Cultural Planning 101: Reshaping communities one ‘step’ at a time

Ever want to learn about how we help reshape culture across municipalities? Here’s all you need to know about cultural planning.

By Jessica Mazze

Documentation Credit: Memory Mapping, Mapping Culture in Oakville by Tone Bailey

This feature is part of Fieldnotes, a public art blog series by STEPS that promotes inclusive and innovative public art through interviews, storytelling, case studies, and knowledge sharing.

At STEPS, our services cover a broad portfolio within the public art sphere. While we support artists in developing art installations and mural projects nationally, these services go hand in hand with our cultural planning portfolio.

In this Fieldnotes blog, we sat down with Sam (Sophie) Mitjavile, our Cultural Planning Manager at STEPS, along with several cultural planning associates whom STEPS has partnered with recently in updating the cultural plan of the Town of Midland and the Town of Oakville. 

Cultural planners have their own unique perspective and methodology when partnering with a municipality, and research methods are changing to accommodate emerging needs across Canadian towns and cities.

“I understand cultural planning to be the process that involves looking at what cultural assets and resources exist in a specific place,” Sam Mitjavile, STEPS Cultural Planning Manager, says. 

“By looking at how the resources are managed, which involves what the municipality and what other actors are doing, [we provide] a strategy that better helps manage resources and achieve a vision.”

Mitjavile has worked with several communities such as the Township of Wilmot and, most recently, is supporting the Town of Oakville with updating its own cultural plan, helping the municipality revise and reshape the town’s culture for 2027 to 2031.  

Step by Step: The research behind the plan

Documentation Credit: Memory Mapping, Mapping Culture in Oakville by Tone Bailey

While there are many ‘steps’ involved in the cultural planning process, there are several considerations a municipality must first make. Effective community consultation requires broad representation of the community. By focusing on a wide scope, cultural planners can garner diverse answers to establish pressing needs, especially with emerging research revealing how municipalities are including equity-deserving groups in their processes.

“A lot of the work is research-driven,” explains Parm Johal, an arts and culture strategist based in Vancouver. “Developing a plan can really help municipal governments intentionally invest in arts and culture, and to invest in arts and culture that’s rooted in community priorities, there’s a methodology behind it.”

Johal is a cultural planning affiliate with STEPS, with 20 years of experience under her belt as a worker within arts and culture; 12 of those years include working directly with municipalities like Burnaby, Port Coquitlam, and various cultural organizations across British Columbia. 

Part of Johal’s work includes researching and even interviewing comparable municipalities to understand their approach to culture before beginning the consultation process. The Town of Oakville is her first collaboration with STEPS, with Johal assisting in the engagement process. 

“We’ve done a few one-on-one interviews [and] some community working group facilitations as well,” says Johal about the Oakville cultural plan. “It’s important to ensure that we’re also working with the staff within the municipality as well to understand the needs from an operational side as well.”

While working with staff can help determine needs of the municipality, it is equally important to gain the perspective of small businesses, tourism organizations, as well as visitors coming to a municipality. 

“Something that is really essential is talking to different Indigenous stakeholders and getting a sense of how they are currently engaged in the culture or not,” Mitjavile says. “How their culture is recognized and presented is really important to us. It’s important to engage with equity-deserving groups.” 

For the town of Oakville, which has undergone not one, but two cultural plans previously, the goal for the municipality is to address gaps in their previous plans. 

“One of the things that is highlighted within that [second] plan was the creation of a public arts strategy,” says Carly Anderson, Senior Manager of Recreation and Culture within the Town of Oakville. “Focusing on our policies and funding mechanisms of support for public art in the community.”

According to Anderson, within the town’s first cultural plan, there was a greater emphasis on built infrastructure, such as the opening of Queen Elizabeth Park Cultural Centre. The second cultural plan, from 2016 to 2021, focused on animation and filling in spaces with partnership in collaboration, a gap that the town wants to address further in this new cultural plan. 

“Working with STEPS has been really great so far,” says Anderson. “It feels a bit more grassroots, really connected to community engagement, and [STEPS] has been really nimble in an iterative process about building out our community engagement framework.”

Some of these processes include attending town events and “meeting people where they are at.” One of these initiatives includes a visual voting poll at the Emancipation Day picnic, an event hosted by the Canadian-Caribbean Association of Halton. 

