Troubling the Keynesian-Neoliberal Periodization on the Flats

Recent interventions in the literature on neoliberalism have called on critical scholars to “appreciate both diversity and consistency across particular neoliberalizations” (Prudham, 2005: 15). This call to search for the “similarities among differences” of neoliberalism (Castree, 2005) can be used to trouble the complicated ways in which the lines between the Keynesian and neoliberal urbanism are blurred both forward and backward. To recall Ross (1996), the event-process of modernization has significant afterlives that looks backward and forward. Simultaneously, Keynesian impulses are reformulated into the neoliberal urban development projects and neoliberal characteristics back onto the Keynesian project.

The modernist urban planning practices of the postwar state dispossessed the residents of inner-city neighbourhoods, including those of LeBreton Flats, for the good of the nation. In a similar fashion neoliberal practices recolonized the Flats to celebrate the nations history of participation in just war. Meso-level state-led intervention shows evidence of ongoing discursive and material dispossession on the Flats. The NCCs violent expropriation in the 1960s was partially premised on increasing land-rent of a depressed neighbourhood. In the contemporary context, the NCCs ongoing interest in rent-extraction parallels its earlier intervention. Although no longer couched in the universalized modernist spirit, and the clean, proper, nuclear, family subject, the discursive construction of the national makes new allusions to proper subjectivity. The capital’s new wish image is oriented towards an internalization of nature as an image-commodity. History has been forgotten in the abstract container of the nation, yet a selective use of discursive (national) nature has been used to sell an urban revitalization. Nature is being brought into the process of capital accumulation according to the regulatory and governing features of the neoliberalization.

In both these periods, the acquisition and maintenance of proper property use is a guiding principle, perhaps not-surprisingly since private property guaranteed by the state is a foundation of (neo)liberalism, often targeted at dispossession of the least fortunate (McCarthy and Prudhan 2004). “The prevailing regime of property,” as Blomley (2004: 38) is a “dense and pungent set of social symbols, stories, and meanings” affects urban dwellers differentially; property owners have control, and can increase their wealth; renters cannot; women and racial minorities are often more likely to be disadvantaged (Blomley, 2004: 38). Most critically to this case, national identity maintains meanings and narratives of property ownership, and tells the story of how the land should be ordered.



Considering the case of LeBreton Flats this is an especially perceptive analysis. Through a diverse set of practices, set within common features and processes, urban planning in the national capital has centralized control within national agencies to exclude displace certain bodies from the national landscape. In the 1960s the concentrated power of the NCC, the NCPS and the NCPS was used to wash away the “slums” of LeBreon Flats, and to replace the “derelict home” with modernist office towers and fast moving traffic. This control over property regimes continues breaking the neoliberal line, although governance structures and practices have changed. National capital planning is now outsourced. “Governance-beyond-the-state,” and P3s now dominate the national management of “empty” properties, though the landscape is far from empty as it continues to evoke powerful meanings. The spaces of LeBreton Flats have been remodeled into a mutable space where subjects can interact intimately with the landscape rather than only gaze upon its modern wonders. The national subject creates their own experience through direct interaction with the national soil and narratives of nationhood on the grounds of the War Museum. In contrast, the discursive rhetoric of the Keynesian period prompted national subjectivity through central dispensation of film and urban planning ideas. The idea of the ideal subject was told to the audiences and members of the nation. A back and forth between each of these periods shows how the contemporary redevelopment of LeBreton Flats builds on and consolidates the massive intervention in 1962.

In the postwar period as huge city swaths lay ready for reconstruction, and critics wondered if “modernist planning was merely an aesthetic preference masquerading as social reform” (Klemek, 2004: 10). The same question might be asked today but in the aftermath of the attack on egalitarianism, asking instead if neoliberal planning is simply a green aesthetic, imbued with culture embourgeoisement masquerading as a “mixed-community.”