there for more than a decade. Toronto’s Don River Valley interconnected park system has long been a refuge for the city’s homeless whose makeshift shelters constructed from recycled clothing and building materials are easily discovered.  Often (falsely) linked with litter, promiscuity and crime, the use of parks by itinerant populations recalls depression-era debates as parks became home to many urban unemployed.

Not all informal occupations can be ignored: in July 2014 homeless residents of Vancouver’s beleaguered and low-income lower east side constructed a camp in nearby Oppenheimer Park to protest their neglect by city officials. Despite numerous eviction notices and citations from the fire department, 400 displaced residents remained in the park, referring to its relative safety over the squalid condition of city shelters. Over the course of the three-month long occupation, a maelstrom of negative press aimed at past efforts to address homelessness forced the City of Vancouver to announce an additional 100 shelter spaces and 157 interim housing units to meet homeless needs.

And in another example in the pursuit of social justice, in June 2009,  Toronto residents came to the defence of their public space when 24,000 members of the Toronto Civic Employees Union went on strike and the City used parks as a convenient and free location to open temporary dumpsites.  As the smell of rotting garbage heated by high summer temperatures increased, protesters tried to block contractors from spreading rat poison over the heaps of foetid garbage. After 36 days of strike, 48,900 tonnes of trash had accumulated inside the city limits as media and public debate centred on the City’s misappropriation of public space.

Protesters in Christie Pits Park during the Toronto Garbage Strike, 2009

global indifference
Climate change may be the next test of the extent to which people are willing to defend their parks against bad behaviour. Parks have become potent symbols of our environmental attitudes. New values placed on parks also challenge us to expand our understanding of bad behaviour as new forces both individual and institutional in origin threaten our landscape values.

Climate change, the sum of many bad behaviours, impacts our public parks and their appreciation: invasive species perpetrate new kinds of vagrant activities, rising temperatures that affect precipitation in turn affects the migratory patterns of animals and shifts the geographical boundaries of many plant species.

Warmer temperatures elevate the risk of attack by insects and pathogens: many northern tree species are becoming vulnerable to disease. Dutch elm disease, an infectious fungi spread by beetles who make their home beneath the bark, has devastated millions of hectares of Canada’s woodlands, including almost 80 per cent of Toronto’s street and park elm population. In Winnipeg’s historic Assiniboine Park, a 200 year old elm, affectionately known as ‘Grandma’ and connected to Lord Selkirk, was felled. In 2013 alone some 5,600 elm trees were destroyed across Winnipeg. Add to this devastation the damage wrought on Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park by Hurricane Juan in 2003, and to St. John’s Bowring Park by Hurricane Igor in 2010 where a century-old linden tree planted by the Duke of Connaught was torn from the ground—the effects of climate change on our public parks are difficult to ignore.  

2014 was the warmest year on record. Rising global temperatures will increasingly bear on our landscape values. Although action has been slow, the ability of parks to mitigate  the effects of climate change has also been recognised. In the six decades since Hurricane Hazel inundated much of Toronto, the re-naturalisation of the Don River Valley through a series of ecological parks has been made a priority to protect against future extreme weather events.

Point Pleasant Park five years after Hurricane Juan, 2008
the litmus of bad behaviour
As surrogates for our social and sustainable goals, public parks are key players in the ongoing negotiation of our cultural and political values. By throwing a spotlight on these values, bad behaviour forces us to confront their instability and the often unseemly paradoxes of our actions and institutions. Bad behaviour and its consequences also assert the ability of landscape to affect social and political change. The merit of bad behaviour in public parks is that we must ask ourselves how we reconcile unlikable, challenging, dangerous, tragic intrusions?  From High Park’s condom wrappers to Hurricane Juan, all bad behaviours that affect our parks should be recognised as signposts for change.

Dustin Valen is a doctoral student in architectural history at McGill University.