What is Cultural Planning?

In the simplest terms, Cultural Planning is decision making that doesn’t just acknowledge culture, but actively seeks to leverage it to make those decisions more effective and meaningful.

A slightly fuller way to think about it is this: every place already has a culture. That includes obvious things like music, food, festivals, and language, but also less visible elements such as shared values, local histories, everyday habits, who feels included, and who doesn’t (see diagram below). Cultural planning starts from the idea that these elements aren’t just “nice extras.” They shape how people experience a place, how connected they feel to it, and whether they see a future there.

So instead of planning a city, neighbourhood, or region purely in terms of economics, infrastructure, or land use, cultural planning asks:

• What stories define this place?

• Who gets to tell those stories?

• How can development reflect and strengthen them rather than erase them?

In that sense, culture becomes tangible and leveragable, not just something to preserve, but something to work with. A well-designed public space, a transit system, a housing policy, or even an economic development strategy can all be more successful if they align with how people actually live, identify, and connect.

Cultural planning also recognizes that “sense of place” isn’t abstract, it directly affects things like happiness, belonging, and social cohesion. When people see themselves reflected in their environment, they’re more likely to participate in community life, support local initiatives, and stay invested in the future of that place. When they don’t, disengagement and displacement often follow.

In 2026, culture often remains the least developed dimension in formal planning processes. Governments tend to prioritize what’s easiest to measure (economic growth, population density, infrastructure efficiency) while culture is treated as secondary or symbolic. Cultural planning pushes back against that by treating culture as a core form of infrastructure: something that requires intentional strategy, investment, and long-term thinking.

We believe that cultural planning is relevant everywhere. In small rural towns, it might mean preserving local traditions while creating new economic opportunities. While in large global cities, it might involve managing evolving diversity and plurality of identity, supporting creative industries, or ensuring that rapid development doesn’t erase the identities that made the city vibrant in the first place.

At its core, cultural planning is about aligning how a place develops with who its people are and who they want to become.

For more information and expanded definitions we recommend exploring Colin Mercer’s Cultural Planning Handbook (1995) and Greg Baeker’s Rediscovering the Wealth of Places (2010).