A Community Advocate Examines the Vital Links between: Land Use, Local Culture, and Cultural Conservation
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2013-12
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MA in Cultural Sustainability
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Collection may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. To obtain information or permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the Goucher Special Collections & Archives at 410-337-6347 or email archives@goucher.edu.
Abstract
Occupational traditions like commercial fishing and family farming require local landscapes and properties in order to continue to exist and evolve. Communities need to act to counter land development that has one goal – short term profit (“highest and best” land-use). To anchor local placed-based occupational traditions that provide social, cultural, and economic benefits to a community means finding ways to bypass that single outcome and dominant land development model. In Gig Harbor, Washington, “highest and best” land-use development has toppled traditional waterfront properties like a row of dominos, including commercial fishing family landscapes and marine fueling facilities, replacing them with recreational marinas, blacktop parking lots, and upscale residential uses. City planning goals calling for traditional use retention are unenforceable, and historic preservation projects preserve only the skeletons of living traditions. Traditional use advocates in Gig Harbor, beginning in 2002, began to alter the local waterfront land-use paradigm. “Land Use, Local Culture, and Cultural Conservation” details a portion of that story.