The National Capitol Commission defines cultural landscape as:
"a set of ideas and practices, embedded in a place."
Cultural Landscapes encompass the intangible and the tangible. The concept of cultural landscape pushes our preconceived concepts of heritage conservation beyond historical buildings, forcing us to explore the patterns and relationships that create our sense of place.
Poetry communicates the intangible and the tangible, by weaving images of the tangible to invoke intangible emotions between the author and the reader. In this way, poetry has the unique ability to create a shared sense of place.
High Park is a poetry hot spot |
To document associative cultural landscape requires diverse approaches and documentary styles. Cultural landscape researchers rely on literary works, landscape painting and cognitive maps to link a location to related stories and beliefs. Poetry Maps are a type of cognitive map. Researchers in environmental psychology, city planning, law enforcement, and tourism use cognitive maps to reveal human knowledge of sensory experiences.
Pairing poems with their referenced location reveals how our interactions with our city shape us.
The City is about storiesYours, mine, what we want to hearLook, Listen, Linger
The excerpts of poems, on The Toronto Poetry Map, are linked to where you can borrow the poetry book from the library.