“Laissez faire has had its day”: Land Use, Waste, and Propertied Improvement in Early Canadian Planning

ABSTRACT

Land use control has become a ubiquitous part of contemporary planning, but in early 20th century Canada such controls were under constant debate. I review these debates and interrogate planning-led anxieties around waste to show how planners used categories of waste to encourage land use control and to facilitate the improvement of people’s lives and property. I think through the frictions that emerged when such planning ideas, mobilized through professional networks, touched down in the cities of Vancouver and Winnipeg. Land use regimes warrant increased scholarly attention: early conversations have contemporary relevance, as their discursive logics are foundational to modern methods of land use control.

KEYWORDS:

• Land use
• property
• waste
• Canada
• Winnipeg
• Vancouver

Acknowledgments

This research took place on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (“Vancouver”), and the Treaty 1 lands of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, the homeland of the Métis Nation (“Winnipeg”). I am grateful for support and comments from Annika Airas, the Place + Space Collective, Nick Blomley, Nick Lombardo, Melora Koepke, Eugene McCann, Ted Rutland, Nicolas Kenny, and Kenton Card. Thanks also to 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, and at the 2017 and 2018 Annual Meetings of the Canadian Association of Geographers for helpful comments. The paper also benefitted greatly from feedback from the anonymous reviewers who provided incisive commentary and suggestions, and from the precise editing of Jill Grant, Heather Campbell, and Ellie Phillips.

Disclosure statement

I do not have any financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of this research.

Notes

1. Urban growth and development in Canada cannot be divorced from the logics of settler colonialism, nor can planning (Porter, 2010; Porter & Barry, 2016). However, planners of the day rarely make explicit reference to colonialism, even though the techniques they used are directly descended from those used to dispossess Indigenous peoples – indeed, Indigenous peoples are rendered invisible in planning texts. Instead, liberal democratic land use logics of the era (many of which remain today) seem to obfuscate or normalize settler colonial attempts to possess and settle land permanently, replace Indigenous populations, and facilitate opportunities for accumulation (see Hugill, 2017).

2. There are limits to interpreting these historical sources. While they provide important insights into the motivations of planners of the time, they are not objective accounts, rather they are shaped by the social and cultural norms of the period (Burgum, 2018).

3. The longest serving Prime Minister of Canada (over 21 years), Mackenzie King was dedicated to liberal corporate ideas around technocratic modernization (Courtney, 1976; King, 1918).

4. JTPIC 1927, 195.

5. Similar discursive logics were used by Montréal planners of the early 20th century (see Bérubé, 2015; McCann, 1996; Rioux, 2013).

6. Published less than a year after the TPIC’s extensive indictment of poor planning in Winnipeg, there can be little doubt here as to which city they are referring to.

Additional information

Funding

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

Notes on contributors

Trevor J. Wideman

Trevor J. Wideman is currently a PhD Candidate at Simon Fraser University investigating the links between urban planning and property, particularly the ways that planning acts to mediate the contentious politics of real property in land, and how unconventional conceptions of land use might arise to reallocate power in the city. His work attempts to advance a theoretical understanding of the links between land use, property, and planning.