Creative City Network of Canada

Creative City News

IN THIS ISSUE

Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Sustainability - Introduction

Models of Sustainability Incorporating Culture

KEY CONTEXTS
Sustainability • Social sustainability / Social capital

Cultural sustainability / Cultural capital • Community development • Sustainable community development

Community capital • Community cultural development

Eco-Arts

10 key themes of cultural sustainability

Summary • Recommended reading

Credits - Info

Exploring the Cultural Dimensions of Sustainability

Our culture embodies the sense we make of our lives; it is built on the values we share and the ways we come to terms with our differences; it deals with what matters to people and communities: relationships, memories, experiences, identities, backgrounds, hopes and dreams in all their diversity. And most of all, our culture expresses our visions of the future: what it is we want to pass on to future generations. Our culture connects our present with our pasts and with the future we imagine. It is with culture that we make the connections, the networks of meanings and values, and of friendship and interest, that hold us together in time, in place and in society. Our culture describes the ways we tell each other our stories, how we create our sense of ourselves, how we remember who we are, how we imagine who we want to become, how we relax, how we celebrate, how we argue, how we bring up our children, the spaces we make for ourselves. Our culture is the expression of our desires to be happy, our desires to belong, our desires to survive and, above all, our desires to be creative. — Jon Hawkes, Understanding culture, 2003 Traditionally, sustainability has largely been defined at the global and national level, but more recently it has been applied to cities and communities too. This shift in focus is reinforced, in part, through the adoption of sustainability frameworks and concerns by the community development field. Parallel to this “local turn” is a greater appreciation for culture as a significant component of sustainability.

Cultural considerations in community development often emerge through discussions about social sustainability or community capital. The pattern is similar: community sustainability continues to be most commonly seen as a way to improve a community’s “well-being” in social, economic, and environmental terms, with culture gradually forming a part of this vision.

This edition of Creative City News offers a taste of some of the evolving concepts around sustainable community development where culture is a significant component. These concepts overlap and inform one another in organic and co-evolutionary ways. For instance, discussions of sustainability incorporate both social and cultural ideas, and community development practices include sustainable community development and community cultural development. Cultural and social capital are part of both sustainability and community development, and eco-arts practices influence thinking about relationships between culture and the environment. As well, the different areas are often linked in practice through a number of common values and approaches.

More and more, culture is a key topic in discussions of sustainability—one with the potential to transform communities and individuals in positive and meaningful ways over the long term.

Sna7m Smánit (Spirit of the Mountain), West Vancouver, BC
Artist Xwa lack tun (Rick Harry) created the work from a sheet of steel. Its structure mirrors the shape of the Lions Gate Bridge—yet with elements acknowledging his roots in the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation).
Photo: John McLachlan
Text: This text is derived from a Centre of Expertise on Culture and Communities working paper, Culture as a Key Dimension of Sustainability: Exploring Concepts, Themes, and Models, February 2007.

 

 
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