From Cocoon to Flight: Transformations and Challenges

Working with 12 uniquely positioned municipalities along the Rideau Corridor provided insights into potential opportunities where components of the HPI could serve as effective heritage conservation tools. However, the discovery of potential hurdles - misconceptions of the benefits of Historic Places Initiative, doubts about the benefits of heritage designation, gaps in community capacity and limitations to coupling heritage with economic development – can impede the successful implementation of Historic Places Initiative within rural communities.

Four Municipality Models of Heritage Stewardship

When one thinks of the Rideau Corridor, recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one immediately thinks of the locks, dams and lakes of the waterway itself. But there is a sprawling chain of 10 rural municipalities spread along either side, each with an abundance of historical resources. There are homestead cabins sitting beside the brick houses that made them redundant, Aboriginal flint-mines lying unmarked beneath a screen of bush, and 1920’s boathouses and stone foundries as well as 1950s era drive-ins that still serve their original purpose. The diversity of historical resources challenged any catch-all management strategy and confounded any simplistic characterization of the current state of heritage stewardship and community capacity in the region.
With respect to heritage stewardship capacity, municipalities fell into four basic categories:

1. Cities and bigger rural towns with highly developed heritage infrastructure
2. Rural communities whose heritage infrastructure was adequate but impeded by present circumstances
3. Rural communities that had had little official heritage conservation activity in the past
4. Rural communities with very little heritage activity

1) Highly developed heritage infrastructure includes areas with heritage planners, databases and archives, a steady record of heritage designations, and an active and engaged heritage community. The team nominated properties from these areas to the Canadian Register, but realized that other municipalities would benefit more from the Rideau Heritage Initiative’s community capacity-building efforts.

2) Adequate heritage infrastructure includes areas with vigorous groups of heritage advocates and excellent archive facilities. However, old heritage bylaws did not reflect a broad social and contextual understanding of heritage value. This made it difficult for these municipalities to handle the rising tide of insensitive home renovations and infill. In both of these communities, the development of Statements of Significance for the Canadian Register was used as an exercise to help residents update their bylaws. In some areas, the team worked with several next generation heritage hopefuls to lobby the municipal government to reinstate a Municipal Heritage Committee.

3) In rural areas that had little in the way of official heritage conservation activity in the past but had lately been moved to act by the growing influx of transient cottage owners and the accelerated construction of enormous houses that threatened the environmental, cultural, and heritage character of their communities, the team introduced first steps, such as the creation of archives and inventories, while simultaneously conducting informal surveys of potential properties for designation.

4) In the areas that had very little heritage activity to speak of, either current or past, the team encouraged preliminary initiatives, such as creating unofficial inventories and making presentations to municipal council meetings at which the team pointed out remarkable structures and landscapes and addressed popular misconceptions about heritage designation.

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