Smoothing the National Landscape: Life-World

The professional appraisals of the Flats reflected the social Darwinist understanding of “natural” neighbourhood change. These descriptions were part a desire to the move the Flats “forward” – and to forget the working landscape of the past.

The neighbourhood descriptions contained within individual property assessments charted the “natural decline “of the central city, assessed the desirability of the neighbourhood, and expressed a pointed desire for the Flats to “progress forward.” Yet, this socio-technical process would overlook the working landscape of the past, the French-Canadian and Irish background of the majority of the working-class residents, a growing Italian community, and a smaller Lebanese community as it experienced significant postwar migration that had altered the Irish, British and French-Canadian of the area. In fact, contrary to reports marking the Flats as a transient area, many residents had lived on the Flats for several decades. In 1951 over 77 per cent of all the dwellings had been occupied by the same residents for more than five years.

While real estate specialists, town planners, federal politicians, and civic boosters hankered for the redevelopment of the Flats, the expropriation and demolition would also sever community and family ties.

For example, the widower Mrs. Cora Albert, who had lived on the Flats for 36 years expressed her displeasure: “I’m not too happy to move because this is my home and my family is all happily settled here”. Her two daughters and a son rented the three other units of the four-unit row house, and had recently undertaken several renovations.

In fact, despite the narrative of decline, many individual land-owners had improved the overall condition of the building stock. Yet such rehabilitations in the view of appraisers, only ‘retarded the deterioration of the area as a whole’ and were only slowing down the ‘natural’ decline of the area.

Many appraisers blamed the ‘integration of the Italian Ethnic group,’ for the ‘unnatural’ upswing in housing prices in the area. In the racialized view of experts, these ongoing familial lending practices and multi-generational homes were deemed by the experts to be out of step with the postwar norms of institutional lending and the nuclear family ideal.

Smoothing the National Landscape: Red Line Taxi

As an operator of over 50 cabs, plus 40 independent operators, the central location of Red Line Taxi at the Corner of Fleet and Duke Streets near major thoroughfares, was conveniently located drivers within 1.5 miles of Union Station and Chateau Laurier where 60 per cent of business was produced. As part of the ongoing property rationalization, the company received $236,000 as compensation for relocation to a site near the new railway station being completed as part of Gréber’s plan. This accounted for the cost additional mileage that would be incurred by the company. No longer able to operate in the CBD due to zoning rules, the company received compensation for relocation on suburban land on land purchased from the NCC. While there was advantages to being located near the new train station, and near the cross-town expreswat, the extra labour costs of the new location were born by the individual drivers. In fact, just as the move was being completed, as the assessment report notes, additional mileage costs would no longer be born by the company, as it was switching to a model in which the company rented out the cars and sold gas to the drivers, rather than paying them a salary, in essence externalizing the operating costs to the drivers. Just as waged labour was becoming a relic in the taxi industry, so too was the very physical building itself: the hub of its network, the stand-alone radio tower above the garage, was deemed surplus and bidders attempted to purchase the ruins, to fulfill new functions, however, the NCC would not easily relinguish goods, and left them instead to the wreckers ball.

Smoothing the National Landscape: Victoria Foundry

Photo: Victoria Foundry Scrap Yard

Among the remaining industrial production, there were a number of foundries on LeBreton Flats including the Victoria Foundry complex. In business for 118 years, Victoria Foundry had at the time of expropriation 26 employees, 9 of which had been with company for over 10 yrs and another 13 employees with over 5 yrs. The shop works at the Victoria Foundry consisted mainly of custom foundry and machine work, both in the manufacture of new products and maintenance and repair of existing machinery. The location, in one of the “most central locations in the Ottawa, Hull area” proximity to the “source of semi skilled labour who find it difficult to commute to the periphery of the city, resulting in higher labour costs” as well as increased production cost of operation in new building such as capital costs, municipal taxes. Customers included the Federal Government, the City of Ottawa, and various supply companies.

A number of appraisals were done to assess both the value of the property and the associated costs of relocation. These valuations varied significantly, and are an incomplete record of the life-world of the plant, however, these do point to the view of value creation, and recreation among the pattern of disintegration on the Flats. Like the valuations, the condition of manufacturing fixtures and moveable equipment varied considerably. Mechanical equipment such as “the ducting from blowers to forgers, and from blower to cupola, and from blowers to brass furnaces” were not “economically worth removing for re-installation elsewhere”. Other fixtures were clearly out of date such as the “wooden fixtures such as cupboards, shelving, lockers” whose place would “largely be taken by modern steel racks and binning in a new plant”. Fixtures such “shafting, pulleys, belts, etc., that jointly provide the power of the few pieces of machinery” was “ very ancient” yet reasonably maintained.

