Every year, Alberta Culture staff come together for an annual Fall Gathering. This year’s event, which took place in early October, was jam packed with unique information and workshops, designed to offer us practical help in our work. The event allows us as members of the Alberta Public Service to get to know other staff from across the Ministry of Culture and to learn more about what we all do each day for Albertans. It’s our goal that this directly translates into the work we do each day to help engage communities and people across the province.
This year, I joined Larry Pearson, Director of Historic Places Stewardship with the Historic Resources Management Branch, to offer a workshop on “Heritage Conservation and Sustainable Community Development.” We didn’t just want to show our colleagues what we do to protect historic places, we wanted to demonstrate how protecting these places contributes to the “triple bottom-line” of economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
Since reducing, reusing, and recycling has become integrated into the normal lifecycle of our consumer goods, why not apply that common-sense principle to our built environment as well? As urbanist Jane Jacobs used to say, “new ideas need old buildings.” The key message was that “the greenest building is the one that’s already built.”
So many people were interested in the presentation, that we thought it would be worth sharing here on RETROactive.
Click on the link below to open the presentation:
Fall Gathering – Heritage Conservation and Sustainable Community Development
Written by: Matthew Francis, Manager of Municipal Heritage Services
RETROactive 
This is a great news piece Matthew. Reminds me of the very wonderful fall conference where we heard the same themes.
I’ve been telling the story!
Jane Ross