For Immediate Release

Dryden – April 14, 2011 The City of Dryden, like many other rural communities in Northwestern Ontario, face enormous challenges related to economic restructuring and diversification. Traditional dependency on forestry and its declining industrial base started the community of Dryden looking at new sources of wealth creation. Dryden has been a leader in Northern Ontario in recognizing opportunities offered by culture-led economic development as a powerful means of diversifying local economies and providing new sources of economic growth. Parallel to and in support of Dryden’s work on municipal cultural planning, and cognizant of wider culture-led economic development opportunities in the region, the Dryden Development Corporation (DDC) along with the City of Dryden Information Technology (IT) department, Municipal Cultural Planner and Patricia Area Community Endeavours (PACE) partnered to secure funding from Northern Communities Investment Readiness (NCIR) to undertake a Regional Cultural Mapping Project.
 
“Cultural mapping is defined as a systematic approach to identifying, recording and classifying a community’s cultural resources. It involves a process of collecting, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to describe and visualize the cultural resources in terms of issues such as links to other civic resources (e.g. transportation, green infrastructure, public gathering spaces), patterns of usage, and unique character and identity of a given community” stated Dr. Greg Baeker, project consultant and cultural guru. He went on to say that, “The Regional Cultural Mapping Project yielded a wider range of cultural resources than many in the community (as in most communities) might have anticipated”. In total 289 tangible cultural resources were identified and Geographic Information System (GIS) mapped in cooperation with the City’s IT department. These include areas such as Creative Cultural Industries, Spaces & Facilities, Festivals & Events, Cultural Heritage and Community Organizations & Occupations.

Cultural Resource Map

A general observation is that Dryden has few ‘anchor’ cultural attractions but rather its appeal and strength both from a quality of place standpoint for attracting and retaining the ‘creative class’ and residents, and from the standpoint of tourists, is the effective ‘bundling’ of a range of cultural resources, ideally based on stories or themes that provide a larger experience of the place and its history and culture. This need for effective theme-based packaging of tourism products and experiences is not a new conclusion for tourism promotion and development in Dryden and other northern destinations. But it is one that is reinforced by the findings from the Regional Cultural Mapping Project.

The longer-term vision is a GIS-based mobile application that will serve as an investment attraction tool for the Kenora District, to be used to evaluate site location attributes and demographics analysis and present the information to potential investors in the format of an interactive and accessible branded web site. The cultural mapping project final report can be found at: www.ExploreDryden.ca under Target Sectors, Tourism Investment. 

For More Information Contact:

Vicki Kurz, Economic Development Manager, DDC
(807) 223-4100
vkurz@dryden.ca