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Tewder said:
... which sort of proves my point that in urban settings what appears to be 'wild' can in fact be very artificially created, or at the very least designed in such a way that allows urban strollers to accept the artifice of 'wildness'...
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This is a good point, but I don't think the Spit is really a relevant example -- the land was artificially created, but it wasn't designed for anything other than dump trucks; the vegetation that has colonized it is indeed genuinely wild.

More generally, I'm not sure if I buy the argument that we need to develop our urban wilderness in order to keep it from slipping away. If anything, the ravines seem more secure now than in the past, when they were used for industry, housing, and highway corridors (when not filled in entirely).
 
Well out of the way, but the Royal Botanical Gardens is one of the most spectacular parks I've ever visited. It's about an hour and 20min away from Union Station using the GO Train + Burlington Transit, but exploring it's wild and manicured areas in summer and fall is unbelievable. Other jewels in the GTA include Riverwood and Rattray Marsh.
 
Remember, too, that a lot of Toronto's most cherished "formalized" park spaces happen to be suburban estates that evolved into some form of "park" or public/institutional use: Edwards Gardens, James Gardens, and any number of other Bayview/Don/Humber/Bluffs examples (including the oddball case of the Guild Inn). And if one wants to defer to kkgg7's "ethnic" arguments, you're almost certain to run into Chinese-wedding-photography-in-action in such places. (By contrast, High Park seems more a jogger/dog-walker thing: too "raw" a setting for the common Asian wedding photographer.)
 
One should consider Sugar beach / Sherborne commons in such debates now.
Not a traditional park per say but it falls into the formal category in many respects ... quite comparable to great formal parks in other cities, on a smaller scale.
 
taal said:
One should consider Sugar beach / Sherborne commons in such debates now.
Not a traditional park per say but it falls into the formal category in many respects ... quite comparable to great formal parks in other cities, on a smaller scale.
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I think you're out to lunch. Nothing good ever happens in Toronto!
 
taal said:
One should consider Sugar beach / Sherborne commons in such debates now.
Not a traditional park per say but it falls into the formal category in many respects ... quite comparable to great formal parks in other cities, on a smaller scale.
Click to expand...

I'd put Sugar Beach in the category I invented earlier called "art parks". Non-traditional, non-ravine, they sometimes come across as works of conceptual art. Ht0's another one. Sherbourne Commons - the south part of it anyway - also draws on the rather vacant, apparently undesigned look that's ravine-like, which some folks new to the city are confused by. The little park with the Kapoor and those other sculptures would be another example of an art park.
 
car4041 said:
This is a good point, but I don't think the Spit is really a relevant example -- the land was artificially created, but it wasn't designed for anything other than dump trucks; the vegetation that has colonized it is indeed genuinely wild.
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I agree - and to pick up on Tewder's English example, there's a discernable difference between the Capability Brown version of nature at Stowe or Blenheim and somewhere like Hampstead Heath.
 
Urban Shocker said:
I'd put Sugar Beach in the category I invented earlier called "art parks". Non-traditional, non-ravine, they sometimes come across as works of conceptual art. Ht0's another one. Sherbourne Commons - the south part of it anyway - also draws on the rather vacant, apparently undesigned look that's ravine-like, which some folks new to the city are confused by. The little park with the Kapoor and those other sculptures would be another example of an art park.
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Art park, I like it ! Generally the 'great' parks many cite we lack are these, 'art' parks. Central park in New York is in many ways a mix of different park types, I'll leave the name inventing to you though.
 
taal said:
One should consider Sugar beach / Sherborne commons in such debates now.
Not a traditional park per say but it falls into the formal category in many respects ... quite comparable to great formal parks in other cities, on a smaller scale.
Click to expand...

The semiotics of these 'new' spaces are rather like those of any designed park/garden even though the aesthetic makes it feel fresh or different.

Hampton Heath does have an air of 'nature preserve' about it but in fact is very highly designed and accessible in parts, with substantial infrastructure... the fact that it feels 'untouched' is part of the success of its design.
 
The origin of Hampstead Heath, as with Clapham Common and similar parks and heaths throughout Britain, is with the Mediaeval tradition of common land - smaller examples are seen in the village greens all over the country. A London equivalent to the designed park, however, would be somewhere like Hyde Park, designed in the 1730s by Charles Bridgeman; the French and other Continentals adopted this jardin anglais style, which replaced the earlier Continental formal garden, in due course ... for places such as the Bois de Boulogne in the 1850s.
 
Urban Shocker said:
I'd put Sugar Beach in the category I invented earlier called "art parks". Non-traditional, non-ravine, they sometimes come across as works of conceptual art. Ht0's another one. Sherbourne Commons - the south part of it anyway - also draws on the rather vacant, apparently undesigned look that's ravine-like, which some folks new to the city are confused by. The little park with the Kapoor and those other sculptures would be another example of an art park.
Click to expand...

Don't forget Yorkville Park, which may have pioneered the genre in Toronto...
 
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