City of Kitchener approves new community-driven Parks Master Plan

The City of Kitchener has completed an ambitious 10-year plan for its parks. The new Parks Master Plan reflects how invaluable these spaces are to current residents looking to gather, relax, play and connect, while anticipating how the community's needs will evolve and how our parks and open spaces will need to grow to meet them.

“Kitchener’s parks are some of our city’s most beloved spaces. From playgrounds and shade structures to dog parks and community gardens, and from the downtown to strengthening the connection to and along the Grand River, the new Parks Master Plan establishes a bold vision that reflects how we’re evolving and changing as a community,” said Mayor Berry Vrbanovic. “The development of our new Parks Master Plan is an important step to ensure we provide high-quality park experiences for many years to come.”

Guided by staff expertise as well as an extensive two-year community engagement process, the City received feedback from over 2,400 Kitchener residents to understand their priorities and needs.

The Master Plan’s 50 recommendations include near-, mid- and long-term priorities funded entirely by forecast budgets. The recommendations are summarized in four impact areas: Parks for Everyone, Connecting Park Experiences, Planning Parks for the Future and Responsive Park Spaces. Each impact area guides strategic projects like strengthening relationships with the development community to strategically grow the parks and open space system, continuing an engagement-oriented design approach for our parks to ensure they incorporate community feedback, and more.

“The community’s feedback was essential to the Master Plan process,” said Jeffery Silcox-Childs, Kitchener’s Director of Parks and Cemeteries. “It was important to us that the plan was informed by the ways people actually use our parks and open spaces, as well as the ways they would like to use them in the future. The input we received led to recommendations tailored to the community. These include creating new parks in non-traditional areas and introducing a wide range of amenities to a neighbourhood by using a park network approach to strategically spreading them around multiple parks to meet as many users’ needs as possible.”

The full staff report outlining the details of the new Parks Master Plan is available on the City of Kitchener’s website. A final accessible version of the full Master Plan will be available in the coming weeks at Kitchener.ca/ParksMasterPlan.

For more information:

Krystin Scheels
Communications and Marketing Associate
City of Kitchener
media@kitchener.ca