On the whole, well-designed tiny parks aren’t really Vancouver’s thing.

That makes sense: small subtleties aren’t really this city’s thing, period. Vancouver prefers to smack you upside the head with the ocean and the mountains, tall glass against bright blues and greens, laughing statues and geodesic domes and knockoff Space Needles dominating the skyline.

The parks with the most effort put into them are largely the ones next to the ocean, or with views of the ocean, and everything else is a nice afterthought; as though if it couldn’t be called “world class” it wasn’t worth the world-class effort. Which may be why we have city blocks full of generic fields and playgrounds, with maybe a community garden here or there. 

Mosaic Creek Park isn’t that. About 40 metres long and 20 metres wide, it feels like the somewhat large backyard of your middle-class dreams that you don’t actually have because you live in Vancouver. 

But it’s intricately plotted out, dominated by a beautiful mosaic art piece that wanders through the park like a lazy creek (hence the name). There’s a little rock structure that’s fun for kids to climb, multiple hangout spaces, and some nice shrubbery.  

This wouldn’t have delighted us so much if there were others like it. But most of the small parks in the city are either undersigned patches of grass intended for you to enjoy the ocean, or weird elongated traffic medians with a few trees in the middle. 

Mosaic Creek is about as good as a tiny park can be with no major amenities. We just wish there were more of them, subtly dropped throughout the city.