Blog

by Jutta Mason

November 18, 2017: playgrounds as dangerous places for kids

About 15 years ago I began to study what was happening to playgrounds in Toronto parks. I then wrote a 41-page account tracing the roles of the various players. But I got too busy with my own work, particularly in Dufferin Grove Park, to continue. Now I have some time to carry on with my account (and lots more has happened since I took my break).

The replacement of playgrounds with what may be seen as "safer" playgrounds seems to have had the can't-win consequence of steadily increasing injury rates (recent CIHI tables). That's an unexpected outcome, in addition to widespread (and international) concern about the effect on child development as play has become more restricted on "safety" grounds.

There's actually only a small amount of research on playground-related injuries and deaths, and much of it is in the category of gossip and conjecture. How much this questionable data forms the underpinning of the safety canon is startling: have a look.

October 16, 2017: food deserts and media fairy tales

The Toronto segment of the TVO series "Life-sized city", aired on Sept.23, is a good example of how tricky it can be to become part of a media story. You tell your story and then it gets taken to bits by editors and writers who have very different priorities that can't always include accuracy.

The bit that particularly bothered me in the show begins at about 28.30 minutes and goes on for a little over 5 minutes.

The show's host, Mikael Colville-Andersen, originally from Alberta but now an international high-flyer and bike planner/advocate based in Copenhagen, starts the item talking from a helicopter. The aerial shot shows the Don Valley Parkway and then the Thorncliffe Park apartment buildings. The host says that in Toronto these buildings are "the only affordable landing pad for newcomers to Canada."

But that's nonsense, of course. Toronto is full of similar buildings, particularly (but not only) outside the centre.

Then the host and Graeme Stewart, an architect, walk around and the host asks Stewart "where are the supermarkets, the places where you would buy stuff..?" Stewart answers: "so that's totally it. These neighbourhoods were built in the fifties and sixties" when cars were the norm but now they are not and it's "hugely inconvenient..to do a 20, half-hour drive to the grocery store." Then he says that the zoning for these neighbourhoods is still from the fifties and that it's illegal to have a grocery store -- and then he points to the Thorncliffe buildings and says that hundreds of people live in these buildings "and we have a parking lot. We don't have anything else."

Neither of them seem to know that five minutes' walk north of the park there is a mall with a Food Basics and a food court, and another 10 minutes' walk north of the mall is Iqbal, one of the city's grocery destinations.

They stroll through the Friday afternoon bazaar in R.V.Burgess Park and Stewart says that one woman "kind of just made this happen." They focus in on Sabina Ali and the host says, "so this is your show?" and Ali turns it around and says "this is our very famous park bazaar model."

-- A good try to bring it back to reality!

But no luck.

The host goes right back to saying "before Sabina Ali took matters into her own hands, this park was simply a no-man's land, absolutely covered in garbage. It was as far from a playground as you can possibly get."

Then Ali tries again: "we got the neighbours involved" and she tells about the improvement in the park. The camera pans without comment over two women who have worked alongside Ali for years, and other women making the naan, people selling clothes, kids having a nice time, etc. But then when the host is at the park's outdoor tandoor, the camera cuts to Ali saying (about 34 minutes in) "when you look at the neighbourhood, it's a food desert, like on the Thorncliffe Park Drive you don't even see a single cafeteria here..." and the host repeats his story of seeing just one convenience store sign. Point made.

"Food desert" is a term invented for de-industrialized cities in the U.S. where the people who are left in the depopulated sections may have to drive many miles to a supermarket (e.g. in some parts of Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland etc). Sabina Ali said later that the show edited a general discussion they had about an issue outside of Thorncliffe Park to make it look like she meant something local.

The 'food desert' frame makes her sound like she doesn't know what she's talking about -- discrediting her to her Thorncliffe friends if they saw the show, maybe to the storekeepers in the mall and at Iqbal. But the people who put the show together found it more newsworthy to highlight the 'food desert' comment than to do any fact-checking.

Shortly after that, the host ends with "you don't see this kind of environment, really, anywhere in the world, where it's just one big mishmash of nationalities, age groups, everybody's just hangin' in the park that Sabina built."

But in fact, what the host calls "the big mishmash," is all over the world. And it livens up much of Toronto.

Thorncliffe Park Women's Committee, 2009

The show's push is to make it look and sound as though Sabina Ali single-handedly fixed R.V.Burgess Park, in spite of her descriptions of how neighbours talked together and worked together. That is such an unhelpful fairy tale. Jane Jacobs used to get really irritated at people who tried to set her up as a big hero. She said "NO! -- good things only happen when people work together!" Good things happened In Thorncliffe Park because of Ali's ability to work with three good friends, and then the ability of that circle of friends to pull in a broader circle of neighbours, and then to interest other like-minded people elsewhere in the ciy, and find people within agencies that "get" what the women wanted to create.

But the TVO program makes it sound like somebody just has to decide to "kind of just make this happen" and poof!

TVO gets government and funder support with their slogan "Creating a better world through the power of learning." But making up fairy tales doesn't create a better world, it doesn't help anybody.