Events
September 18, 2025
The Future of Urban Cultural Planning: A Book Launch & Roundtable
This session explores how creativity and culture can become drivers of sustainable, inclusive, and forward-looking cities.
Date and time:Thursday, September 18 · 6pm EDT
Location: Toronto, RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD), Rosalie Sharp Pavilion
The city is a cultural construct.
Arts and culture are the connective tissue of urban life, fostering belonging and identity beyond bricks, streets, and infrastructure. Yet today, cities face mounting challenges in sustaining spaces for cultural production and participation. Culture gives places meaning, and planners must learn to recognize, support, and mobilize it as a force for inclusive and equitable urban development.
Is culture simply a “nice to have” in cities—or is it integral to how we plan them? What role does it play: building belonging, driving economic growth, or enhancing real estate values? Do the arts accelerate gentrification, or do they create new opportunities and jobs? And what exactly is creative placemaking? Do cities need cultural plans?
Featuring editors and contributors to the Routledge Handbook of Urban Cultural Planning —the most comprehensive international survey of the field in the past decade—this session will unpack the latest thinking on the intersection of culture, the arts, and heritage with urban development. It will also offer practical tools and policy approaches to embed culture in planning practice.