Cultural elements, both tangible and intangible, embody many socio-cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions of a community. They reflect and enable community relationships, accomplishments, challenges, and hopes. They are resources to draw upon, and tools for action. Key cultural elements in a community can also be used as anchors and foci for policy and planning efforts to ensure cultural resources are integrated as a pillar of a community’s sustainability.

Identifying a community’s key cultural elements and integrating this knowledge into broader contexts for action is a basic step in community cultural planning and policymaking. Concern for sustainability adds longer-term considerations and reflections to this work.

Cultural elements can be grouped under four general headings:
1 Physical Assets
2 Opportunities for Cultural Engagement
3 Media
4 Policy and Support Systems

Heritage
To understand our present and future, we need to know our past. Heritage assets are tangible embodiments of history. Connecting with cultural heritage allows us to “...locate [ourselves] in [our] own historical, social and cultural environment” (1996 Helsinki Declaration). It revives collective memory to re-envision the future.

Heritage assets include historic buildings, sites, relics, and artifacts. These resources are non-renewable and non-replaceable. For example, when a building is replaced by a new structure, cultural significance cannot easily be replicated. Finding new uses for heritage buildings will not only save a part of history from demolition, it also plays a direct environmental role by recycling existing assets.

Coincidentally, heritage buildings often become homes to museums. Museums, institutions dedicated to documenting and teaching our histories, are guardians of cultural heritage and essential to the functioning of cultural sustainability. Heritage is inextricably linked with our sense of identity and affirms our historic, cultural, and natural inheritance.

Placemaking
In an inclusive and culturally sustainable society it is important for citizens to see themselves reflected in their environment. Community placemaking is a process of transforming the physical environment into something culturally meaningful and collectively personal. A space becomes a place.

Placemaking includes community-specific cultural districts such as a “Little Italy” or “Chinatown,” and student-friendly neighbourhoods. It includes hybrid architecture like the First Nations House of Learning at the University of British Columbia, which features a longhouse with an aesthetic adapted from the traditional Coast Salish longhouses and contemporary meeting space design. The result is an environment that encourages First Nations students to share knowledge and culture in a “home away from home.”

Often, in times of tragedy it is these special places that offer a sense of belonging, a home for the human spirit, a shared space where those affected can connect and cope. Community members need to be able to find comfort in a place that speaks to their identity.

Meeting/sharing spaces
Cultural facilities and centres provide appropriate spaces to create, share, present, communicate, learn, socialize, and build community. Public spaces are where community members can debate values, meanings, and purpose as active, engaged citizens. These cultural spaces can be indoors, outdoors, or in virtual space over the Internet. Some examples include community and recreation centres, parks, local museums, coffee houses, public libraries, community halls, public art spaces, galleries, and theatres.

Public art
Public art is a physical community asset that can tell a story or start a dialogue. It could be a sculpture created to commemorate a piece of social history, a temporary installation for the purpose of a specific public engagement, or a creative expression of a public dream. An urban art form that is gaining wide acceptance is graffiti. In the right places, graffiti art has the capacity to express stories and ideas in a fresh, often countercultural way. Whatever form public art may take, it facilitates a social opportunity for cultural engagement and civic participation that animates the city.

...heritage is a legacy inherited from the past, valued in the present, which it helps interpret, and safeguarded for the future, which it helps shape. It provides a collective identity, a sense of the common good, and defines individual and community ways of life, values and beliefs. Natural and cultural heritage take many tangible (built heritage, cemeteries, garbage dumps, middens, places, spaces, geology, landscapes, gardens, plants, written records, music, dance, arts, literature, artifact collections, food, clothing...) and intangible forms (experiences, oral tradition, customs and stories, spirituality). Heritage brings people together in collectives and organizations to be imagined, constructed and expressed in many ways, a reflection of a community to itself and to visitors, through books, festivals, events, exhibitions, etc. Heritage is also a cultural industry that requires public policy and legislation, enterprise, innovation, and communication. —City of Ottawa, “What is Heritage?” Ottawa 2020 Heritage Plan

Social opportunities
There is a wide range of ways in which citizens can engage in the cultural life of their community. Social opportunities for cultural engagement activate, animate, and bring vibrancy to the cultural aspects of sustainable communities. These opportunities include community art projects, presentations of artistic works, festivals and celebrations developed by residents, and local history projects.

Community art is a dialogue through creative and imaginative means, intended to foster cultural understanding and social cohesion. It creates a wonderful opportunity for collaborative, inclusive community projects, which range from grassroots theatre productions to visual art collectives to community dance groups. It might involve taking ownership of a walkway or wall through installing colourful mosaic tiles.

Theatre, dance, gallery exhibitions, film, music, poetry, food, festivals, and parades enliven a city. When developed by and for its people, they are a resource and a life force for a community. Culture develops a sense of place that is unique and meaningful for the diverse range of individuals living and working there, and makes the community an attractive place for everyone, including visitors.

The act of sharing local cultural history and memory is powerful, and is a valuable resource for understanding a community’s heritage. Traditional guided tours share personalized histories and help ensure the survival of local stories, myths, and legends. Using mobile phones, organizations like [murmur] have also created innovative, self-guided audio tours featuring the memories of residents in cities across Canada.

Living museums like the Historic Town of Barkerville in British Columbia and the Random Passage Film Set in Trinity Bight, Newfoundland, are another way to bring history and heritage to life. Visitors can enjoy demonstrations and dramatizations that capture the imagination while facilitating reflections on the past.

