Agree with badcoffee. Sometimes I feel designers don’t truly take into consideration those younger than 15 years old. Nothing in the revamped Eau Clare plaza seems designed for children. “Hey mom, can we go to Eau Clare so we can play on the giant concrete rectangle with telephone poles sticking out!” That splash park was always busy with families and kids.
This city is also allergic to water. I’ve mentioned it before and I know we live in a winter city, but my God would it kill the city to have a couple grand water fountains or a few more outdoor wading pools? I’ll bet money they don’t reinstall a water feature in the new Olympic Plaza.
The water thing is weird, weather is an excuse - my view it's because we are very cheap and overly afraid of lawsuits. Partially it's also our culture - a relatively low-water and young city that missed the "peak fountain" era of the early 20th century.
RE: children's stuff in the inner city, it always seems to be a bias within the recreation and parks systems - firstly that downtown doesn't have children, and assuming children have access to cars so they can go to "nearby" splash parks and facilities. This is a broader bias that impacts many things, but related to fountains and parks it's really obvious when you see what's built, where. Because it's not actually true that we don't build splash parks or great children amenities, we have loads including many seasonal ones - we just intentionally don't build them in central locations.
For example,
this spray park in South Glenmore Park is massive and freshly invested in - multiple playgrounds, many water features, change rooms, bathrooms, sun/rain protection etc. It's a wildly popular destination for families with young kids. Can easily see hundreds of people in a popular summer day. You could easily fit this design on Prince's Island or anywhere central:
Instead of the fun, family friendly stuff we get things like Century Gardens which is nice and very popular, but no where near as fun or large capacity:
Excuses to why the first example can't exist downtown are predictable - there's not enough children to justify things like spray parks in downtown, inner city park space is in short supply and can't dedicate the space, it's too expensive to maintain parks like the splash parks in downtown due to "downtown issues", downtown already has so much stuff and we need to balance it out, and my favourite - it'll be too crowded. I also wouldn't be surprised if many splash park ideas die on the vine due to "where will parents park, as obviously most children will arrive by cars".
Some of these arguments may be reasonable for a given location or idea, but mostly I find it a lazy status-quo cultural bias that is applied before any idea can get off the ground to create a more child-friendly downtown. We absolutely could fit a spray park in an existing park. Parking "need" is a made up thing. There's thousands of children living downtown right now (let alone more in the future) plus thousands more children that visit inner city parks daily all year round from elsewhere in the city. There's countless examples from many other major cities that have "downtown issues" and still manage to pull off awesome children's infrastructure in their city centres.
Meanwhile the suburban splash parks don't face the same frictions. North Glenmore Park didn't have to "prove" there's enough children nearby (there isn't) to justify a spray park is a good idea, it's just assumed that it's the type of place that should have children stuff. That's the type of bias that holds back design sometimes in the inner city public spaces.
