Finding a Wild Space in an Urban Place
June 1, 2019
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Wild Lands Advocate article by: Grace Wark, AWA Conservation Specialist
With early summer here, I’m sure many of you are spending more time in your local parks, green spaces, and neighbourhood nature reserves. Following a particularly harsh winter, many of us are eager to light up the portable grill, dip our toes in a stream, or take a leisurely bike ride along the river pathway. After all, Alberta’s cities boast a number of incredible parks and greenways: Botteril Bottom in Lethbridge, Weaselhead Flats in Calgary, Waskasoo in Red Deer and Edmonton’s soon-to-be Big Island Provincial Park, among many more. These parks allow us to navigate our river corridors, get our 10,000 steps, and enjoy the outdoors in Alberta’s narrow window of warm weather.
Thinking about Alberta’s wilderness, city parks aren’t likely to make many lists of “wildernessdestinations.” If you imagine a wild space, you’re probably thinking about a mountain getaway, backcountry hike, or canyon scramble rather than a leisurely stroll through a city park. Urban spaces are often thought of as loud, busy, and bright, but this doesn’t mean that they’re wilderness-free. In fact, our parks and green spaces frequently offer sanctuary from the urban bustle to the benefit of both people and our wild urban counterparts.
Urban green spaces perform a number of important functions: small parks and city greenways offer wildlife connectivity; big parks give space for large city-dwelling mammals; urban forests absorb pollution and smog; and riverside parks and wetlands help to buffer spring floods. These spaces offer a multitude of benefits for city aesthetics, physical and mental health, and play a critical role in helping us coexist with the other species in the urban jungle.
Conveniently for us, we’ve placed many of Alberta’s cities along major river valleys – a necessity for travel in the years leading up to early 1900s, and a necessity now for irrigation and potable water supply. Incidentally, these spaces are incredibly attractive to wildlife; river valleys funnel in nutrient rich waters, stimulating plant growth and subsequently attracting herbivorous grazers, shorebirds, nesting raptors, and denning carnivores.
Take for example, the City of Calgary, sitting at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers. Calgary has a substantial volume of wildlife movement, as they follow lush riverside vegetation and opportunistically seek-out loose grain, food scraps, and grass seed. If you live an urban area, you’ve likely spotted a rogue deer, coyote, hawk, or even the occasional moose wandering through your neighbourhood’s yards and streets.
While roaming wildlife may seem ill-suited to an urban context, it may be the urban infrastructure that’s out-of-place rather than the wildlife themselves. These sightings should serve as a reminder that while we’ve built structures, roads and an altogether new urban ecosystem in these places, we’re still part of Alberta’s existing, millennia old river valleys that will continue to serve as wildlife habitat if we let them.
This is where I seek to find “wild space” in an urban place. We’re not the first inhabitants to have existed in Alberta’s river corridors, and we won’t be the last, but leaving green space in our cities is important to conserving what wilderness is left in Alberta’s settled landscapes, no matter how small those wilderness spaces may be.
In this article, I’d like to explore how cities challenge urban wildlife and how these challenges can be lessened by establishing a healthy network of city parks and green spaces. In valuing our parks as “wild spaces”, we can remember the ecosystems that we’re building within and seek to respect and accommodate our wild, urban co-habitants.
The great urban obstacle course
When I say urban obstacle course it sounds more like a fun-filled afternoon of urban parkour rather than a chaotic system of multi-lane highways, gridlock, windows, lights and sounds. This is what our urban wildlife are up against, an environment which has become increasingly not their own.
Wildlife in Alberta’s national parks and provincial protected areas are frequently offered a number of protective luxuries such as wildlife crossings and large disturbance-free areas. Our urban wildlife aren’t always so lucky. Lights, noises, buildings and roads are sensory and physical barriers to urban wildlife migration and dispersion. These disturbances make it difficult to move across cityscapes, diversify gene pools, hunt or feed as they could in more remote areas.
Now wildlife is more likely to receive some degree of consideration in urban planning, including the occasional environmental assessment or precautionary roadside fencing. But the norm remains that cities aren’t planned with wildlife as a first priority. Wildlife collisions are frequent and expensive. Between 2005 and 2014, two bears, three cougars, 48 moose, 772 coyotes and 5,152 deer were hit on Calgary’s roads and highways, incurring a not insignificant cost of $45 million to drivers and taxpayers.
While many of these collisions can be attributed to the fact we build cities within migratory hot beds, city parks and greenways offer improved connectivity for migrating wildlife. Greenways are strips of undeveloped land in or near urban space designed to facilitate environmental protection and/or recreation. Ideally, city parks should be connected by greenways, especially in areas prone to heavy wildlife movement, to reduce the frequency of devastating, deadly highway collisions.
Some of Alberta’s major cities already have initiatives to establish greenways and strategize future green connectivity; however, greenways aren’t always planned with wildlife migration in mind. Take, for example, Calgary’s Rotary Mattamy Greenway. This is an impressive 138 km trail network, built by the City of Calgary and Calgary Parks Foundation to connect 12 city parks. While this network is highly desirable for uses like biking or marathon running, it doesn’t serve wildlife values well. Rather than weaving through the city, the Rotary Mattamy encircles it, providing very little utility for wildlife seeking a path-of-least-resistance. On the other hand, Edmonton’s Breathe30-year Strategic Plan intends to establish a network of ecological parks and green infrastructures through Edmonton’s river valley and ravine system, linked throughout by pathways and trails. If fulfilled, this greenway would align more with conserving wildlife-friendly space through a heavily disturbed area like Edmonton’s downtown core.
