A Map of Toronto's Cultural Facilities - ERA Architects Inc.

1.0 Introduction
Cultural facilities are the tangible representation of Toronto’s level of support for serving the
cultural needs of its citizens. In downtown Toronto, cultural facilities have defined and reenergized
specific socio-economic districts like the Entertainment District along King Street or
the Gallery District along Spadina Avenue. Toronto’s theatres, galleries, museums, movie
houses and outdoor stages are magnets attracting residents and visitors alike to specific parts
of the City. Outside the downtown core, cultural facilities have played an equally important
role in defining communities and provide what Jane Jacobs describes as a “community heart”
– the modern equivalent of the town square.
The City’s Culture Division identified a need to capture geographic and quantitative information
on Toronto’s cultural facilities to better understand the City’s cultural infrastructure. ERA
Architects, working with Urban Intelligence and CUESTA Systems, developed, designed and
created a map that documents more than 750 cultural facilities.
What is a cultural facility? In formulating the methodology for this mapping the study team
realized that the term covered a wide spectrum of facilities with very different client group
expectations. In its broadest sense, as any place where cultural activities might occur, the term
becomes unquantifiable. For this mapping exercise, a cultural facility is identified as a venue
that is a building or designed landscape that fulfills a defined cultural role. The study team
broke down the term ‘cultural facility’ into four defined roles which support specific municipal
objectives and responsibilities related to culture:
Role 1 - support for cultural activity throughout all of the City’s diverse communities
Role 2 - support for the artists of the City
Role 3 - support for culture as part of the City’s Economic Development and
Tourism strategy
Role 4 - support for culture as a heritage resource
Various cultural facilities play one, two or more of these roles but they are quite distinct activities
with different players and different audiences. For a culturally vibrant City, Toronto must
ensure that each of these roles are balanced and that adequate cultural facilities, either Cityowned
or non-City owned, are available to fulfull each mandate.
Key observations the study team have made are firstly that cultural facilities in all four roles
are intricately linked with neighbourhoods, communities, and urban morphologies which
could be called cultural clusters or cultural corridors. Secondly, it is clear that non-City owned
cultural facilities thrive in culturally-friendly clusters, most often found in the downtown core.
Thirdly, the health of the City’s cultural infrastructure and the delivery of the City’s cultural
objectives rests strongly on partnerships with the non-City owned facility sector. Each cultural
facility is an integral part of a larger urban ecology.
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