Forges and ovens, on the other hand, had “a good proportion of their active life remaining in them” and the overall structure “had adequate utility and physical stamina for the next 25 years”. This latter appraisal considered the advantages of the present building and location over a new site which although it would improve aesthetic considerations, the “prestige building were in no way increases volume of trade or volume” especially since the overall design was not only “efficient”. All of this mechanical residue, judged by appraisers as not ‘economically worth removing for re-installation elsewhere’, would be silenced in the smoothing of the LeBreton landscape.

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.

Landsdowne Live and the Urban Growth Machine

When Robert Dahl wrote his book on urban governance in 1961 he asked the question of who governs the city, and how urban development can be understood in a political context. This early contribution to the study of urban governance is complemented by Logan and Molotch’s classic 1987 essay “The City as a Growth Machine.” Logan and Molotch maintain that the question of “Who Governs” has to be complemented by the equally central question “For What.”

Land-based interest and the day-to-day actions of urban elites figures prominently in their thesis, and their analysis provides an agency-centered understanding of the power relations and resources underpinning the formation and development of urban places and systems. Logan and Molotch argue that “for those who count the city is a growth machine, one that can increase aggregate rents and trap related wealth for those in the right position to benefit.” The desire to drive growth creates a consensus among elite groups, a consensus which is used to eliminate alternative visions of the role of local government. The Urban Growth Machine (UGM) thesis, which stems from this essay, maintains that coalitions of land-based elites drive urban politics to expand the local economy and the accumulation of wealth. Civic boosters them, connect the very essence of civic pride to growth.

According to this analysis the rentier-class ensures support for the project of continued growth by creating community solidarity on the collective benefit of growth and expansion. Among this growth coalition, local business people, especially those who invest and finance property development and real estate are major participants in urban politics, and are often deploy their considerable resources to promote growth based development. Much of the growth mobilization involves local government (which rentiers need local governments to succeed). The aforementioned properties interest playing a major role in electing local politicians: paying tribute to the old political adage that politics is about who gets what, here and how. And so when a development friendly Mayor such as Larry O’Brien is elected, they can act in full force to bring the UGM up to maximum speed: which is perhaps most evident in the Landsdowne Live project currently being proposed for Ottawa.

Property developers and financiers, however, are not alone in driving the UGM. Local media the authors point out also benefit from expansion since they gain increased circulation, advertising and profit as a result of growth. Historically, newspapers “bolster and maintain the predisposition for general growth.” Second, baseball and football stadia have been used by local governments to provide a focus for development projects.

Landsdowne live is a wonderful example of how the interests of media and property development mesh with the UGM. Media outlets such as Team 1200, Ottawa Sun, and media personalities such Glen Kulka, have trumpeted the benefits of a new stadium, and their voices should not be seen one voice among many, but a voice with vested interest in promoting not only general growth but the expansion of sports in the city from a purely profit laden perspective. Cleverly, these media outlets have outright ridiculed politicians and civic activists who propose alternative visions, as the UGM contends. Likewise for the property developers: local property robber baron Greenberg has used the Citizen to promote the growth-centered vision for the city. All those who oppose this grand vision were are told, have no civic pride. It is not a stretch to say this is an unfair playing field, is it is a question of power and resources. However, as this is an agent centered understanding of the political economy of development, the thesis also argues that interest which do not mesh with this view can be quite effective in offering an alternative vision if the growth based vision is not compatible with their “use of places – to live, to shop, and earn money.” Professionals not tied to the growth machine are most potent group to contend the growth coalition. The density of professionals in the Glebe offers just that possibility of effective citizen opposition.

The UGM is working quite well in Ottawa. With a sympathetic Mayor who is himself part of the urban growth coalition, civic resources have been mobilized to maintain their profitability and to promote one vision. I applaud those who are working to slow down the machine.

Slumology (The Reformers)

“It is clear that juvenile delinquency, crime and vice thrive in an environment of bad housing... many of these surveys have indicated that it is the slum that makes the slum dweller, not the slum dweller the slum, and therefore the elimination of the slum one tends to get the elimination of lower social standards”

Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, Submission to the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction (Curtis Report), 1944.

