We found Canada's best splash pad — an urban cooling underdog

Written By Peter Allan
colorful image of giant water spouts in yellow red and green showering down on people to keep them cool

Illustration by Ata Ojani

By Cloe Logan

When water isn’t spurting up from the holes in the ground, you’d walk past it without knowing it’s an essential piece of cooling infrastructure and a gathering place for people of all ages. But at noon during a late July heatwave, the Halifax splash pad is full of life. Kids are screaming bloody murder as they run through the cool streams; their caregivers are benchwarmers waiting on the sidelines. You can only place your bare foot on the dry concrete beside it for a second — it’s that hot.

Climate change is making heat waves like this one more common, longer, hotter and more widespread. And while people feel the heat no matter where they live, urban environments are hotter than their rural counterparts. The concrete that covers sidewalks and roads retains heat, leading to cities warming at twice the global average rate. Depending on where you live and how many trees shade your home, the phenomenon — known as the urban heat island effect — can be even more intense.

It prompted us at Canada’s National Observer to consider the ways people interact with their urban environments in an age of extreme heat. Our research brought us to an oft-overlooked solution: splash pads. They are built with kids in mind, but also serve as refuges for people of all ages without air conditioning. Making homes cooler is an essential piece of the climate puzzle (during BC’s deadly 2019 heat dome, the majority of deaths occurred at home), but building and maintaining public cooling infrastructure is also key, said Lorien Nesbitt, who leads the Urban Natures Lab at the University of British Columbia.

“We can't be asking heat-vulnerable people to stay in their houses for a month at a time, even if it's nicely air conditioned, and especially if it's not,” she said. “So how do we allow people to be in the community, to be with their friends?”

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Peter Allan
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