Hamilton Parks Master Plan

Client City of Hamilton
Location Hamilton| Ontario | Canada

Parks Master Plan provides guidance through an equity lens, focusing efforts in neighbourhoods that are currently underserviced or will be underserviced due to population growth in Hamilton.

There is a pressing need to acquire new parkland to better support the city’s growing population. While new communities have many options when it comes to the development of parkland the existing neighbourhoods of the city are more constrained by land availability and other impacts of urban structure. As redevelopment projects increase the population density in these urban areas, existing parks will experience greater demand, and the social impacts of gaps in park provision will become more pronounced. There are numerous factors that lead to the prioritization of parkland acquisition in one area over another, even if one area may be more deficient than another.

O2 was retained by the City to develop a Parks Master Plan that provides an overarching framework to assess the current supply, access, and classification of Hamilton’s parks system to guide management decisions and prioritize the acquisition of new parkland. We adopted an adaptable approach to assess park provision and access to understand the per capita supply of parkland throughout the city using a 500m walkable catchment. This highlights areas of the city with good supply of neighbourhood parks, and those where parks are not locally accessible. These existing gaps in neighbourhood park access then serve to define the Focus Areas where the acquisition of new parks is most necessary.

Within these Focus Areas, a variety of Focus Factors are used to help prioritize where acquisition should occur next. This provides a useful triage to focus attention on the areas of greatest overall need. This framework for parkland acquisition and redevelopment provides clarity by identifying priority areas for new parkland acquisition to facilitate fair, transparent, and consistent decision making. Once gaps in the existing park system have been identified, and prioritized, the City is faced with the challenge of acquiring, developing, and programming these new lands.

As the City focuses on accommodating more population growth in the existing urban area rather than the greenfield area, it will become more difficult to acquire parkland through traditional means such as dedication at the time of development application. To achieve the City’s parkland goals, parkland acquisition and improvements will be required on a regular basis.