Urban Rewewal in Marseille's Old Port (1943)

In his book Vichy At War, Robert Paxton argues that despite claims to the contrary, technocrats ‘did not save the French people from suffering’ but rather shared Vichy’s ‘heavy burden of responsibility’. The Battle of Marseille, which finds some of its origins in Jacques Gréber’s regional plan of 1936, is perhaps one of the more glaring examples of how this burden is shared by French urban planners. Between 1931-36, Gréber developed a regional plan for the greater Marseille area that proposed a strict separation of functions, slum removal and a hierarchical transportation system. The architect and planner drew up strict aesthetic prescriptions (such as height limits) for Marseille’s Old Port to ensure the buildings of the working-class district would not impede the beauty of the rocky Mediterranean shoreline for those driving along his proposed seaside roadway. Segregated allotments and zoning rules based on class and income and the removal of ‘dangerous and unhealthy homes were also part of his plan to rationalize Marseille’s urban space’.

After numerous procedural delays, Eugène Beaudoin worked between 1941-1943 to update the regional plan. Inaugurated 1 February 1942, Beaudoin’s plan for Marseille can be seen as part of the same urban renewal program. Beaudoin recommended that the Old Port be ‘cleansed’ of its ‘leprous sectors’ and be replaced by an ‘airy, renovated quarter’ though which a new avenue would provide travelers with incomparable views of the coast. The Old Port, which according to a municipal publication was ‘decrepit, rotten…full of corruption, leprosy, and gangrene’, was blocking progress. Ideally the Old Port would be cleared of its ‘pus’ to open forth a path for the planned coastal road. However, like Gréber, Beaudoin was, on his own, unable to complete his slum clearance project.

à

Despite these first unsuccessful attempt to level the Old Port, an ultimate collaboration between Vichy authorities and occupying forces would provide the pretext and administrative support needed to proceed with municipal plans. Starting on 22 January 1943, a forced expropriation led by zealous French authorities emptied the Old Port of its 30,000 residents. The police action would result in mass arrests, the deportation of 1,949 Jews to death camps, as well as near total demolition of the neighbourhood. While ordered by Berlin, the operation was as much about urban renewal as collaboration with Nazi policies. Two weeks earlier, on 8 January 1943, the local newspaper published a decree which revealed that City of Marseille had received authorization to borrow 500 millions francs to finance the construction of new buildings, to open up new roadways and ‘to cleanse unhealthy slums’. The expropriation was, as stated in a German newspaper, ‘a rare case where a measure of war coincides with projects long adopted by a Municipality and by a Government and already being executed.’ The Germans had emptied the Old Port of its working-class residents, Jews, leftists and displaced French-African soldiers, but equally as important, the action coincided admirably with Beaudoin’s urban renewal plan. The city profited from the police action by proceeding with expropriation without having to pay any indemnities. While Gréber is not directly responsible for the expropriation and deaths, an arc of knowledge stemming from Gréber’s original regional plan ultimately resulted in the destruction of Marseille’s Old Port.

La Défense 4: Un Aller-Retour

As a major employment node, the massive la Défense complex is directly connected to la Périphérique and to the RER commuter train network though a major transportation hub below the main plaza.


Auto-mobility@ la Défense


Rail Links


This last picture is almost seemingly the entrance to la Défense, however, it is in fact the entrance to Hull’s own peripheral government Place du Portage office complex built as an urban renewal project in the early 1970s. Like la Défense, the four-phase complex, boasting the largest contiguous floor of any office building in Canada, is linked to the (unfinished) highway and expressway network. The massive complexes and their unilinear transportation linkages are an ode to the swift character of the rush hour commute and to the efficient speed of modern office work and workers. While more accessible (in terms of class and age participation), these transportation corridors are still an enclosed and specialized one-way space. Its high-modernity entrenches the city landscape further in the limiting “yokes of corridor mentality”.

Place du Portage, like it’s transatlantic cousin, was built on the paths of low-income neighbourhoods - also-know-as ‘slums’ or ‘bidonvilles’ in the pathologies of modern postwar urban reformers. However, unlike la Défense, the old neighbourhoods still surround the government offices, though despite their kitch pastiche continue to suffer the repercussions of the massive intervention, and from a general uneven development of Hull-Gatineau’s urban-suburban polarization.

The Spirit of 1958 (la Défense 3)

In a recent forum on la Défense, Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 decision to initiate this grand projet was characterized as a prophetic vision. The beholders of his fateful plan, the hommes sages reunited to pontificate on its future, presented a vision for the next half century. The event also provided the current hyper-président Sarkozy with a new laurel. During the June 30th meeting, the mediator of la table ronde lauded Sarko’s plan for réaménagement as a saving grace for the sector. Sarko, accepted the praise, and as if to mimic his Gaullist predecessor, he made an equally bold call: for La Défense to become une grande place financière; even a rival to the London’s City. This new prophecy aims to renew the spirit of 1958, to bring back the daring urban renewal spirit of the post-war period. President Sarkozy challenged his colleagues to rise to the height of the proceeding generation. Sarko reminds us that la Défense was once a bidonville and an architectural scar (he knows because he used to cross the area on his way to soccer matches). This slum, he pontificates, was transformed as a result of de Gaulle’s hubris: on nothing (rien) [empty?] was created a visionary urban renewal project. The vision of greatness must be celebrated, Sarko urged, and echoing his comments about colonialism, he dismissed regret over dispossession as a misplaced idea, and called on this generation to replicate the great spirit of 1958.



The narrative was as follows: the land was underused, and worst of covered with (invisible) morally unfit subjects, in short, it was “empty” and ripe for redevelopment. The script of dispossession and displacement is as N. Blomley points out an active and ongoing process. Dispossession, in this case of the former low-income residents (rather than indigenous groups N.B. refers to), requires the continued display of “spatial technologies of power” such as surveying, planning, map making, place naming. In both the initial expropriation, and the ongoing embourgeoisement, the acquisition and maintenance of proper property use and ownership is a guiding principle reinforced by the planning authority of the state-authority EPAD (Etablissement pour l'Aménagement de la Région de la Défense). This is entirely consistent with the longer trajectory of liberalism which holds property at the centre of its regulatory regime. However, property is not solely a material question of land use, property markets, or ground rent. Land and property, as Blomley argues, is also about identity. Specifically to the case of nationalism: “the formation of national identity is, in part, a mediation of the meanings and significance of land as property” (Blomley, 2004: 38). National narratives of ownership tell the story of how land should be ordered, and who should be excluded or included from ownership. The dream-image of a symbolic business center for Europe is a extension of these impulses and brings forward Sarko’s dream of creating un Grand Paris as the memory marker of his presidency – and is about national narratives.

During the round table, an effervescent Sarkozy noted that each generation is confronted with the choice to project itself onto the future, and that each has the option create a vision for the future. He trumpeted un désire “que l'audace redevienne une qualité française ! ». La Défense, he suggests to the audience, was an avant-garde project, a European and French first which created a high-rise, exclusive economic sector. The call is to renew this spirit: to create bigger, higher towers as a way to make cities greener, and the path towards France becoming a leader in the new Europe.

However, his call for a renewal of French audacity in urban development are truly nationalist, and by extension, anchored in the same authoritarian tendencies that have unfortunately plague too many state-induced or state-led large-scale urban redevelopment project. In proclaiming his love of architecture, the strict republican proclaims Versailles as an example of sound architecture, a good investment, and why critics of large-scale projects are wrong. These revisionist statements, while fittingly bizarre, and one of many of in a litany of krasher-like spray of sluggish rhetoric, render visible the authoritarian disposition of national urban renewal. The renewal of 1958 requires a forgotten, empty past as the only way forward where the (masked) ideological underpinnings of urban renewal were used to bypass democratic opposition. In their quest to promote these (failed) modernist dreams, national planners continue to displayed a rather shocking willingness to overlook the authoritarian tendencies of liberal modernist planning.

La Défense 2

The triumphant modernist President Georges Pampidou pronounced in 1970 that “there is no modern architecture without towers.” La Défense his promised “forest of towers” is a testament to his undying faith in the promise of rapid modernization.



The CNIT, the iconic building of the first wave of building (pictured above) still stands, however, many of the first modernist buildings such as Gréber’s 1958 ESSO Tower, have been demolished and replaced by larger, higher ground rent producing, office buildings. Gréber’s square, mid-sized, early modernist frame has been replaced by the massive, and uncompelling Coeur de Défense Tower.



Pampidou was not the only President to show a preference for large scale projects. Successive Presidents would seek out further their own grands projets: for Gistard le Musée d’Orsay; for Mitterrand the Bastille Opéra (designed (as my Grade 10 French teacher pummeled into us during obsessing airing of TV5 “Club Sandwhich” episodes) by Canadian Carlos Ott). Not to be outdone by his predecessors, the work-harder-preaching Sarkozy renewed his commitment to a renewal program set into course in 2005-2006. Sarko reinforced his plan for an extensive expansion of La Défense, urging the state-owned site manager EPAD to fund and direct a massive building program on the site, in partnership with the region, the RATP, and the SNCF. La Défense would be Sarko's very own own imprint on the Parisian landscape.

La Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration

Opened in 2007, the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration has taken tentative steps at poking holes at the French republican ideal. It is also a welcome contrast with the Paris grands projets and major cultural destinations. The Museum’s narrative - which highlights immigrant experiences in France - distinguishes itself from other Parisian museums (revolution, revolution, liberté, fraternité, egalité!) by foregrounding the long history of immigration to modern France (Italy, Poland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, South America, Vietnam, and sub-Saharan Africa). This in itself is a disruption of the very notion of A French identity rooted in common ideals without difference. In various parts of the exhibit, the museum even attempts to question state regulation of immigration, and the impacts of demanding increasingly excessive levels of documentation and state control of the bodies of status and non-status immigrants.

Equally compelling is the side script detailing the postwar urban renewal projects and the expansion of high-rise apartment blocks on the Parisian periphery through comprehensive housing programmes, and the construction of the (in)famous HLMs. (The current temporary exhibit, by Patrick Zachmann, is a fascinating overview of his past 20 years of photography of the everyday life in the banlieue, which forces the viewer to questions popular representations of life in the French ‘burbs. Zachmann’s exhibit is also a wonderful juxtaposition of the stigmatizing code visual of life in the immigrant, working class suburbs, such as Champigny-sur-Marne, circa 1950, which led to the ambitious programme for constructing eight new towns)





The importance of the built environment, however, is not only contained within the Museum walls. La Cité is housed in a building that was part of the International Colonial Exposition of 1931. As the Museum’s audio-guide tells you, after the expo, the building, and especially the grand hall depicting French contributions to the world (travail, égalité, etc), was used to host various social and diplomatic events. However, disappointingly, the visitor is told very little beyond the architectural history of the building: the bizarre and brutal nature of the colonial exhibits (importing villages for display), colonial ideas of superiority represented in the murals in the main room, are not mentioned. In other words the messy, and ugly colonial underpinnings of the building, and the ideas represented in its frescos, architecture, and purpose, remains hors-texte. A (post) colonial défrichage is left to the viewer. Considering that many visitors are unequipped to decipher these complex meanings, more was needed here. Even some additional information on the nature of the colonial exhibits would point to the nasty nature of colonialism.



Perhaps this silence is less about the museum that about the state of politics. The absence of this critical view of the colonial period is reinforced by the fact that no major national politician was present at the opening of the Museum. Their ambivalence to some of the ideas and issues gingerly addressed in the Cité denotes an appalling unwillingness by the political elite to confront their colonial history. No great surprise, I guess, where, in face of ongoing questions about France’s colonial past, President Sarko recently argued that France “should be proud of its past and stop this nonsense about repentance.” Perhaps, hopefully, la Cité is a
small-work-in-progress-rock being thrown at the wall of chauvinist republicanism.

Link: La Cité: colloquims and articles

La Défense + Jacques Gréber

La Défense, the giant business center at the end of Paris’ grande axe stands as an iconic reflection of dream-image of postwar modernism. Initiated in the mid-1950’s by a state-controlled development agency, according to the 1933 Athens Charter, the master plan was designed for maximum density of office and residential use. The complex would be served by an extensive networks of roads meeting in a central roundabout laying beneath the main pedestrian esplanade. Thus direct access to the basements of the buildings would be assured.

Chantier de la Défense (Cnit)
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This modernist wonder has connections to Ottawa own ambitious postwar urban planning. The first skyscraper constructed, as the ESSO Standard Building designed by French architect and planner Jacques Gréber and his son Pierre. .

And, like Ottawa’s own tragic urban renewal projects, such as LeBreton Flats, la Défense required extensive expropriation. In this case over 8,000 ‘sub-standard” dwellings were demolished.

The Esso Standard was a spectacle of modernism, which fittingly, was featured in Jacques Tati’s Play Time – a marvelous satiric critique of the dislocation and empty busyness of modern life.

PLAY TIME Jacques Tati
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The scale of the project was immense, and the master plan would later be adapted, under the approval of uber-modernist Jacques Pompidou, to allow for bigger and more individual buildings. Now exclusively office space la Défense would total a mind-boggling 1,500,000 m2.

Seperatad Bike Lanes

Now that Toronto is getting serious about actually implementing its cycling strategy, it is a good time, as Now writer Paul Terfenko suggests to begin implementing separated bike. While those painted lines in existing lanes are quite handy, they are constantly being invaded by trucks, parked cars, and most annoyingly cop cars stopping for coffee. Moreover, they do little to make me feel safer...

