Editor’s note: I am again happy to welcome Michael McClelland as a guest contributor to OHA+M. Prior to founding ERA Architects Michael worked in the heritage departments for the cities of Vancouver and Toronto. He is a founding member of the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals, a member of the Stewardship Council for the Cultural Landscape Foundation and current vice-president of ICOMOS Canada. Michael was the coordinating heritage architect for the Distillery District, has worked on numerous national historic sites and is the author of many heritage conservation district plans in Toronto.He is also the co-editor forConcrete Toronto – a Guide to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties to the Seventies and The Ward – The Life and Loss of Toronto's First Immigrant Neighbourhood.
Michael (and I) would love your comments!
Imagine yourself a tourist taking in the historic sites of Old Montreal, treading its quaint narrow sidewalks and ancient cobblestoned passages. Now imagine yourself taking the same tour in a wheelchair, challenged by those very same sidewalks and cobblestones.
It is an unfortunate aspect of contemporary society that those who advocate for conservation of cultural heritage and those who advocate for access for persons with disabilities often see themselves on opposite sides of a debate with competing priorities and values. Whose values take precedence? Who should win out? Should the demands for access for all be ignored to satisfy the calls for heritage conservation, or vice versa?
Let’s consider how a much more nuanced conversation might occur.
We might start by recognizing that both heritage conservation and accessibility for persons with disabilities are not static disciplines, but have developed in a contingent manner over the last century or two.1 With each generation the definitions of exactly what heritage and accessibility mean have shifted significantly.
In the early nineteenth century the heritage conservation movement was concerned for protecting only our most ancient monuments, statues, ruins of forts, and other national and militaristic sites. The movement continued slowly over time to expand its focus to include, not only ruins, but touristic replicas like Louisburg and whole villages like Niagara-on-the-Lake. The idea spread to the point that a complete village or town centre or main street could be “conserved,” and essentially what was good for the tourist visiting historic sites was also good for the resident who lived there. Heritage conservation had become associated with good city-building and an enhancement of the quality of life for all.
Ideas about what constitutes heritage continued to expand with the founding of various advocacy societies dedicated to particular sub-sets of patrimonial interest, such as the Georgian Society in the 1930s, the Victorian Society in the 1950s, and more recently docomomo (the documentation and conservation of modern movement buildings) in 1990. Currently, billboards, commercial retail buildings, and recent industrial infrastructure have all attracted their aficionados. This growth has become exponential — to the point where clearly almost anything could now have heritage value to someone. Gustavo Araoz, president of ICOMOS, has called this impact on heritage conservation a paradigm shiftfor those dealing with conservation management.2 If everything has potential heritage value, what are our fundamental goals for heritage — what do we conserve and why are we doing it?
Currently in Canada two important rights movements, Black Lives Matter and Truth and Reconciliation, are advocating to further recalibrate how we see our history and how we may look at and interpret heritage conservation in the future. It might be fine to say that everything has potential heritage value, but there is a need to address the specific heritage of under-recognized and racialized communities.
A similar, evolving trajectory can be seen in the advocacy movement related to access for persons with disabilities. Much of the early discussion around accessibility related to rehabilitation of veterans after the First and Second World Wars. Initially these efforts were limited to getting former soldiers back into the work force as highly valued and respected citizens, as national heroes. As this effort continued, research began to suggest that a much larger segment of the population could also benefit from the physical improvements initially considered for veterans. For example, a ramp for the mobility-impaired could replace stairs at the main entry to a building.
The model of Universal Design, as developed by architect Ronald Mace, greatly changed the terrain of access for persons with disabilities, with a greater focus on design available for all, universally, and with much less emphasis on specific disabilities. This Universal Design concept has been very much welcomed by architects and designers to assist in our thinking about accessibility. The standard seven principles of Universal Design3 can indeed be universal, creating an excellent set of axioms for designers. These include equitable use, flexibility in use, and simple and intuitive use, all rather common-sense ideas to most designers.
