Understanding Culture

This section provides a contextual understanding of culture and its benefits, offers the definition and dimensions of culture, and positions culture as an essential element to achieving sustainability in Canmore. For the purpose of this Plan, the following terms and definitions are used to inform our vision, recommendations, and actions.

The Meaning of Culture

“Culture means… being in relationship to land, language, community, and people.”

“Culture means… ways of being and ways of doing, how each community does it.”

“Culture means… love and how it comes out in how we teach our children and in stories, dance, and who we are.”

– Community Responses 2019

The Definition of Culture

Distinctive ideas, identities, and knowledge as expressed through artistic and cultural practices, traditions, language, stories, and the preservation of heritage.

The Dimensions of Culture

Culture in its broadest sense is about what matters to people and communities and what we value. For the purposes of this Plan, the three key dimensions of culture are:

• our sense of place, our values, our heritage, and our identity

• the material products of and the services in the creative processes

• our engagement with, and participation in, cultural and creative processes

The arts can be seen as the creative expression of our culture. Story and image, among many forms, serve a vital role in expressing and defining who we are, what we experience, and what we imagine for the future. Heritage is what we value about our cultural history and preserve and honour for future generations. Events and festivals are how we celebrate our culture, and the things we value about our lives and our community.

The Benefits of Culture

Global research into the benefits arising from investment in arts and cultural development show that this investment can generate considerable public benefit, described as public or cultural value. These measurable benefits include:

• Personal value: Contribution to personal enrichment, health, and wellbeing

• Cultural value: Contribution to culturally rich and vibrant communities

• Social value: Contribution to healthy, safe, inclusive communities

• Civic value: Contribution to civic image and democratic and engaged communities

• Environment: Contribution to sustainable built and natural environments

• Economic value: Contribution to economically prosperous communities

Cultural Leadership

Cultural leadership is the act of leading the cultural sector. Like culture itself, it derives from a variety of people and can be practiced in many different ways: senior managers and directors in cultural organizations and institutions; governments developing and implementing policies and programs for the cultural sector; and a huge range of creatives, producers, innovators, and entrepreneurs in small studios, companies, and collectives. Leading the cultural sector is practiced in two different ways. First, it means competently managing the organizations and the infrastructure of the cultural sector itself, ensuring financial viability as well as legal, staffing, and governance accountability. Second, it means leading culture itself – creative work, productions, and projects – bringing cultural products and services to the economy and broader community.

Cultural Vitality

Cultural vitality is evidence that a community makes a conscious, symbolic, and effective expression of its own values, meanings, and aspirations. We do this by developing our own cultural and creative capacities. The extent of arts and cultural presence and opportunities in a community, the level of support, the involvement and participation in those opportunities, and the benefits that flow from these in everyday life are evidence of cultural vitality.

Cultural Identity

Cultural Identity can apply to all cultural references through which individuals or groups define or express themselves and by which they wish to be recognized. When asked about Canmore’s culture, many identified as being part of “mountain culture”. Cultural identity does manifest itself in the distinct landscape of a place and it is important that the implementation of the Cultural Master Plan takes the unique physical characteristics (both natural and built) of Canmore into account when determining future cultural development. But Canmore’s cultural identity is a far wider, and deeper, concept than its outward appearance. The people living in Canmore also have other identities: family, gender, age, heritage, sporting club, drinking hole, community group, religion, birthplace, parents’ birth places, community and cultural association, customs, artistic tastes, fashion choice, and sexual preference.

The Canmore Cultural Master Plan must facilitate the celebration of all these identities, respect their existence, and use them to stimulate the vitality of the whole.