Cultural heritage landscapes, part one

Main Street, Warkworth, Ontario

Earlier this year I was asked to name some of the key changes, actions or themes affecting heritage conservation in Ontario over the last generation or so.

One I mentioned: cultural heritage landscapes. In one form or another they’ve been around a long time, but now seem to be all the rage. Both in concept and in application, CHLs are a still emerging phenomenon here and elsewhere, a development both exciting and challenging.

In this province the term “cultural heritage landscape” seems to have entered the official lexicon, from heritage charters and professional practice, sometime in the 1990s. At the time of the Ontario Heritage Policy Review (1987-1990), our first comprehensive review of the policy and legislative framework for heritage conservation here, the CHL term was not in wide usage. The review’s report, A Strategy for Conserving Ontario’s Heritage, does not use the term, although it does reference “historic landscapes” and “natural, scenic, and cultural landscapes.”^[1]
 

By the mid-1990s though, with the introduction by the province of broad policy statements to guide land-use planning, CHLs make their debut in the first provincial cultural heritage policies. The Provincial Policy Statement (1996, amended in 1997) said:

The 2005 amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act pointedly did not include “cultural heritage landscape” or indeed any term for particular types of cultural heritage property or resource (apart from “archaeological site” and “marine archaeological site”, where special provisions applied).^[3]

The same year the PPS was updated and included an expanded CHL definition:

Note that, unlike the 1996/97 original, this expanded definition is a hybrid. The original was an intensional definition — one that tries to capture the essence of a term. “A defined geographical area”, “modified by human activities” and “valued by a community” are the key aspects of that definition. The 2005 definition keeps the intensional part, adding to it with the language that a CHL “involves a grouping(s) of individual heritage features…” But it then goes on to give an extensional definition — one that lists the kinds of things the term covers. Hence the “Examples may include …” Note that heritage conservation districts designated under the OHA are first on the list and can be seen as an exemplar of a cultural heritage landscape.

CHLs are also referenced in the 2006 Ontario Heritage Tool Kit. The Tool Kit guide to heritage conservation districts has, not surprisingly, many references to cultural heritage landscapes. Interestingly though, the Took Kit guide to designating individual properties does not use the term, although there are two mentions of “cultural landscapes”, one of which is a cemetery. This would suggest that the ministry sees Part V (rather than Part IV) designation as the principal OHA vehicle for protecting CHLs, which tend to transcend the boundaries of a single site or property.

Heritage Resources in the Land Use Planning Process, the Tool Kit guide on the cultural heritage and archeology policies in the 2005 PPS, devotes five pages to CHLs. Citing guidelines adopted by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in 1992, the guide describes “three primary landscape types”: designed landscapes, evolved landscapes and associative landscapes. The guide examines the PPS definitions related to CHLs, talks about defining their boundaries, and identifies a number of heritage/planning tools for their conservation.

In this decade the Provincial Policy Statement, 2014, further refined the CHL definition: