| Downsview Park, located in Toronto, Ontario is a 572 acre site, deliberately set aside by the federal government with the intention that it be shaped into Canada's first urban park on a national scale. This vast site has had many identities over time. It has been a portion of the territory of various Aboriginal groups; a place of European settlement and agriculture; a place of industry and aviation; a site of military activities; and prior to any human influence, a place formed by the processes and activities of nature. As such, Downsview Park encompasses a complex contemporary physical landscape upon which one finds many indicators of its past identities.;This in-depth exploration of the Park's natural, Aboriginal, settler, and industrial and aviation heritage reveals that the place that is now Downsview Park possesses a rich heritage comprised of its multiple identities over time, and that these past identities have an important role to play in the site's ideal future as a park of national significance. Whether these identities will ultimately do so, relies on a complex intersection of politics, economics, development, and imagination, all of which play out upon the Downsview Park site, thus revealing that a place's heritage is as much about its present and future, as its past.;Keywords: Aboriginal, aviation, built heritage, cultural heritage, Downsview Park, heritage, industrial heritage, landscape, natural heritage Parc Downsview Park, place biography, settler heritage, sustainability, urban park.;Influenced by temporal and spatial concepts of heritage, and closely related theories of landscape and place rooted in the discipline of geography, this thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of what constitutes Downsview Park's heritage and how this heritage is relevant to future initiatives in park development. Drawing on a combination of methodological approaches it is structured such that it takes the form of four in-depth thematic heritage investigations which in turn produce four conceptual heritage landscapes for the reader to explore. To produce each heritage landscape in a manner most appropriate to its given theme, a combination of methodological techniques are utilized including: library and archival research; primary analysis of heritage-related policies at all levels of government; personal correspondence with key government and Park officials; the building of relationships with interested individuals, local historical societies, and heritage-related organizations; and, in certain cases, semi-structured interviews with key informants. |
