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Work That Endures: Power to the People Keeping Places Alive This milestone conference, bringing together for the first time the Canadian Land Trust Alliance and the Heritage Canada Foundation, is designed to make the ‘Heritage Workforce’ stronger with hands-on workshops, tours, panel discussions, seminars and roundtables. Heritage Canada Foundation conference attendees will be able to participate in activities and sessions organized by the CLTA. Registration will start in April! Below is just a glimpse of some interesting topics that will be discussed during this exciting event: Heritage Without Borders (organized by the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals) Endangered Places of Faith: A National Roundtable Protecting Lighthouses: Building a National Network Building Leadership in Your Community Preparing Stewardship Plans Funding Land Stewardship Advocacy 101: Sharing Effective Advocacy Techniques Economics and Heritage Conservation Interpretive Planning & Presentation Downtown Revitalization: Techniques and Current Practices Heritage Tourism Aboriginal Heritage Don’t miss our special events:
This conference is held in conjunction with the Rues principales/Main Street Colloquium on September 24, 2008 and in collaboration with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals.
Become a Work that Endures Sponsor! Why should you become a Work that Endures Conference Sponsor? Individuals, companies, organizations and agencies can receive valuable profile, recognition and other benefits while contributing to the success of the conference at the same time. Don’t miss this opportunity to:
SPONSORING THE CONFERENCE LETS YOU CONNECT WITH THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN CONSERVATION TODAY! Download our sponsorship package, click here.
An essential event for heritage decision makers, planners, architects and developers, community activists, advocates and consultants.
Conference Program (PDF) Heritage Canada Works From October 11th to 14th Edmonton’s historic Fairmont Hotel Macdonald was the site of our annual conference, Big Plans for Old Places: Heritage and Development in Canadian Communities. It was one of the most successful annual conferences the Heritage Canada Foundation has mounted in a number of years in terms of high numbers of participants (both delegates and speakers), the range of subject matter covered, and the level of partnership on workshops and public lectures. This year’s conference format, featuring larger discussion panels and working lunches, also departed from past practice. The 220 delegates—who ranged from planners, architects and heritage conservation educators to students, volunteers and advocates—were inspired by keynote speaker Roberta Brandes Gratz, New York’s visionary urban critic and author of The Living City: Thinking Big in a Small Way and Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown. Ms. Gratz distinguished between “regrowing” urban areas and “rebuilding” them. Regrowing, she argued, is the way to create vital cities with life at street level that offers smaller shops and more intimate cafes while using existing buildings. Conference sessions kicked off with “Was it Good for You? Marrying Heritage and Development,” moderated by Carleton University’s Heritage Conservation Program director, Herb Stovel. Bringing together a panel of experts in municipal development—a developer, planner, heritage activist and elected official—allowed for a fruitful exploration of the benefits of developing historic places and the barriers working against it. Later in the conference delegates were treated to an exciting national Blue Ribbon Panel on heritage development, composed of five prominent heritage developers from across Canada, including the moderator, Toronto developer Margaret Zeidler. Frankly, and with humour, they drew from their own experiences to identify many of the missing pieces—creative financing, incentives and more development “intelligence”—required to make building rehabilitation projects the new normal. The first of the two conference streams, “Managing Change and Development,” focused on urban planning issues. It featured sessions identifying the pressures on Canadian heritage—from insensitive infill to the displacement of rural houses and heritage tourism. Other sessions evaluated the “sticks and carrots” in the heritage conservation toolbox, namely, the merits of heritage planning controls, incentives and protective measures. A particularly lively panel, moderated by City of Calgary heritage planner David Plouffe, examined the role of civic engagement in protecting heritage resources and how to cultivate involvement. Fascinating case studies were presented including B.C.’s Britannia Beach Mill, the Indian Residential School Museum of Canada in Manitoba, and the NOW House rehab project focusing on post-World War II Victory Housing. They showed how heritage building rehabilitation projects have transformed entire communities and how reusing heritage buildings can support sustainability goals. The second conference stream, “Revitalizing Communities,” brought to the fore cutting-edge urban renewal strategies in the United States and Canada. It featured Todd Barman from the U.S. National Trust Main Street Center, Bryan Van Sweden from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, François Varin from Quebec’s Rues principales Foundation and Larry Pearson from Alberta’s Main Street Program. The stream also included a presentation on how the oldest Main Street project in Alberta, Fort Macleod, was faring after 25 years. On Saturday morning, a mobile workshop took session delegates to Edmonton’s 118th Avenue—an area with social challenges, a burgeoning arts community and tremendous potential—to experience the challenges facing a current Main Street project first hand. HCF’s Engaging Stakeholders in Heritage and Development initiative was carried throughout the conference during question periods and the two lunches. The initiative—a national consultation with stakeholders about improving heritage outcomes in property development—kept conference participants busy discussing a variety of related issues. Their significant input will be used in developing HCF’s recommendations concerning priorities to overcome challenges and to more effectively influence decision-making. A variety of other meetings and events took place, including the 2nd annual meetings of the Built Heritage Leaders Forum and the Heritage Conservation Educators Roundtable. The forum, made up of leaders from province-wide heritage trusts and advocacy organizations, discussed the budget announcement regarding the National Trust. They also participated in working sessions designed to identify and enhance opportunities for collaboration. The educators roundtable focused on the issue of ethical standards for heritage conservation practitioners, the need for a concerted research and publication program, and the importance of distance education to promote collaboration and sharing. In each case, a working group was struck to address issues of interest to each of these sectors over the coming months. The conference also offered a total of seven tours, from Edmonton’s Modern built heritage to its Old Strathcona historic district, with the Rossdale Flats and Church Street in between. HCF would like to thank all our sponsors and all the hard-working volunteers who contributed to the shaping of the conference program, who developed and guided the excellent tours, and who assisted with general tasks. We couldn’t have done it without you! The Heritage Canada Foundation would like to thank the following sponsors and partners for their generous support:  City of Edmonton Planning and Development Department  Edmonton Historical Board Alberta Historical Resources Foundation City of Calgary Land Use Planning & Policy