Universal Design has been laudably successful; but in providing for all it has dwelled less on what it means to be disabled in Canadian society. Approximately 24% of the Canadian population currently identify as having a mobility, vision or hearing disability or challenge.4 And as our understanding of disabilities grows, it is likely that this percentage will also grow.
Like discussions around contemporary queer culture, what had previously been seen as a socially negative condition has been turned around to be presented as a condition of pride and self-identification, to be respected as one more characteristic of being human. In contemporary culture, within the context of diversity and inclusion, a disability can be seen as an important part of someone’s self. It might be accommodated by Universal Design or it might not, but that doesn’t erase its unique and special nature.
So in comparing the advocacies for heritage conservation and accessibility for persons with disabilities we see that both interest groups are shifting focus to engage and encompass larger constituencies within the population. What constitutes heritage and what constitutes a disability are now both highly relevant questions in Canadian culture.
Let’s explore this further.
In seminal Canada-wide documents on heritage policies and practices, like Parks Canada’s Standards and Guidelines for the Conservation of Historic Places in Canada (S&Gs), there are plenty of references to conservation and how one defines specific heritage value or values. The S&Gs set up an approach that acknowledges the complexity of heritage conservation and is more than a strict rulebook. The S&Gs recommend researching and fully understanding the values of the place with an engaged community before considering options for intervention. This is essential in recognizing heritage values because they “can be differently assigned by different groups and may even change over time.”
Interestingly, for all its strengths and its willingness to recognize that heritage values may not be as fixed as we might have thought, there is still no specific reference to persons with disabilities and their accessibility needs in the S&Gs document.
In Bill C-23, the proposed new Historic Places in Canada Act now before Parliament, again there are abundant references to the need to conserve heritage. In introducing the Act, Parks Canada stated the intent was “to present our shared history in ways that are inclusive and meaningful to all Canadians, including Indigenous peoples, youth and members of diverse groups across the country.”5 But it is unclear how a resource can be ”meaningful to all Canadians” if it remains inaccessible to persons with disabilities. There is no clear recognition of persons with disabilities within Bill C-23.
Similarly, Canadian policy documents regarding accessibility are silent on the specific requirements for historic places. In the Accessible Canada Act there is the requirement “that accessibility standards and regulations must be made with the goal of achieving the highest level of accessibility,” but it is unclear what the criteria would be for this “highest level” and whether accessibility within historic places might be one of the yardsticks for evaluation or assessment. Of course, Universal Access requirements need to be applied to all new buildings, but what about heritage structures and places dating from long before this question of accessibility arose?
Because our constitutional framework assigns building codes and planning matters to provincial law, it is good to look at examples of how provincial regulations address this issue of evaluation or assessment.
In Ontario the Provincial Policy Statement 2020 (PPS) provides guidance and direction on how matters of provincial and public interest are addressed in the land-use planning process. On heritage the PPS is very clear. As a provincial priority, “significant built heritage resources and significant cultural heritage resources shall be conserved.” This “shall” is a very clear directive, but there is a proviso.
The PPS states that it must be understood as more than a set of individual policies. The decision-maker should “consider all of the relevant polices to understand how they work together.” In application this has meant that the heritage objective of conserving resources has not trumped other major provincial policy objectives, like housing, nor equally should they trump heritage. In tribunal cases it has become clear that all of these significant policies are to be evaluated, considered and understood as working together when applied in the particular situation.
In the best sense this working together would be seen, not as balancing or compromising between competing priorities, but as reconciling different important public interests. Cooperation rather than conflict.
