UCLA

As green space becomes more central to both urban growth and sustainability agendas, new parks are emerging from disused infrastructure, funded, designed, and managed by philanthropic donors. These collaborative park governance strategies promise to deliver ecologically responsive and culturally vital green spaces, but raise critical questions about the spatial justice implications of private power in the production of public space.This dissertation explores the drivers, modes, and implications of philanthropic participation in the material and discursive production of urban parks and green spaces. Centering on three embedded cases of donor-led parks in Toronto, Canada – The Bentway, The Meadoway, and The Art Trail – I investigate, first, how philanthropy reshapes the production, design, and governance of urban green spaces, and second, how these politics, processes, and outcomes implicate park justice. I use interviews, policy and media discourse analysis, and urban design analysis to investigate the three parks as material sites through which design and programming strategies are deployed and as processes through which power is wielded and resisted.Drawing from theories of the production of space, urban political ecology, and urban justice, I probe the interrelations between urban environmental imaginaries and actual urban landscapes. I find that local environmental governance discourses and global policy mobilities naturalize the value of philanthropy-led park production, and in doing so, shift expectations amongst policymakers and the public regarding how parks ought to be made. With donor participation framed as a broadly shared social and environmental good, counter-narratives are constrained; donor power neutralizes dissent and diminishes alternative visions of urban environmental development. As philanthropy infuses the park-making process with new power relations, I argue this may divert public resources away from equity-informed park needs and exacerbate distributive and recognitional injustices across park systems. I offer policy and planning recommendations to address these risks.The findings contribute to theoretical understandings of how private power operates through multi-scalar processes of urban environmental change. Critical attention to how discursive representations of greening, growth, and giving produce material changes in urban environments can reveal spatially uneven effects and uncover more just alternatives.