Highlights of HCF’s 2006 Conference—Headlines, Hotlinks and Historic Places: Heritage in an Electronic Age 2006 Conference proceedings (PDF) Ottawa’s old train-station-turned-conference-centre was the site of our October annual conference. The three-day event focused on new technologies for sharing information and raising public awareness of conservation issues. They included the digital reconstruction of buildings, creation and management of inventories and registers, rehabilitation project management, practical information on promoting conservation through web and internet communications, and how to work with the media. The 200 delegates—who ranged from planners, architects, educators and curators to students, volunteers and advocates—were inspired by keynote speaker Elizabeth May, former executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada. In her energetic talk on “Why Heritage Matters,” Ms. May said that many of the tools and strategies used to move the environmental movement from the fringes to the national stage can be adopted by the heritage conservation sector. Knowing how to “tell your story” builds relationships, grabs media attention, influences politicians and “turns people around to your point of view.” (For highlights of Elizabeth May’s keynote address, turn to page 40.) Gilles Morel, director of the Société de développement de Montréal, introduced the highly successful Old Montréal website. The site provides “one stop shopping” for a varied audience while promoting the historic quarter to potential visitors. In 2005-6, it topped one million hits! The site is packed with practical content: parking maps for tourists, area tours, a timeline of its history, a photo gallery, an important architectural inventory, a guide to renovation and restoration work, and much more. Another web-based tool was presented by Dr. Adriana Davies of Alberta’s Heritage Community Foundation. The Alberta Online Encyclopaedia is a new tool for public engagement and heritage dissemination. It has had more than 1.5 million site visits that lasted longer than 20 minutes. Dr. Davies stressed that digital resources are good vehicles for demonstrating the relevance of collections, historic buildings, landscapes and other heritage resources while also providing enormous scope for partnerships—both private and public. (See www.vieux.montreal.qc.ca and www.albertasource.ca.) The full conference program included sessions on preservation planning using computer “visualization tools” and on heritage management using electronic repositories. Delegates were impressed with a range of case studies from in-motion height controls to protect historic views in the nation’s capital to a systematic maintenance database for Winnipeg’s heritage property to an award-winning inventory system developed for 7,000 heritage buildings in Brantford, Ontario. While many presenters acknowledged the challenges of the digital age—fear of new technology, huge costs to digitize, maintain and enhance collections, and the need for special expertise to create multimedia educational content for both professional and informal learners—all concluded that its innovations could be tremendously useful. Representatives from the conservation movement in Canada, England, New Zealand and the United States discussed the value of developing registers of national heritage places and compared similar problems each faced in digitizing inventories. Launched in 2003, the Canadian Register of Historic Places—a listing of sites from across Canada recognized by federal, provincial, territorial and local governments—has 6,000 listings, with 20,000 expected by 2014. The Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) in Ottawa took front place for its amazing digital reconstruction of Montréal’s boulevard Saint-Laurent, commonly known as “The Main.” The significance of an evolving streetscape focuses on the relationship between people and place—a relationship that is difficult to capture using traditional methods of heritage recording. The CIMS technology transported delegates to “The Main”—a designated national historic site—using an interactive, immersive 360-degree digital environment as seen from the pedestrian’s perspective. This interdisciplinary studio, with members from the fields of architecture, industrial design, information technology, electrical engineering and cultural studies, works to integrate content production and applied technical research. The management of large heritage portfolios, particularly those owned by federal government departments like Public Works and Government Services Canada and the Department of National Defence, was examined in a plenary session led by Julie Harris, principal of Content Works Inc., and was followed by a round table discussion with government representatives. A huge inventory of post-WWII federal buildings still need to be evaluated for their heritage significance, yet we lack a long-range real property management policy that includes sound protection and commitment to reuse. Challenges include providing managers of federal heritage properties with the tools they need to protect heritage character, address the shortfalls in Treasury Board Policy, and sustain the growing federal heritage portfolio. The HCF annual conference also offered a half-day preservation planning mobile workshop focused on four geographic clusters of heritage planning activity, and a series of walking tours of historic Ottawa—including the Byward Market area. HCF would like to thank all who contributed to the insightful discussions that helped to shape the conference program and those who willingly shared their knowledge and their passion at the Ottawa event. Contact usHeritage Canada Foundation 5 Blackburn Ave., Ottawa, ON Tel.: 613-237-1066 ext. 227 Fax: 613-237-5987 E-mail: conference@heritagecanada.org
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