Smoothing the National Landscape I

On 17 April 1962, the federal government publicly announced a massive urban renewal project for the neighbourhood of LeBreton Flats in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The expropriation of LeBreton Flats, and its working-class residents, emerged from an ambitious state-led initiative to remodel Ottawa into a new, modern, national capital. Initiated in 1945, and carried out in the 1950s and early 1960s, the federal planning initiative would radically alter Ottawa’s urban socio-environment. The proposed reconstruction projects proceeded from class-based assumptions, transatlantic urban reform consensus, that tagged low-income neighbourhoods as undesirable ‘slums,’ making it easier — if not necessary — to run expressways, construct large office blocks through the working-class districts. The state-led project provoked the ‘creative destruction’ of the rich socio-industrial landscape of LeBreton Flats and cleared away the ‘dead weight of past environments.’ The relics of the vast lumber and milling industry did they fit with the image of a modern national capital – and were cleared away for a new dream image – a National Defense Headquarters.

Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin, this series will expose the wreckage of past to help make the translation of the modern maelstrom possible. Empirically, it exposes the last vestiges of the industrial staples trade, and how all users – residents, squatters, scrap-dealers, manufacturers – were relegated to negotiating the terms of their disappearance from the Flats. Yet, despite this extensive attempt to remake the Flats into a national ‘landscape of power’, the state-led recalibration of industrial-ecological landscape remained incomplete. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, this new series of blog entries looks-back at the promise (and failure) to re-make nature at remains a symptom of the phantagasmoric spell of progress and mimics Benjamin’s methodology by focusing on collection of ‘scraps of history’ as a means from which to expose the false promise of the postwar dream.Second, inspired by Benjamin’s atmosphere of One Way Street, photographic and archival evidence is used to uncover fragments of ongoing activity on the Flats. These textual and visual fragments, drawn from expropriation files, offer cues to the distorted spell of progress of the postwar consensus and a counter narrative to the rent-based determination of urban decline.