Would you go to Brampton to see a performance or an art opening? Unless you already live there, you might think it’s too far to travel, but that may change.

There’s a passage in Robert Fulford’s excellent 1995 book Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto that I think of often as it puts current notions of where culture is — that is, where the exciting parts of the city are — into perspective. In it he recounts getting into a cab in downtown Toronto and going to the new location of the Olga Korper Gallery that had recently relocated from Spadina Ave., where art galleries had clustered, to Morrow Ave.

Morrow is a short, formerly industrial street off Dundas St. as it curves north to meet Roncesvalles Ave. Fulford’s description of how far off the beaten path the gallery was is amusing to read in 2018 when Toronto’s arts and culture scene has expanded far beyond Morrow, but it’s instructive to see how our perception of cultural geography changes over time. One day the entire GTA could be part of that geography.

With that in mind it’s notable that on June 27 the City of Brampton approved its first culture master plan. Mention culture and Brampton to people and the Rose Theatre might come to mind, the 10-year-old performing arts centre nestled in Brampton’s cosy downtown, just a few minutes walk from the GO train station.

While any big city needs a venue like the Rose, culture plans like Brampton’s go much further, taking a wide view of what makes and who contributes to culture, pulling in multicultural populations and “creative activities pursued both formally and informally” and “where boundaries between cultural activities and creative entrepreneurship are blurred.”

Big deal? A 2016 Statistics Canada study notes that Ontario’s arts, culture and heritage sector contributes $27.7 billion to the province’s GDP and 302,000 jobs. In the City of Toronto alone, a 2014 Toronto Arts Council report pegged arts and culture contributions to the city’s GDP at $11.3 billion, employing 174,000 Torontonians. It would be foolish for a city like Brampton, the ninth most populous in Canada, not to have a plan. Culture matters.

As big and incredibly diverse as Brampton is though, it’s both suffered and prospered in the GTA because of its proximity to the beast that is Toronto. A benevolent beast, but one that gets a lot of attention and has such a gravitational pull that it seems like other cities orbit around it. It’s a dynamic not unique to Toronto as smaller cites near bigger ones are often left in the shadow.

Of course Brampton has always had its own culture and history, and some Bramptonians have had a front-row seat, so to speak, of its evolution. A problem is there aren’t enough of those seats: a place like central Toronto has the venues and infrastructure needed to support a very public cultural life, from massive institutions to do-it-yourself spaces. As the core got more expensive and redeveloped, the places where culture was made and consumed spread farther out.

A culture master plan can help all of that, though Brampton’s place as a cultural centre has already been growing with independent efforts like the FOLD, a Festival of Literary Diversity that includes diverse groups of Canadian that haven’t been as represented as they should be in country’s literary landscape. It’s also changing the idea that a literary festival in the GTA must happen in downtown Toronto.

In May, the City of Brampton also released their “Brampton 2040 Vision,” an urban planning document that revealed a transformed city of the near-future with a green network connecting parks and ravines, exciting public spaces and arts hubs, and new town centres with skyscrapers as well as preserved neighbourhoods nearby. Along with the culture master plan, it represents a bold and exiting future for Brampton.

Twenty-one years after Fulford wrote Accidental City, Noreen Ahmed-Ullah wrote an essay called “Brampton, a.k.a. Browntown” in the anthology Subdivided: City Building in an age of Hyper-Diversity. In it she describes Brampton’s rich South Asian cultural diversity and how much she and the people she bumps into day-to-day love living there, but is dismayed that the city she moved to from the United States is sometimes referred negatively, even as a ghetto. She worries about the polarization among communities along racial, ethnic and socio-economic lines.

Culture can’t fix everything, but a part of Brampton’s culture plan is to foster social cohesion: to help people understand each other and create bonds. Food traditions are usually the first, and some times only, step many of us take, but there’s much more to experience.

As Brampton implements its plans it will be a place to watch closely because this hyper diverse city is the future of Canada.

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Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef

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