Inclusive Urban Ecological Restoration in Toronto, Canada
High Park is one of the largest green spaces within the city of Toronto, and it attracts people from all over the city with its beautiful lawns, attractive gardens, and oak savanna and pond restoration. Walking through the park on a sunny, summer day you
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Inclusive Urban Ecological Restoration in Toronto, Canada Allegra Newman
High Park is one of the largest green spaces within the city of Toronto, and it attracts people from all over the city with its beautiful lawns, attractive gardens, and oak savanna and pond restoration. Walking through the park on a sunny, summer day you encounter the diversity that is the city of Toronto—a city where about 50 percent of the residents are people who immigrated to Canada within the last ten years (Toronto Community Foundation 2004). In 2007, a park planning exercise was led by the park management and the volunteer park council to decide the direction of future park development, and specifically what role ecological restoration would play. Seventy people met on a Saturday morning to discuss the future of the park and gather input from various interest groups, including dog walkers, gardeners, cyclists, and restorationists. All seventy participants were white and seemingly of western European ancestry. They certainly did not reflect the diversity of the park’s users. Looking around the room, I questioned why diverse cultures were not engaged in this process even though they had direct interest in what happened in the park. This experience was the beginning of a research project in which I examined ecological restoration work in Toronto and looked at why certain voices, specifically those of racialized people,1 were not being heard in the planning and decision-making processes. In this chapter, I examine why inclusive ecological restoration is important, critically analyze how Toronto organizations working on urban ecological restoration projects are moving toward being more inclusive, and investigate the challenges to and opportunities available for creating a more inclusive practice.
What Is Inclusive Ecological Restoration? It is well known that urban ecological restoration is an important facet of ecological restoration and that it has its own unique challenges and opportunities (Kilvington et al. 1998; Gobster 2001). These challenges occur because there is a greater interaction between many people and the environment being restored in urban areas and, subsequently, a greater possibility of conflicting values and ideas about nature. Hull and Robertson (2000) see the battle over competing values as a competition where “some D. Egan (eds.), Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, 63 The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-039-2_5, © Island Press 2011
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participation: volunteers
values and beliefs are held up and exalted, others are dismissed and ignored, and still others are left implicit and unnoticed” (114). In 1998, Leonie Sandercock, a professor of urban studies, argued, “If we want to foster a more democratic, inclusionary process for planning, then we need to start listening to the voices of difference” (109). Inclusive urban ecological restoration, as I contend in this chapter, provides opportunities for “voices of difference” in our
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