Finding the Intangible: Contested Cityscapes, Inclusive Cultural Heritage Determinations, Balancing Stakeholder Interests… Is Urban Property Law Up to the Challenge?

While cultural heritage consists of far more than the tangible built merits of a heritage space, urban heritage determinations in cities and the legal protections that result tend to be heavily oriented towards the tangible. Even where intangible cultural heritage is recognized, these cases tend to favour relationally dominant iterations of what heritage can constitute in a city and whose heritage is deemed to matter. However, to effectively localize international guiding frameworks for sustainable urban (re)development and heritage management that center the equitable treatment of the cultural heritage(s) of a city and account for the notion of heritage “from below”—such as the UN International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning, the UN “Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape”, or UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda—an inclusive domestic legislative and policy response is required that balances pluralistic public and private interests in heritage spaces. Turning to Canada’s urban legal and heritage settings as a case study, this chapter explores tools offered by urban property law, such as heritage preservation easements and cultural land trusts, that may be useful in the practical localization of the goals expressed by these international frameworks while accounting for the complex landscape within which urban heritage claims, processes, and protections operate.