Keeping parks in Parkland
Another threat for urban and urban-adjacent wilderness is the extension of city boundaries further and further into existing natural habitat. In 2018, Calgary city council approved the development of 14 new communities at the city’s fringe. Council literally paved the way for further shrinking and conversion of Alberta’s Parkland Natural Region. While Calgary has experienced significant growth in recent decades, there has been no pre-emptive land acquisition for new parks among Calgary’s 198 neighbourhoods. This means that Calgary has not and will not see a proportional increase in green space as the city expands territorially.
Urban sprawl is a serious problem here in Alberta. Many of Alberta’s cities are too eager to push their boundaries further and further from their historic centres – Edmonton’s expansion to and beyond the Edmonton International Airport illustrates this all too well. If we wish to expand outwards, we face primarily privately owned agricultural lands and parcels of public land, which can be purchased and redeveloped. This means that there is minimal motivation to increased densification – to plan urban growth upward, rather than outward. The appetite for new suburbs, big lots, and big single family homes seems insatiable.
This continual development is problematic. It should be confronted by eliminating urban expansion in favour of densification and creating parks that retain their natural character. Natural areas require less continual maintenance. For example, using native, drought resilient plants would reduce the need for irrigation, lawn maintenance, and pesticide. They also provide other critical ecosystem services such as buffering floods through storm water collection and retaining natural habitat for urban species. Many city parks in Alberta do this well. It’s just a matter of supporting more thoughtful planning for urban parks and protected areas to counterbalance current trends in suburban growth.
Biodiver… city
Urban biodiversity is another essential component of the urban ecological puzzle. Biodiversity in cities differs vastly from the surrounding area, as urban wildlife must adapt to more disruptive conditions. Wildlife eager to adapt tend to be generalist species, those who can survive in a multitude of ecosystems. This is why we don’t see species like grouse or caribou within the city limits. Their habitat requirements are too specific to meet the level of disturbance and fragmentation from urban growth. We’re all too familiar with our urban generalist species: the aggressive goose, the opportunistic coyote, the wandering deer and the prolific hare, to name a few. While these species can cause the occasional nuisance, their adaptability has allowed them to become a part of the existing biodiversity within our cities.
Where urban parks can contribute to the biodiversity equation is in providing the space and connectivity wildlife populations need to be abundant and resilient. One problem urban wildlife face is that their populations can often become isolated. This reduces the likelihood of new genetic material entering the pool, or the ability of individuals to pass on their genes through mating opportunities outside of their local populations. Wildlife need to intermingle to remain resilient. But, without a dating app or an Uber to get northwest coyote A to southeast coyote B, their populations can become subject to inbreeding and its associated side-effects.
Solutions to this are larger parks, sustaining multiple populations, or greater connectivity. Connectivity doesn’t necessarily mean greenways since they can be difficult to implement within an already built landscape. But, as Lepczyk et al noted in 2017, connectivity can be realized by using smaller parks and green spaces as “stepping-stones” between urban habitats.
Why go urban?
Contrary to everything I’ve been saying, some may argue that city parks are more for us than wildlife. This is a valid point. Off-leash dog areas, riverside cookouts, and soccer fields aren’t the most wildlife-friendly spaces. However, I feel the net benefit of city parks is not only in setting aside deliberate wilderness spaces in highly developed urban areas, but in giving city-dwellers a place to develop a relationship with nature.
Many of our first memories with natural spaces are in our neighbourhood parks. These spaces have taught us how to interact with nature, while working double-time to promote a healthy, active lifestyle, facilitate social gathering, and give us space for reflection. The connections we make in these spaces bring wilderness into our daily lives, rather than being a far, distant space without a visible impact to our health and well-being. We can then borrow what we’ve learned while exercising local conservation and apply it provincially.
Using these spaces can also lessen the burden on the provincial and federal parks that are currently bursting at the seams from tours and day-trips. Exploring your local natural areas will add depth to your understanding of the wilderness in your own backyard, while saving yourself and the atmosphere the gas you would have used to travel somewhere else.
So I urge you to both enjoy your urban green spaces this summer and fiercely advocate for more. Our urban parks serve as a reminder that we need to leave space for wildlife and wilderness, whether in the backcountry or in our backyard.
Here are some resources to help you engage urban conservation this summer:
1) Calgary Captured is a citizen-science driven wildlife monitoring project coordinated by the City of Calgary. Through the Calgary Captured website (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/calgary-captured/calgary-captured), you can upload photos of wildlife you’ve seen within the city and identify the species within the pictures others have taken.
2) During the provincial election period, the Government of Alberta committed to creating a new Provincial Park in the City of Edmonton, Big Island Provincial Park. Show your support for conserving urban green space by sending a letter to the new Minister of the Environment and Parks at aep.minister@gov.ab.ca
