Culturescope.ca - Three Big Questions

1. What is the relationship between culture, community development, and sustainability?

2. What are the cultural elements of a sustainable community?

3. Why does a cultural context matter?

1. What is the relationship between culture, community development, and sustainability?

Community development looks at communities not as simple geographical spaces, but as rich places filled with people from different social and cultural backgrounds, who are constantly adapting to new environmental, economic, social, and cultural realities. Community development seeks models and strategies that are inclusive and adaptable to residents, instigating change through thoughtful, progressive policy initiatives.

Sustainable community development is concerned not just with retaining local industries, services, and resources, but also with doing so in an environmentally, economically, and socially beneficial manner. It increasingly recognizes the need to incorporate culture and creativity in sustainable plans and strategies. This is reflected in the proliferation and implementation of “creative city” approaches to policies, development plans, and strategies in cities and communities around the globe. This wellspring of grassroots thinking, will, and activity has fuelled the emerging four-pillar model of sustainability that is gaining currency in policy and planning initiatives in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

This model recognizes that a community’s vitality and quality of life is closely related to the vitality and quality of its cultural engagement, expression, dialogue, and celebration. The four-pillars model further recognizes that the contribution of culture to building lively cities and communities where people want to live, work, and visit, plays a major role in supporting social and economic health.

Click here for part two of this question: Culture: The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability

2. What are the cultural elements of a sustainable community?

The diverse cultural elements of a community, both tangible and intangible, are avenues through which many socio-cultural, economic, and environmental dimensions of a community are embodied. 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: i. physical assets; ii. opportunities for cultural engagement; iii. media; and iv. underlying policy and support systems.

Click here to read the details under these headings.

3. Why does a cultural context matter?

Shared culture is the meeting place of healthy, heterogeneous communities. Cultural activities present opportunities for reinforcing diverse identities, for creating a sense of shared purpose, and for motivating people to become involved. In other words, they help to develop social capital and to strengthen social cohesion see Definitions.

To attain shared culture, communities need to find common linkages between individuals by breaking down social barriers and barriers to sharing. They need to welcome a range of perspectives. Shared culture means there is mutual respect for every culture and for the collective culture being created together. It embodies what the community – its history, resources, stories, hopes and dreams – means to the individual.

Shared culture is also referred to as intangible cultural capital, which has been described as “ideas, traditions and customs shared by a group of people,”** including intellectual capital such as language, literature, and music. A diverse, cohesive community is one where each citizen’s ideas, traditions, and customs are shared with the collective, and sometimes re-invented together. In the resulting mosaic, the different cultures and generations making up the community are respected, leading to social cohesion and, often, an important sense of individual comfort.

It was argued at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg that only through sharing, understanding, and mutual respect will the world be able to come to terms with the challenges it faces in term of loss of biodiversity, globalization, and poverty. Without an ability to adapt, communities become vulnerable to the negative effects of economic and environmental change. A sustainable community is a thriving, resilient place with the capacity to respond to change and to develop in ways that are beneficial to both the present and the future. Shared culture, which is an ongoing process very much about adapting to new social realities, is both the means and end of successful sustainable planning.

**Footnote: From David Throsby’s Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. For review of this book, go to: http://www.mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae6_2_5.pdf

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