ACO TORONTO 2024 SYMPOSIUM ON INTANGIBLE HERITAGE

Every year, the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario’s Toronto Branch hosts a symposium exploring current heritage ideas. Past themes have included Housing and Heritage, Main Streets, Modernist Schools, and Demolition. This year’s symposium will examine the phenomenon of Intangible Heritage or heritage that is distinct from built form.

Intangible Heritage can relate to traditions, activities, commerce, communities, identities, and storytelling. There’s a sense in which all heritage has intangible elements. While it certainly has relationships with physical spaces, what makes Intangible Heritage different from built heritage is that its significance lies outside traditional evaluations of architectural merit. It is use, not aesthetics, that defines Intangible Heritage.

Or is it? The narratives of Intangible Heritage are complex, intersectional, and in motion. Looking more closely at its presence across Toronto—from Kensington Market to Little Jamaica to Suburban Banquet Halls—this year’s symposium will highlight some of the things the term Intangible Heritage can and should mean and why.

SCHEDULE:

Doors - 12:30pm

Introductory remarks - 1pm

Panel 1 - 1:30pm-3:15pm

Interval - 3:15pm-3:30pm

Panel 2 - 3:30pm-5:15pm

Reception with light food and cash bar - 5:15pm-7:15pm (spilling out into the garden if good weather prevails!)

SPEAKERS:

Panel 1 (1:30pm-3:15pm)

Lisa Prosper - Cultural Landscapes and Indigenous Heritage

Lisa Prosper is a cultural heritage consultant whose work includes projects related to the identification, commemoration, and conservation of cultural landscapes and other forms of place-based heritage with First Nations communities, all levels of government, the private sector, and heritage organizations, including UNESCO, ICOMOS, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, and the Canada Council. She currently chairs the Indigenous Cultural Heritage Advisory Council at Parks Canada. Lisa is a member of the Acadia First Nation and lives in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Dane Williams - Black Urbanism

Dane Williams is vice chair and co-founder at Black Urbanism TO (BUTO), an organization that seeks to protect, preserve, and promote historically Black cultural ecosystems, businesses, and spaces in Toronto. Previously a member of the executive committee at the Kinsmen Club of Edmonton, Dane’s work engages with Black communities in re-envisioning their neighbourhoods to support social, economic, and cultural advancement.

Chiyi Tam - Chinatowns

Chiyi Tam is an urban planner, anti-displacement organizer, and managing director at Chinatown Cultural Land Trust. Previously the executive director of the Kensington Market Community Land Trust, Chiyi is currently a visiting expert with the School of Cities and serves on the advisory board of Montreal Chinatown’s JIA Foundation, BC’s Union Cooperative Initiative, and the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts. She leads a public course on community land trusts with the Estuary Institute.

Panel 2 (3:30pm-5:15pm)

Sneha Mandhan - Suburban Banquet Halls

Sneha Mandhan is an urban planner, urban designer, and architect whose work examines the relationship between physical spaces and cultural activity. A PhD candidate in the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography and Planning and a Connaught PhDs for Public Impact Fellow, Sneha’s research centres on Banquet Hall sites in Toronto’s suburbs and their cultural and intangible heritage significance for immigrant, newcomer, and diasporic communities. She recently produced and curated the crowd-sourced exhibit Banquets & Belonging: Diasporic Celebrations in the Greater Toronto Area at the Peel Region Art Gallery, Museum, and Archives.

Nicholas Jennings - Music Venues

Nicholas Jennings is a music historian, journalist, and author based in Toronto. He was the music critic at Maclean’s from 1980 to 2000 and has contributed to The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Billboard, Words & Music, TV Guide, Inside Entertainment, and Hello!. Nicholas’s books include Fifty Years of Music: The Story of EMI Music Canada, Lightfoot, and Before the Gold Rush: Flashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound, a history of the 1960s Yorkville era of Canadian music. He is currently co-curator of the Friar’s Music Museum, celebrating the rich musical legacy of Toronto’s Yonge Street.

Michael McClelland - The Church-Wellesley Village

Michael McClelland is an author, architect, and founding principal at ERA Architects whose work blends heritage conservation, cultural planning, and urban design. Michael has worked on heritage sites across Toronto and beyond, including The Distillery District, Evergreen Brickworks, The TD Centre, Mirvish Village, The Royal Ontario Museum, Union Station, and The Art Gallery of Ontario. His books include Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties to the Seventies and The Ward Uncovered: The Archaeology of Everyday Life.

MODERATORS:

Michael Otchie (Panel 1)

Michael Otchie is an architect at ERA Architects whose practice explores the hermeneutics of place, the translation of historic architectural styles in contemporary settings, and inclusionary approaches to heritage sites. Michael holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Liverpool, where his work explored filmmaking as a documentary tool to capture city narratives and the role of the body in challenging the constraints of urban space, including through the practice of parkour.

Stefan Novakovic (Panel 2)

Stefan Novakovic is a writer and senior editor at Azure Magazine. A former editor at UrbanToronto, Canadian Architect, Canadian Interiors, and Building, Stefan has written extensively on architecture, urbanism, design, and the ways in which they engender and are shaped by a diverse range of discourses. He has been a speaker at the Interior Design Show, the Architect@Work Conference, the Architecture and Design Film Festival, and more.

THE ARCHITECTURAL CONSERVANCY OF ONTARIO

For 91 years, the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario has protected, documented, and conserved culturally and historically significant sites throughout the province and created educational programming that makes that heritage more accessible. Through enterprises like TOBuilt, our public database of over 15,000 buildings, structures, and human-made heritage landscapes across Toronto, the ACO works to inform and stimulate discourses about built and intangible heritage and advocate for its recognition and stewardship. A registered charitable organization and one of Canada’s largest heritage nonprofits, the ACO operates 17 local branches across Ontario, including in Toronto.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Cecil Community Centre, 58 Cecil Street, Toronto, Canada