Overview
Vanier is a neighbourhood rich in heritage, culture and creativity. It’s also at a key moment in its history, with an opportunity to coordinate and strengthen cultural revitalization efforts under the Vanier Culture in Action banner. Expected in mid-2024, the Vanier Culture in Acton Plan follows five years of collaboration between the City of Ottawa and residents of Vanier on how best to culturally revitalize the neighbourhood. It’s rooted in Vanier’s many cultural strengths without ignoring its challenges.
Vanier Culture in Action is an opportunity to formalize ongoing collaboration between the City of Ottawa and the Vanier community to support the neighbourhood’s cultural development and revitalization. In doing so Vanier will help provide a model for future neighbourhood-level cultural planning. Crucially, any revitalization must benefit all who call Vanier home – those from all walks of life who live, work, play and are culturally connected to the neighbourhood.
Engagement
To develop Vanier Culture in Action, partners employed a variety of community engagement tools, including focus groups, online sessions, Citizen Forums and Community Steering Committees.
In following a community-led approach, residents and organizations were empowered to explore and identify gaps and opportunities for cultural revitalization. This allowed for the Vanier Culture in Action Plan to benefit from the shared knowledge and experiences of those directly involved in cultural work, programming, and social services in the neighborhood. It fosters ownership of the strategy and action plan. It also brings together a group of community cultural champions as diverse as the neighborhood it represents.
Goals
1. Oversee initiatives that help organize Vanier’s cultural life
2. Enhance cultural life on traditional main streets
3. Enhance cultural life in public spaces and plazas
4. Celebrate diversity and welcome newcomers through cultural programming and initiatives
5. Revitalize Vanier’s image as a thriving cultural hub
6. Acknowledge and collaborate with Indigenous residents and Indigenous cultural organizations in Vanier
7. Include cultural aspects and requirements into a Vanier Secondary Plan that is consistent with the Montreal Road Secondary Plan
8. Revitalize Richelieu-Vanier Community Centre by offering and encouraging more cultural and artistic programming
9. Promote Muséoparc Vanier as a tourist destination
Impact
The Draft Strategy for the Revitalization of the Cultural Life of Vanier Residents identifies several potential impacts of this kind of cultural revitalization work, grounded in extensive research on what has worked in neighbourhoods facing challenges on a similar scale to those found in Vanier including SoHo (New York, US), Saint-Roch (Quebec, Canada), M-50 Arts District (Shanghai, China) and Arts District (Los Angeles, US).
That community-led cultural development has a direct, positive impact on neighbourhood life across cities, countries and cultures provides hope that this can be successful in an Ottawa context.
The impacts of community-led cultural revitalization identified include:
- Strengthened community, social and cultural life
- Improved self-reported resident wellbeing, sense of belonging and overall quality of life
- Increased inter-cultural dialogue and reduction in identity-based discrimination
- Enhanced neighbourhood reputation and sense of local pride
- Economic development through attraction and retention of businesses and residents, job creation and talent development
- Dismantling of organizational silos that serve as barriers to collaboration and collective impact
Contact
To learn more about Vanier Culture in Action please email Cultural Developer Thomas Radford at thomas.radford@ottawa.ca
Project Update
Reference documents
Mapping Vanier, a cultural perspective on its demographics
Mapping Vanier in 2019
A Cultural Perspective to Its Demographics
With these 13 maps, we want to show, in the Vanier district of the city of Ottawa, the density variations of each of this neighbourhood’s 13 demographic characteristics. The maps represent the Vanier district and its immediate surroundings, the limits of which are: to the west, the Rideau River, to the north, Beachwood Road, to the east, Saint-Laurent Boulevard and to the south, Highway 417. We also divided the neighborhood into several zones. For example, this division of the neighborhood allows us to present the areas of the neighborhood where more Francophones live. Each zone of each map is covered by a more or less dark variation of a colour. The portions of the neighborhood showing a dark variation of this color signify a greater density of residents whose demographic characteristics are indicated at the bottom left of the map. At the top left, we show the same color or density variations, but this time for all of central Ottawa. Environics has provided us with the data used for these maps created by Jing Feng.
