Fri May 7 detailed schedule

Land Use Planning in Early 20th Century Vancouver: The Making of a Properly Propertied City

Abstract

21^st century Vancouver has been framed by many urban planners as a city worthy of emulation. Yet in the early 20^th century settler city, Canadian planning professionals framed Vancouver’s poor housing conditions and haphazard land uses as “wasteful” and ripe for improvement. Canadian professionals proposed that Vancouver take on comprehensive land use planning and adopt scientific and rational land use controls to discipline unruly property owners through parcel-based land logics. In this paper, I draw on literature in legal studies, geography, and planning to show how links between land use control and citizenship emerged in this formative moment in Vancouver (and Canadian) planning history. I look at the activities of the Vancouver Town Planning Commission to show that while land use planning was a seemingly neutral, apolitical, and legalistic exercise, Vancouver planners of the 1920s and 30s also used such controls to implement and maintain a “properly propertied” civic landscape while also encouraging normative forms of settler citizenship. I assert that by governing through land use, Vancouver planners valorized certain people, things, and activities while marginalizing others, casting them off as wasteful and outside of the “greater good” of the city.

Presenter(s)

Trevor Wideman, University of Toronto

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