Reflections on the Ontario Heritage Conference

Last week, I spoke on a panel about “Engaging Youth in Heritage” at the Ontario Heritage Conference. I was joined by some fabulous peers, Natalie Majda , Elise Geschiere , and Hayden Bulbrook .

A short exchange occurred when one of my fellow panelists (surprisingly, not me) made a point about the potential cultural significance of strip malls and how they function outside of the traditional framework for heritage designation. An audience member chimed in, insistent that calling a strip mall a cultural hub is a “stretch” and that designating strip malls may be “too” out of left field. I don’t totally disagree, but there’s nuance here. Unpacking this line of thinking helps capture some of the key points that I wanted to get across through this panel, so that's what I'm going to try to do here.

I’ll preface by saying that I’m not a heritage ‘professional’, but I do work in culture, community, and public space. To me, heritage is fundamentally tied to these things. Heritage can facilitate belonging, foster a sense of place, and (re)generate culture. My question is always - for whom? Who and what does heritage serve? That’s the lens I approached this conversation from.

De-professionalize and ditch the ego.

Heritage professionals know more about architecture styles, preservation techniques, and the OHA than I ever will, but does this really qualify them to be the arbiters of what is and isn’t culturally valuable, or of what is worth the effort to preserve? In the context I work in, (Toronto and it's inner suburbs) strip plazas have been hubs for racialized and newcomer communities for generations. They are important nodes in immigrant food networks and some of the few third spaces in sprawling suburban built form. This audience member had many years of experience under their belt, but what is the point of expertise if we so stubbornly disregard what communities value, without even trying to understand why these spaces are important?

This field is rooted in a settler-colonial framework, and the technical knowledge it has accumulated is very good at perpetuating, spatializing, and concretizing these settler-colonial histories...not so good at reckoning with the increasingly pluralistic and diverse society we live in. Technical expertise shouldn't supersede community values if the profession is as serious about justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion as it claims to be.?

Think beyond existing policy frameworks.

There’s been uproar within the professional community about recent amendments through Bill 23 to the Ontario Heritage Act. Look, I get it, these changes aren’t at the vanguard of good heritage policy, but I think that some of the most vocal opponents are missing the point. Many claim that increasing the threshold for designation and weakening policy tools like listing, will make it difficult to protect the heritage properties of BIPOC and other marginalized populations (because these properties often struggle to meet more than one criterion, especially design value).

But I ask you - did these policy tools ever really serve marginalized communities?

No.

At its core, the pushback against these changes is rooted in misunderstandings about how marginalized populations conceive of and hope to preserve their own heritage. The heritage sector is overdue for the paradigm shift away from physical material and built form that cultural heritage literature has suggested for years. When viewed in the context of the heritage sector's historical inadequacy in protecting marginalized heritage, appeals to renounce Bill 23 because of its effects on marginalized populations reek of tokenism at best and scapegoating at worst.

So, frankly, I agree with that audience member - it is a stretch to designate a strip plaza within the existing framework. Designating or even listing misses the point. Designating a strip plaza does nothing to protect what is actually important about it - its use and the function it serves in its community.

Be proactive. Today is tomorrow’s heritage, let’s act like it.?

A strip mall or a place of worship in an old warehouse or a boxy banquet hall (see Sneha Mandhan ’s cool work) - these are valuable spaces to many racialized/immigrant communities, but because of their built form they will likely never be heritage designated. Nor, as discussed above, should they be. The cultural significance of these spaces often emerge in spite of their built form. Communities have had to adapt to these spaces because this is often all they have access to. Marginalized groups deserve beautiful spaces that reflect their values. Freezing these buildings in time, which is what so many heritage policy tools do, actively works against the needs of these communities.

When I walk to the plaza at the corner of my street in Scarborough and see people gathered for taraweeh prayers in a laundromat, (do I need to spell out the cultural value this space now holds?) I feel like the appropriate heritage response is not to preserve the building, but rather to adapt the building to its users needs. If the heritage profession can't do that, then maybe it doesn't serve all of the communities it tries to claim it does.

We also can’t wait 50 years, when these communities have been displaced and then start waxing lyrical about how these spaces were so important for racialized immigrants or how these spaces teach us about the resilience of their users. Years after we razed The Ward, we curated exhibitions and wrote books about it. I reject this destiny for the spaces I hold dear. These communities are here right now. They need support, they need affordable housing, they need secure access to food, they need options for mobility, they need spaces that are actually designed around their needs.

Heritage professionals are just as responsible as any other city-building profession to advocate for these needs.

Being resilient is tiring...why can't protecting cultural heritage mean making things better today?

Some final thoughts

Strip malls have served as a useful rhetorical device for me over the years as my thoughts about heritage have evolved, so I'm glad they worked their way into the conversation at the panel. Thinking through how heritage practice interacts with a typology like an inner suburban strip mall really highlights how the profession isn't built to serve a lot of marginalized communities. That's why I'm grateful for initiatives like plazaPOPS , who actively advocate for these spaces with dignity and care, and for showing a younger me that there are people out there in practice whose values align with mine.

I'm grateful for the folks that were on the panel with me, they brought up amazing points, all of which I agreed with. This panel showed me that the heritage industry is heading in a positive, critical, and thoughtful direction - but it also reminded me that I'm quite happy doing the work I do outside of the institution of capital-H heritage practice.