Learning opportunities
An important process in developing human capital is the formal handing down or transferring of skills and knowledge. Examples of formal learning opportunities include recreation classes such as pottery and dance, mentorship and apprenticeship programs, drop-in workshops, community workshops and programs for artists or non-artists, skills training, and after-school programs.

Shared learning opportunities form links and trust between diverse members from different cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. They also provide a transfer of skills within the community. Instructors, including elders from various cultural groups, are empowered to foster knowledge and students are empowered with skills to contribute to the community. Creative programs also allow citizens with unique skills to practice and express their talents, often in innovative ways.

Through training, empowerment, and the transfer of knowledge, communities build human and social capital, which increases the sustainability of their community and workforce.

Media can play many roles, including producing, transmitting, and publicizing all the cultural resources mentioned above. Media sources range from newspapers, radio, and television, to newsletters, books, the music industry, the Internet, film, magazines, and new media. These are all means to document, communicate, and preserve cultural information such as knowledge, skills, values, and local stories, as well as to mobilize citizens on issues that are significant to them. Media is most successful when its content is reflective of its audience. Opportunities for community-based media are critical.

Underlying policy and support systems are vital. Without support for the operation and programming of cultural activities and assets, cultural heritage and programs are vulnerable as a pillar of sustainable community development. The creation of strong cultural elements requires complex systems of interlinking enablers. These include research, development, funding, creative resources, networks, online resources, and virtual meeting spaces. Barriers which inhibit cultural vitality can include an inability to communicate through a common language, a lack of cultural understanding, insufficient access to expertise, poor co-ordination and organizational skills, shortage of funds for start-up and ongoing operations, insufficient connection to remote and struggling communities, and lack of communication networks within the community and with government.

With the increasing attention to the four-pillars approach, however, policy and support for culture is understood to be integral to sustainable, livable communities and cities. As individuals become more sophisticated in relating to culture, both their own and that of others, the will to support the fourth pillar and to overcome these barriers strengthens.

The arts matter because they are local and relevant to the needs and wishes of local people. They help citizens to express their needs and to clothe them in memorable forms. They offer a way of expressing ideas and wishes that ordinary politics do not allow. The arts regenerate the rundown and rehabilitate the neglected. Arts buildings lift the spirits, create symbols that people identify with, and give identity to places that may not have one. Where the arts start, jobs follow. Anywhere that neglects the arts shortchanges its people.... The arts link society to its past, a people to its inherited store of ideas, images and words; yet the arts challenge those links in order to find ways of exploring new paths and ventures. The arts are evolutionary and revolutionary; they listen, recall and lead. They resist the homogeneous, strengthen the individual and are independent in the face of the pressures of the mass, the bland, the undifferentiated. In a postmodern world, in which individual creativity has never mattered more, the arts provide the opportunity for developing this characteristic. —John Tusa, “Art matters,” The Guardian, December 13, 2005

Photos: Ken Lum (left), Simon Purcell (right), and January Wolodarsky (bottom)

Renfrew Ravine is one of the few areas in Vancouver where Still Creek is not covered with concrete. At the lowest point in its history, it was filled with garbage. When artist Carmen Rosen moved into the neighbourhood, she wanted to help change the ravine from a dumping ground to a place that nourished people as well as wildlife.

Thus, in fall 2003, the first Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival took place. It’s now an annual celebration, with a harvest fair, parade, and multidisciplinary community art event based on environmental awareness. The ravine is in an area with a substantial Asian population, so from the start the project was linked to the Asian Mid-Autumn Festival. This kind of community-building is important to Rosen, and also happens during the skill-building workshops and work parties offered over the summer on environmental issues, stewardship (weeding, watering, garbage removal), story collecting, lantern-making, music, etc.

This year’s Moon Festival on October 7th will celebrate that most basic element—water. Neighbourhood youth will collect stories from their elders, whose origins are in countries around the world, and also express their own hopes and fears related to the future of water on this planet. A historical element will include the perspective of early settlers to the area. An associated lecture series at the local library is designed to generate discussion about larger water issues.

For Rosen, the long-term health of Renfrew Ravine, which is a small but important part of the global environment, and the health of the community go hand-in-hand.

Visit www.moonfestival.net

Photos: Yvon Cormier

For over 40 years, the small town of Caraquet, New Brunswick has hosted the Festival acadien de Caraquet, the largest cultural event in Acadie and one of the top tourist attractions in the Atlantic Provinces.

Annually, from August 1st to 15th, up to 150,000 people attend the festival’s many shows and activities. These include the blessing of the boats in Caraquet harbour and the Tintamarre, an ancient Acadian tradition that was revived in 1979. Tintamarre means “loud racket,” and this part of the festivities is about making as much noise as possible! Last year, on August 15th, which is the Acadian national holiday, 25,000 people marched down a closed-off segment of Caraquet’s Boulevard Saint-Pierre with pots, pans, shakers, tin cans, and whistles, expressing joie de vivre and pride in their heritage.

Between 200 and 400 artists, primarily Acadian or from Québec, Louisiana, or Europe, are featured. Most are from the field of popular song, but classical music, jazz, Latino, and other styles are included. Visual artists, as well as Acadian and francophone writers and poets, are showcased.

The Festival acadien de Caraquet provides a major boost to the local economy while helping to build strong, proud Acadian communities, which strengthens the country’s social foundations. Its success was recognized by the provincial government, who honoured the festival in 2004 with a Tourism Excellence and Innovation Award.

Visit www.festivalacadien.ca