“It was really neat to see people engaged with that,” says Anderson when recalling the voting process. The tactile nature of the process and ability to see feedback in real time allowed the participants to “feel seen” in that process.

Photo Credit: Canada Day Community Event by Sabrina Chu

From Kerr Fest, to Art in the Park, the cultural planning process has allowed Anderson and the municipality to rethink the way attendees seek out events and ensure that everyone is able to give their feedback towards the new cultural plan. For those who cannot attend events, there is a community survey seeking out insights from the community. 

This research process is intensive as it is wide-reaching. At STEPS, we have facilitated several research residencies for mid-career artists and cultural planners over the years. Their research has provided us with insights on the most pressing issues that impact equity-deserving groups across communities in Canada, and offers unique solutions and perspectives for cultural planners to consider.

Accessibility integration at the municipal level

Our Public Art Research Fellow, Justine Bochenek, has been investigating Canadian municipalities on their current processes in integrating accessibility.

Bochenek is a graduate from Toronto Metropolitan University with a master’s in urban planning. They were initially drawn to the profession through having a desire to help people, and first learned about STEPS through their coursework. Bochenek has developed a better understanding of the impact the built environment has on society.

“What I find really interesting about accessibility planning is that we can use urban design and planning to include groups of people,” Bochenek explains. “I like to think about how we can make sure that we make the places that we live interesting. In order to do that, we have to think about who is going to be in these spaces and how we’re going to include people.” 

Bochenek highlights the importance of diversity, and accessibility planning includes specific people to ensure that they have spaces that allow individuals to contribute to a more culturally vibrant city. In order to do that, accessibility needs to be included in the initial design process.

“Right now, we have a really huge gap in understanding how to make cities more accessible for people with disabilities,” says Bochenek. Bochenek explains that the top-down planning framework, which has existed for quite some time in urban planning, creates higher costs for municipalities than those who implement accessible frameworks from the get-go.

This is what has led Bochenek to focus their research on accessibility integration at the municipality, applying a concept known as accessibility aesthetics in their framework for research. In Access Aesthetics—Toward a Prefigurative Cultural Politics, scholars Mary Bunch, Julia Chan and Sean Lee define this concept as a political aesthetic that exists within a vibrant ‘crip arts movement’, which can create a new lens for cultural planners and municipalities to shift their framework and understanding.

“When we invite people with disabilities to the table, that already jogs people’s inner dialogue,” says Bochenek. “Unfortunately, because we’ve designed cities to not be inclusive, sometimes we don’t see people with disabilities out in the world. That creates a negative feedback loop.”

Bochenek is conducting a policy scan of municipalities, looking at different art policies and garnering an understanding of what municipalities consider “accessible.”

“I’m noticing that accessible is a word that means many things,” Bochenek explains. “The problem is that the use of the word public accessibility basically means ‘not private.’”

In other words, because something is broadly public, it is deemed automatically accessible, yet Bochenek goes on to explain that what might be considered for public use could also be considered a tripping hazard or overstimulating.

“A lot of documents are really specific about accessibility, saying that it needs to be viewable or physically available, but it hasn’t broken down how they are going to implement the public art piece.”

In order to remedy this, there should be greater emphasis placed on reading research about disability arts and accessible curation, which has been in conversation for decades. Bochenek has seen more of this methodology brought up by disabled artists and curators, taking applications formally used in museum studies and within art spaces, and understanding how they can be applied to urban planning and its processes.

Emily Sweeney, the Disability Arts Officer for the Canada Council of Arts, has written about this for the Canadian Museums Association. In her article Shifting Definitions of Access: Disability and emancipatory curatorship in Canada, Sweeney defines access aesthetics and how accessible curation can be broken down into three dimensions: physical, sensory, and intellectual.

The concept was first discussed in the late 1990s by academics. Sweeney writes: “Disability is complex; its embodiments, languages and perceptions are so tremendously diverse and require nuanced understandings of disability history, culture, and art, or at the very least multiple perspectives of lived experiences.”

