Block 1: Refiguring the Post-Industrial Ruin or Bridging Natural and Cultural Heritage in the Haldimand Tract

Abstract

In an ever expanding and quickening world, heritage has become a vestige of authenticity, identity, and placemaking. In a settler colonial country its ties to ideas of inheritance, birthright, and patrimony, complicate these narratives of identity and belonging. Today heritage has its economic, environmental, and cultural utilities: supporting regional economic shifts to tourism and development, protecting natural areas, and fostering multi-cultural exchanges of values, traditions, artifacts, and customs.

In this work, I offer my own contribution to the growing chorus of heritage theorists, critics, and designers, while critically reflecting on my own personal connection to place. Born at the southern end of the study region in the small town of Paris, and currently attending the University of Waterloo School of Architecture approaching the northern periphery of Block 1, this archival research and fi eld exploration has uncovered a history that unsettles well founded beliefs of belonging and stirs me to pursue a meaningful path to reconciliation through heritage.

These questions began with a recreational exploration of formal and informal trail systems along the Rivers. Many of which are familiar childhood friends. In these valleys were all the familiar trees, reptiles, birds, flowers, but also: a city’s informal dumping grounds, a series of hand carved stone column capitals, washing machines, and the ruins of industry. As I walked these trails I would contemplate these artifacts, and the River. The Grand and its tributaries – the Nith, Connestogo, Eramosa, and Speed Rivers – have all been designated in the Canadian Heritage River system.

This book begins and ends with the River, flowing from questions of obsolescence, positive, and negative inheritances, to imagined futures through the lens of heritage. Concerned with what and how we bring values, artifacts, and narratives into the future, it finds recourse in the past. Engaging with three hydrological industrial heritage sites on, in, and along the Grand River, I propose three interventions which engage with lessons from the text’s meditation on heritage and place.

The representation of these interventions is primarily through models built from artifacts collected from the banks of the River, endowed with qualities of both natural and cultural heritage – making and dumping, holding and weathering respectively – that aim to represent the way forward for heritage in the Grand River Watershed. A management of ‘Natural’ and ‘Cultural’ heritage as interconnected.