What About a Rain Park (or two)?
Imagine looking out your window to see the rain pouring down, the ground is wet and your first thought being, “a perfect day for the park!” As it is in Victoria, that is likely not what people think when they wake up to a rainy day. Sure, if you can stay under a forest canopy for a walk through the woods it can be pretty enjoyable to listen to the rain, but if you are in the city and you have a three your old, the rain can feel limiting. In Gothenburg Sweden, there is city park that truly is a destination when it is raining, the rain playground in Renströmsparken Park. The two key elements of the rain playground are that it makes use of the rain for play and there are spaces to sit and avoid the rain. This means that both kids and parents are having a good time on a rainy day.
I have talked about this park before and also of how to make better use of public space in the rain here and here. While I do need to point out each time I write on this subject that Victoria is not as rainy as people think. Each year you can look at the cities in Canada with the most precipitation or articles about the sunniest cities in Canada, and find out that Victoria is likely sunnier than and drier than you think. The issue is that so much of our identity floats across the Salish Sea from Seattle and Vancouver, which both get so much more rain and so much less sun than Victoria, that we have taken on a bit of their persona. Also, while we do live near a rainforest that starts as you head out to the west coast of the Island, we on the tip of the south island don’t, despite again what we hear and see constantly on social media and in the news. Still, when it rains it comes all at once during the winter and it makes for some challenging times to get outside and enjoy a park, especially if you want to take your kid to the playground.
This brings me back to the rain playground at Renströmsparken Park in Gothenburg Sweden and the two elements I brought up before, there is space to escape the rain and space to enjoy the rain. In this park you have these giant leaves that both protect those underneath them from the rain and also direct the flow of the rain to specific points in the playground where it collects. In those spots, the designer has focused in on one of those universal joys of children, jumping in a puddle. There are also basins where rain collects at the height of child so that they can play up close and personal with the water. The park has some of the traditional features of a playground as well with swings, a climbing structure and a slide. This makes it a destination no matter whether it is raining or not.
Victoria does have some amazing playgrounds and even a few water parks for kids for when it is hot, but nothing currently focused on play during those six months when we can expect to see rain outside. On those days, even if it has stopped raining for a bit, drive by any of the mammoth playgrounds in the city and you are going to see an empty space. Even worse as I have found with my kids, if you fight the rain and get your kids out on a playground when they are wet, they become actually quite dangerous for them. As I said in my article on what I would like to see go into the harbourside parking lots, I think there is a great opportunity for the city to work with park designers and a local artist (Illarion Gallant I think could make a pretty amazing rain sculpture park) to create a truly amazing place of fun and play. Since I have this vision in my head of rain playgrounds, I spend a lot of time trying to search for other examples and the one in Gothenburg keeps coming up as the only real example (If you know of another one, please, please leave a comment or link for me to look at). So that means that Victoria has an opportunity to make the best of a rainy day and also put itself at the forefront of park design. Vancouver actually did this recently with the Rainbow Park in Yaletown, which while an absolutely amazing playground, is not focused on rain.
Bouquet of Memories by Illarion Gallant. I can definitely see how his work could transform into a rain park! (Courtesy of Rusnak Gallant Ltd.)
One thing we do have in Victoria at a couple of parks are some beautiful examples of rain capture such as Fisherman’s Wharf Park in James Bay, perhaps the two aspects could be put together to use both rain capture and play to have a fun place, a learning place and a healing place all in one. I also would love if some of the rain catchment parts of parks were also tied into places to escape the rain even it is wasn’t attached to a playground. One of the few rain benches I can think of in a park is the Mushroom Bench in Beacon Hill Park, I would love to see more places like that.
I really want to hear from you on this, would you like to see a rain playground or park in Victoria? If you would, what would you want to see in it? Where should we put them? I am sure this is not the last time I will bring this up as the idea keeps bouncing around in my head, I would love some day to have it right before my eyes!