By breaking down accessibility into these three realms, it helps individuals better understand how individuals can interact with content differently from a museum perspective, and can easily be applied to the cultural planning process. In fact, this is a concept Bunch and her colleagues touch upon in their research. According to Bunch and her colleagues, access aesthetics transforms such spaces by centring crip ways of sensing, perceiving, and knowing.

However, a fourth dimension of this field includes looking at who is on their staff representationally, and who is making the calls for accessibility too. Yet this ties into some of the core issues within cultural planning. Often, there is very little funding to ensure there is representation in planning services.

“Most municipalities in Ontario have an Accessibility Coordinator. But that can often just be like one person in the entire municipality rather than like a department,” says Bochenek.

Having one individual working within a municipality can lead to a small scope to understand accessibility, and not all municipalities have the resources or access to consultants.

Funding and decline in volunteerism are key issues

Johal notes that one of the key issues within cultural planning is a rising decline in volunteerism, and its impact on municipalities across the country. 

In fact, almost all municipalities can find themselves stretched for funding and smaller volunteer turnouts. 

“Rural, urban, and suburban communities each come with their different realities, which shape both the plan itself and how engagement is also approached as well,” Johal says. “You usually have to look at the scale and character of the community before making those recommendations.” 

Documentation Credit: Memory Mapping by Toney Bailey

Urban and suburban communities are experiencing a rapid demographic change, with growing populations filled with newcomers. According to Johal, there is a greater emphasis placed on character-building and retaining community members by forming a cultural identity.

“Sometimes people are wanting to go outside of the community,” says Johal. “They’ll go where there is cultural richness.” This is a theme that occurs in urban communities, where diversity allows for more choices and a solid creative economy that contributes to the municipality.

Smaller, remote communities may have their own defining feature of their culture, as observed in the planning process for Wilmot and Stratford. 

“One of the things that came up again and again was that agriculture was really important to the culture of this place,” explains Mitjavile. “Our engagement also responds to the local needs and challenges; it’s going to be really different depending on the size of the town and the history of cultural planning.” 

This is a common theme within rural communities. There is a lack of formal infrastructure and the existence of venue spaces for arts and placemaking initiatives, as well as fewer staff. Not to mention, transportation is a huge factor in audience turnout in rural communities compared to its counterparts. 

“[Rural communities] can rely more on volunteers and multi-space uses like community halls,” says Johal. “There’s usually a strong connection to landscape or tourism, or local history, and sometimes engagement, or just getting audiences, is through word of mouth.”

Yet this creates a system where communities are overly reliant on volunteer labour, leading to higher caps, which can often lead to burnout. 

“One of the ways to address this is to equip volunteers with more support, and concrete skills like event marketing can help,” says Mitjavile.

Mitjavile also highlights how urban areas are experiencing rapid growth, creating diversification at faster rates. This means that having stronger connections with Indigenous stakeholders is crucial, and that municipalities need to be tapped into how culture is not traditional arts; it’s broader than that and shifts depending on population growth.

“That’s the case with Oakville,” Mitjavile explains, where the current culture has shifted a lot in the last decade due to growth. 

These concerns should be at the top of mind during cultural planning. However, Johal and Mitjavile both agree that solutions to these growing problems will need creative solutions and fresh perspectives.

“When municipalities are really trying to make a case for arts and culture, data and measurement is a big part of it,” says Johal. So how is this going to be measured?

Johal suggests that there needs to be more data gathered on the impact of arts and culture, and gaining more qualitative answers from research rather than looking at the quantitative metrics.

“It’s not just the number of people you have in a theatre, right? It’s just sometimes looking at it in a different way” 

That is where STEPS has the unique positioning of functioning as a charity, with the experience of working in public art, allowing partners and artists to help municipalities rethink their outreach and public art strategy.

“Our perspective gives us a good understanding of the needs of different cultural stakeholders,” Mitjavile says. “We’re coming with that implementation knowledge, and we’re also coming as an organization that artists know.”

The familiarity artists have with STEPS allows important insights and unique perspectives to municipal cultural planning. Looking to get in touch with us? Book a call with us here. 

About the Writer

Jessica Mazze (she/her) is a Toronto-based writer completing her master’s at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology, community engagement and its influence on media systems. As the Cultural Content Writer for STEPS Public Art for the Summer of 2026, Jessica looks forward to connecting and sharing the work of artists across the city.