What is Aurora’s “current state of culture”? Revised plan aims to pin that down

September 30, 2021 · 0 Comments

Throughout the summer, Town Park has been a cultural hub for the community.

From the Town’s Multicultural Festival earlier this month to programs offered by the Aurora Cultural Centre, the Aurora Public Library, the Aurora Museum & Archives and the Aurora Black Community, there has been no shortage of cultural activities for residents to enjoy.

But how does the community of today define culture? That is a deceptively complex question the Town hopes to answer through the drafting of a new Cultural Master Plan.

The Cultural Master Plan was first developed for the Town in 2014. Drafted with a five-year window, it is up for review once again through a process led by Phil Rose, Project Manager for Town Square.

Taking on the job at the beginning of 2020, Rose, along with an assembled Collaborative Leadership Team, their efforts were only temporarily hampered by the arrival of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic they have been meeting virtually, with in-person elements like community engagement resurrected this summer all designed to help answer the cultural question.

“We’re working on a model where we’re defining what we call the ‘current state of culture in Aurora’ and we’re trying to determine this based on census records, StatsCan data, on anecdotal information from the group on how would we define Aurora from a cultural perspective currently in terms of how we support it, the strength of it, and how vibrant we think the cultural community is,” says Rose. “Once we’ve mapped out the current state of culture, the next step, which will begin this month, will be saying, ‘this is where we currently are and where do we want to be?’”

From there, the next step will be how do we get from where we are today to where do we want to be in the future.

From the feedback they have received so far, Rose says culture can mean many things to different people. For some, it can centre on traditions and values. For others, the performing arts. The public engagement process has given the team a good idea on who residents consider to be “culture providers” but the “values the community shares and the traditions we hold dear” might be a bit trickier to pin down – but maybe not, with a helping hand from the public.

“One of the things that is in the works now is we want to put together what we call a Cultural Forum,” says Mr. Rose, noting this forum will bring together people from the cultural sector, the business community, sports groups, and even people with backgrounds in promotion to weigh in. “Depending on where we are in COVID and capacity, this is an opportunity to get those individuals together [for] a conversation about where they see the current state of culture. What are the main challenges? What would you like culture to look like in Aurora in the near future?”

Culture has not been immune to the pandemic. Nor has culture been immune from political shifts and efforts to address social injustice. Both factors have shaped culture and also opened up new avenues that might not have been previously considered by the Town’s Cultural Partners.

A new Cultural Master Plan, says Mr. Rose, could consider culture’s role within our changing world.

“The Cultural Sector has probably been one of the most hard-hit due to COVID and culture relies on people being in the same space, experiencing live music [and] the degrees of separation to really experience it has to be small. We have had lots of conversation about how do we move so many different businesses and organizations to a virtual space [and] COVID has definitely informed how culture has been experienced in the last little bit.

“Just by nature and the demographics of Aurora, the individuals who are on our Collaborative Leadership Team are a homogenous group for the most part: white, middle class. We have a cross-section of men and women but there isn’t a lot of diversity there. How can we do better on that perspective? Culture has the ability to speak to some pressing issues around equity, diversity, discrimination, racism – even housing is a huge issue in Aurora and across York Region of the GTA. Even if you think of performing arts or visual arts, culture is much broader than that. It has the opportunity to raise awareness of some of these larger issues. That is where we want to go and I think the Cultural Master Plan will talk about how we can be more direct.

“Culture works best when you have a buy-in from a lot of different groups and individuals and I think that is what we have been aiming for. We’re going to steer the ship as much as we can, but we want our culture groups and the public to know they have a lot of influence on the process as well.”

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter