Burlington Parks Provisioning Master Plan & Recreation Service Analysis

Client City of Burlington
Location Burlington| Ontario | Canada

Attractive, equitable, and highly functional parks and open space are key measures of success for Parks Provisioning in the City of Burlington.

A successful Parks Provisioning Master Plan must recognize and respond to the tensions between residential needs, agricultural requirements, private economic development, and the desire for an attractive, equitable, and highly functional parks and open space system. The plan will develop target park provisioning rates and distribution service levels for different policy areas of the city. Once future parkland requirements are identified, tools will be developed and tested to understand if they can deliver in practice.

O2 was retained by the City of Burlington to create a park provisioning master plan. The City of Burlington has recognized the need to build a Parks Provisioning Master Plan (PPMP) to establish a Council-approved parkland acquisition framework and target for park provisioning standards to ensure Burlington is providing adequate green space to support growth. O2 is currently creating a practical, effective, and adaptable park management framework that will enable the City to meet its objectives, make essential contributions to its communities’ quality of life, and continue to serve as an important destination for visitors from around the country. O2 was further retained to complete a comprehensive recreation service analysis for the entire city. O2 defined the current access to all City and private/non-profit recreation facilities based on walking catchments, community catchments, planning policy catchments and dissemination block catchments. Recreation service levels were then defined based on the function of the facility. A facility utilization analysis was also completed for each major asset category, using data provided by the City of Burlington. This analysis resulted in service level targets and recommendations, rooted in best practice research.