Cultural Landscapes - Beyond Just Heritage
The Ontario Heritage Trust defines a Cultural Heritage Landscape as the following:
A cultural heritage landscape is a property or defined geographical area of cultural heritage significance that has been modified by human activities and is valued by a community. These activities or uses may be key to the cultural value, significance and meaning of this landscape.
A cultural landscape may be designed at a specific time by a specific person or it may have evolved organically over a long period time (and may still be slowly evolving). It may also include a landscape that possesses powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element rather than material cultural evidence, which may be insignificant or even absent. It involves a grouping(s) of individual heritage features, such as structures, spaces, archaeological sites and natural elements that together form a significant type of heritage form, distinctive from that of its constituent elements or parts.
Put simply, cultural landscapes are about the relationship between people and place. On a large scale or small, as my former teacher and renowned restoration architect, Julian Smith would say, the raltionship between ritual and artifact.
Though the term originates in heritage conservation, I believe its utility reaches far beyond a niche heritage framework. Cultural landscapes offer a powerful, practical lens for anyone working in planning, development, or design today - especially as we navigate the enormous pressures of growth, housing demand, and climate resilience.
By focusing not just on what we build, but on how we live in and move through our environments, a cultural landscape approach offers a grounded, human-scale way to shape change that respects and, ideally improves the places we care about most.
Too often, development decisions are driven by zoning maps, parcel sizes, or short-term demand. But the places people love, the places where communities thrive, are rarely defined that way. Cultural landscapes help us zoom out and ask better questions: What is the underlying structure of this place? What makes it work? What gives it identity?
At one point in my career, I worked in the office of the Member of Provincial Parliament for Toronto Centre — a provincial riding roughly bounded by the Don River to the east, Yonge Street to the west, Bloor to the north, and Lake Ontario to the south. One of our responsibilities was to help foster community development in an area that may be the most diverse in the country. But building a shared identity based on arbitrary riding boundaries — rather than actual patterns of life — was an uphill battle.
Toronto Centre is not a cultural landscape in itself but it contains many cultural landscapes - neighbourhoods with distinct histories, rhythms, and relationships to place. Once we realized this, our office changed tack. Rather than imposing a single structure, we embraced the neighbourhood mosaic of the riding and found much greater success building connections through community-specific planning and outreach. I look back on that time as a clear example of how understanding the true composition of a place is key to any kind of planning success.
Fast forward to today, and I live in a small town that’s about to experience a major population boom. This story is playing out across Canada, and unsurprisingly, change is often met with resistance from long-time residents — people who’ve come to cherish a certain way of life.
And that’s just it: that way of life is a cultural landscape. It’s not only about the buildings or the scenery — it’s about knowing your neighbours, walking to the store, chatting on the street, and enjoying a pace and friendliness that stands in contrast to big-city living. That character is what’s at risk when growth is careless or disconnected.
So how can new development respect the existing cultural landscape?
At a broad scale, it starts by thinking about how people connect. Instead of carving out acres of car-dependent subdivisions where no such neighbourhoods exist, new growth should find ways to link into the existing fabric - to strengthen main streets, extend walkable routes, or create new public spaces that encourage gathering and interaction. In other words, development should add to the story of a place, not overwrite it.
This approach isn’t about freezing places in time or mimicking the past. It’s about working with the grain of a place and understanding its evolution, its patterns, its soul and responding with care. Not every new project has to look “heritage,” but it should feel rooted in the rhythms of the community. In a small town, those rhythms are noticeable - and disruptions are glaring.
Whether I’m working on a specific site or consulting on policy, this lens helps me ask better questions and often helps communities articulate what they value most, even when they don’t yet have the words.
In the end, the best development doesn’t overwrite a place. It joins the conversation.
A Note to the Heritage Field
For all the promise that cultural landscapes hold for development and planning, I don’t think the heritage field has fully embraced the concept - and it should.
For a sector often concerned with its relevance to the broader public, we still focus too often on architectural styles, individual buildings, or regulatory designations, rather than on the deeper, lived relationships people have with place.
However, if we want heritage to matter to more people and to move beyond specialists and into the lives of everyday citizens, we need to meet people where they are. And where they are is in their neighbourhoods, their routines – in their cultural landscapes.
By shifting the focus from what we save to how we live, heritage can become not just a retrospective tool, but a forward-looking one - guiding thoughtful growth, shaping quality development, and reinforcing the connections that make places worth caring about in the first place.
