Opinion: Where my parks at?
This deserves a webpage.
While looking up information on Ezio Farone Park I noticed the City of Edmonton only has webpages for its major parks. You know, the Hawrelaks, Gold Bars and Coronations.
The Ezio Farones, the Dr. Wilbert McIntyres and Kildares don’t get a webpage.
I want them to get their own webpage!
OK, there’s a slight twist to them not having a webpage. There are a bunch of different pages you can slog through to find picnic sites, or sports fields, or your neighbourhood’s parks.
I’ll note with my work on the Strathcona Centre Community League, however, that people tend not to know the “official” name of their neighbourhood. The Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues (EFCL) and Next Gen can back me up on that, since it came up at their recent event to get younger people involved in community leagues. (More on community leagues soon enough my pretties.)
To make sure I wasn’t make an outlandish request, I poked around a couple of websites from other Canadian cities.
Certainly I checked on Calgary. They are like us, and only have webpages for their big parks. The community parks, nestled nicely into your neighbourhood, don’t have much more than a name and address mention.
A city of similar size to Edmonton (though not in a similarly sized capital region), Winnipeg, also doesn’t give its medium and small parks a page of their own. Though, they do provide information on the amenities of each park, which I think is a nice touch for anyone looking around at a neighbourhood to live in, or looking for a place to schedule the weekend pick-up football games.
Toronto beats them all. It appears all of their parks have their own webpage (except skateboard parks…) and at least one has its own website. I even did a measurement check on how big an acre was, to make sure these parks weren’t only the ones with giant swaths of land.
So, I’m writing this to the world (it’s the Internet after all) but I’m going to drop a line to the City of Edmonton and ask for a little more detail on our parks on the Internet.
We need to know more about the Garneaus, Montroses and Nellie McClungs. Those are parks we can have a BBQ in or saunter down to when we want a new place to read a book.
Are you with me or am I looking for too much from our city’s website?
