Cultural mapping is simply a tool to assist municipalities identify, record and make use of information on the many and diverse cultural assets in their communities.
In November 2010, Municipal Cultural Planning Inc. released Cultural Resource Mapping: A Guide for Municipalities produced by the Canadian Urban Institute with support from the Ministry of Tourism and Culture’s Creative Communities Prosperity Fund. The Guidelines are a rich source of insight about cultural mapping ideas, tools and leading practices. The Guidelines define cultural mapping as:
A systematic approach to identifying, recording and classifying a community’s cultural resources. It involves a process of collecting, analysing and synthesizing information in order to describe and visualize the cultural resources in terms of issues such as links to other civic resources (e.g. transportation, green infrastructure, public gathering spaces), patterns of usage, and unique character and identity of a given community.
There are two kinds of cultural resources that are the focus of cultural mapping. Together tangible and intangible cultural assets fuel cultural vitality and contribute to defining the unique cultural identity and sense of place of a community:
- Tangible Cultural Assets – identifying and recording physical (or tangible) cultural resources making use of Geographic Information System (GIS) tools and platforms;
- Intangible Cultural Assets – exploring and recording intangible cultural assets – the stories and traditions that contribute to defining a community’s unique identity and sense of place.
Cultural Resources Framework
The problem in communities is not a lack of information on culture but rather that information is collected in different agencies, in different ways and for different purposes. The first step is therefore the consolidation of existing data from multiple sources and coding that data accordingly, based on a consistent set of categories of cultural resources called the Cultural Resource Framework (CRF).
