Property, waste, and the “unnecessary hardship” of land use planning in Winnipeg, Canada

ABSTRACT

Planning, in the context of the liberal democratic state, has long been concerned with the ordering and improvement of landed property toward a “highest and best use.” In this paper, I look to early 20^th century planning in Canada – specifically in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba – to interrogate questions of land use in relation to planning and property. I connect land use planning to property by looking at how ideologies of waste, deployed by planners at the national scale to evaluate people and land and motivate rationalistic land use control, touched down in 1930s Winnipeg. I scrutinize if and how Winnipeg officials acted upon waste within planning schemes of improvement. Ultimately, I show that powerful professional planning discourses around the implementation of scientific order and the avoidance of waste were taken up selectively by Winnipeg officials in the interests of maintaining a propertied landscape. Private property, in Winnipeg, trumped planning.

KEYWORDS:

• Land use
• planning
• property
• waste
• Winnipeg
• Canada

Acknowledgments

The labor that went into this article took place on Treaty 1 Territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Ininew. Oji-Cree, Dene, and Dakota, the Birthplace of the Métis Nation and the Heart of the Métis Nation Homeland (a.k.a. Winnipeg, Canada); and on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, Canada). The paper could not have been written without the expert guidance of archivists Martin Comeau and Jody Baltiessen at the City of Winnipeg Archives, and Rachel Mills at the Archives of the Province of Manitoba, all of whom showed immense generosity and patience with me as I tried to piece together some fragments of early 20^th century Winnipeg planning. Thanks to Dr. Annika Airas and others who were able to comment on early drafts of this paper, and much appreciation to the Place + Space Collective for ongoing friendship and solidarity. Thanks also to Nick Lombardo and the participants of the “Law and Land Use: Property, Planning and the Control of Urban Space” sessions at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, in New Orleans, LA for their thoughts, as well as those who took the time to comment on this paper at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Geographers in Winnipeg. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewers who helped me in working through the ideas in this paper. All of your insights are very much appreciated, and the paper is better for it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Many scholars of the progressive era have investigated waste in relation to the relentless drive for efficiency in early 20^th century urban governance, which was inspired by the introduction of Taylorist modes of production (see Haber, 1964; Hays, 1959). Very few, by contrast, have looked at the relationship between waste and the improvement of people and property, a lacuna that this paper seeks to fill.

2. By this I mean that control over land was concentrated primarily in the private hands of individual owners and property developers, free, for the most part, from municipal state interference.

3. What has appeared to some scholars of early 20^th century Winnipeg as “zoning” was actually a fragmented land use system of restrictive covenants, building codes, and health codes. Restrictive covenants, in particular, were used by developers to maintain exclusive neighborhoods. As a legal form, restrictive covenants are less comprehensive and more limited in their geographic reach than land use zoning, but more powerful in terms of exclusion (Artibise, 1975; Berger, 1964; Kramer & Mitchell, 2010; Toews, 2018).

4. This lack of land use planning and aversion to property control on the part of elites is particularly notable in relation to the momentous Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, during which working-class strikers railed against the logics of private property and sought to radically transform the liberal democratic capitalist foundations of the city (Kramer & Mitchell, 2010; Toews, 2018).

5. Zoning proceeded so slowly in fact, that by 1941 only 61% of the city had been placed under use restrictions (Avent, 1943).

6. This clause was eventually removed from the zoning by-law in 1934 (City of Winnipeg, 1934a).

7. Historic neighborhood characteristics drawn from Artibise (1975).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.