Who are the Canadians doing this work?
The 19-person Canadian delegation brought together arts-space operators, land trust founders, community developers, municipal staff, and funders from Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal. Many came from small or volunteer-run organizations that could not have made the trip without travel support. 221A and the Cultural Land Trust were on stage throughout the summit, from 221A Board Chair Nathan Grandjambe’s keynote to panels with 221A Cultural Space Planner Miriam Berndt and 221A Executive Director Brian McBay.
Cover Photo: The Canadian delegation at KAAPELI, Helsinki, September 2026. Photo by Joni Helminen.
Relational infrastructure before physical
The clearest lesson was this: before a land trust buys its first building, it needs the relationships that make the building possible. Peers shared spreadsheets, pro formas and governance documents freely, a sharp contrast with the gatekeeping common in real estate. KAAPELI itself—a vast adaptive reuse run by a city-owned company that keeps rents within reach—showed what those relationships can build over time.
A movement still defining itself
There is no settled answer yet on what a creative land trust is. Chiyi Tam of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust framed it as a spectrum: at one end, the technocratic, focused on real estate, and at the other end, the transformative, a community-based movement.
The hard questions were scale, governance, and accountability. Reid Henry and Caitlin Jones challenged how a trust grows without losing touch with the artists it serves, and who it ultimately answers to. For 221A, governance is where the technocratic and the transformative meet: the harder work is deciding who gets a seat at the table, who makes the final call, and whose interests carry weight as a trust takes on more land and more risk.
Some voices at the summit justified exclusionary shortcuts in the name of speed, but shortcuts can recreate the very dispossession that contemporary land trusts aim to undo. Land-based work only serves communities if it moves at the pace of trust.
The Canadian context
Canadian delegates brought questions of governance, Indigenous land relations, and anti-displacement that international peers saw as among the most forward-thinking in the room. Colonization touches everything here, which makes Indigenous co-development a foundation of land trust development, not an add-on. For the past year, 221A Cultural Space Planner Miriam Berndt has worked on Indigenous reciprocity research, like financial reciprocity and self-determined space use, as we also continue to learn from peers, such as All Our Relations Land Trust and Temiskaming District Community Land Trust in Ontario and the DTES Community Land Trust in Vancouver. Meanwhile, depressed commercial real estate is opening acquisition windows that Canadian groups can’t yet move fast enough to use.
In Vancouver, City Council unanimously passed the motion “Keep the Artists in: Creating a Cultural Land Trust for Vancouver” on July 15, 2026, after eight years of research led by 221A. The Cultural Land Trust is rooted in Vancouver but built as a model that can be applied and adjusted to other communities.
Canada doesn’t lack practitioners doing this work. Our task now is to build relational infrastructure, so the physical infrastructure can follow. Thank you to Left Bank Co. Founder Michelle Tabet for initiating the Creative Land Trust, to the Creative Land Trust Summit team, and our Helsinki hosts.
Project Support