Many municipalities in Ontario require their land-use planning applications to include a Heritage Impact Assessment and it becomes the role of the municipal planner, in the first instance, to address this question of how the PPS policies are working together. What is the heritage importance of the place and what level of intervention can be undertaken and why is that intervention required? This is what is implied in understanding how different policies work together. There are still limitations with this assessment in that certain aspects of heritage places, such as legacy businesses and important cultural venues, are not within the purview of the Ontario Heritage Act, nor are contemporary considerations like embodied energy or potential climate change impacts. And questions of accessibility for persons with disabilities to heritage places still do not appear on most municipality’s check lists for what should be considered in a Heritage Impact Assessment.
But this establishment of a relatively rigorous evaluation and consideration process for cultural heritage is a step further than what currently exists regarding determinations of specific accessibility needs and accommodations for persons with disabilities. The Ontario Human Rights Commission states, “defining disability is a complex, evolving matter”6 and presumably so is how a disability should be considered and addressed. This is similar language to heritage policies such as the S&Gs where there is an acknowledgement that definitions of heritage and conservation are evolving and may change over time.
At a recent conference the Rick Hansen Foundation pointed out that 78% of Canadians believe that there should be a national standard for accessibility and 92% of Canadians feel that taxpayer-funded projects should be held to the highest accessibility standards.7 The implementation of this much-needed policy will necessitate that it too works together with other important public policies.
Like a Heritage Impact Assessment but for accessibility, we would need to understand, in a given situation, what disability is being accommodated, what the relevant disability standards are, and what is being impacted and how. With new construction the principles of Universal Design are a bit of a no-brainer. But the Universal Design principles were not planned to address existing structures, nor heritage places.
The Angus Reid study conducted for the Rick Hansen Foundation does not talk about the specific conditions of heritage places. Should a historic lighthouse in the Maritimes not be eligible for public funding because it remains a lighthouse with a lot of stairs? Or consider a historic place like the Tenement Museum in New York, which attempts to tell the story of early immigrant history in a poor tenement building with cramped quarters, narrow hallways and poor lighting. Or simply consider a worn stone threshold of an entryway in Toronto’s Distillery District. What would the “highest accessibility standards” require in their rehabilitation? With each example we need to fully evaluate the level of accommodation that can be provided while reconciling any other significant public policies.
What does access and accommodation imply in these cases? Consider what significant Canadian heritage sites, or parts of them, have little or no access for anyone.
Taking a step back: Both the heritage and access for persons with disabilities movements can be seen as advocating for human rights on both an international and a local level. In Europe, the European Union adopted the Faro Convention (the Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society) in 2005.8 The convention claims the rights of all citizens to participate in their cultural heritage. In the United States accessibility is very clearly stated as a civil right where the law prohibits discrimination based on disability.9 These sentiments are echoed in our federal documents.
There can be no cultural heritage without conservation. There can be no participation without access.
The rights to conserve heritage and the rights for accessibility for persons with disabilities are not competing rights, but are founded on fundamentally shared democratic values. They are not in opposition but have great potential to work cooperatively to build a more inclusive Canadian environment.
To reconcile these two advocacy movements, it will be necessary to implement more careful policies and develop precise methods for communicating how evaluations are undertaken. What is required of each, what does excellence mean and how can we see ourselves working together?
Notes
Note 1: The word contingent here comes from Aimi Hamraie’s book on accessibility, Building Access, Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Meaning unplanned or accidental in a philosophical context, the term can be traced back to Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Note 2: This paradigm shift is described in numerous speeches and articles by Araoz. See for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-KJVOX3agM.
Note 3: For a full discussion on Universal Design see Aimi Hamraie’s book on accessibility, Building Access, Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press 2017).
Note 4: See https://www.rickhansen.com/sites/default/files/downloads/ari-research-jan-2019eng-final-accessible_1.pdf.
Note 6: See https://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/policy-ableism-and-discrimination-based-disability/2-what-disability.
Note 7: See https://twitter.com/RickHansenFdn/status/1435994749542957057.
Note 8: See https://historicengland.org.uk/content/docs/research/faro-convention-pdf/.
Note 9: See https://adata.org/learn-about-ada.