NOW Magazine // News // Amicable separation

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Revisiting Victory Homes

The suburban project took on anew form and historical significance following WWII. The influx of workers, veterans and farmers immediately following the war exacerbated the wartime housing shortage. The housing shortage during and after WWII led to the first direct federal involvement in house-building. A number of institutions are created to house returning veterans who demanded housing. In 1941, Wartime Housing Limited (WHL) and Wartime Housing Corporation (WHC) were created under auspices of the War Measures Act. The 1942 Veterans’ Land Act, designed to enable agricultural settlement for returning veterans, became more popular as a way of acquiring suburban homes.

The wartime housing constructed by were of a simple minimalist design. These modest one and a half story bungalows with pitched roofs with steeply pitched roofs, though also included advanced technology and kitchens, bath etc. These first rented at very modest prices can still be seen in many cities, such as the Ottawa's postwar suburb of Clarington..

In 1944, the Advisory Committee on Reconstruction (Curtis Committee) called for government to be involved in the housing for low-income families. However, fairly strong hostility to public housing from local governments and provincial governments prevented the more ambitious proposals for non-market housing. Moreover, rival bureaucracies such as the National Housing Administration (NHA) were suspicious that the WHL would overstep its mandate and compete with it and private industry. They were equally fearful that the units would reduce property values and become slums if not torn down after the war. (Wade, 1994: 125)

As a result of cabinet level and bureaucratic resistance to non-profit housing, market-oriented approaches to housing needs would soon became the norm (Bacher, 1993). Housing policy would come to favour home ownership by every family. For example, CMHC officials devoted much of their time to promote the house-building industry. Efforts include ensuring access to mortgage capitals, low interest rates, and increasing the allowed term of mortgages form 15-20-25-35-and until recently up to 40 percent.

During this period, Canadians were transformed from a nation of tenants to a nation of homeowners. From 1951-1961 home ownership from 30 to 54% in metropolitan census areas. While the postwar suburbs were constructed at great speed, they were deliberately planned to maximize consumption of mass produced goods and minimize the responsibility of developers to create public space and public services.

Ottawa’s Urban Growth Machine

In 1961, just around the time Jane Jacobs was writing her influential book on the death and life of the great American city, Yale Professor Robert Dahl was writing a book on urban governance. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. A case study of political power and representation in New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl book looked systematically at political power, economic influence to evaluate who governs the city of New Haven, and how urban governance can be understood.

The simple question of who governs remains pertinent today as we evaluate the tools and policies of urban planning. How for example are land use decisions made? How does the process of comprehensive planning integrate different goals and motivations? How are stakeholders given a stake in decision-making? What are the limits to this decision-making process?

The Urban Growth Machine (UGM) thesis, which developed from these early interventions, maintains that coalitions of land-based elites drive urban politics to expand the local economy and the accumulation of wealth. According to this analysis the rentier-class ensures support for the project of continued growth by creating community solidarity on the collective benefit of growth and expansion. Land-based interest and the day-to-day actions of urban elites figures prominently in UGM provides an agency-centered understanding of the power relations and resources underpinning the formation and development of urban places and systems.

Recent debates over the expansion of Ottawa’s urban boundary is symptomatic of the formation of coalitions around urban growth. As the City of Ottawa renews and updates its official plan, local developers and lawyers are lobbying to have the boundary expanded so that their lands can be developed for residential use. In their lobbying efforts they have attempted to include in their analysis the cost of housing, arguing that is the urban boundary is not expanded, then home ownership would become unaffordable to many residents. Of course, as the UGM thesis suggests, this is all about creating coalitions, but the real goal of the development industry is to ensure adequate lands for continued greenfield development.

Why is this so important? Planning decisions around sewage, roads, transit, parks, creation of commercial districts, former industrial spaces can dramatically increase the value of land. Most of the profit for land developers is captured in the rezoning, subdividing and servicing of raw land. The extension of water and sewer into smaller lots multiplies the value of the original parcel. Almost all of the developers profit comes in the planning phase and municipal politicians create wealth through land use planning, servicing and subdivision: either on green field sites, or by rezoning current sites to allow for higher building height or density. In fact, profits earned in the planning approval processes are much higher than in the actual construction of homes and high-rise units

However local community and environmental groups have argued that such an approach will only perpetuate unsound planning decisions of the past and continue to worsen the problems of sprawl, pollution, and traffic. Not only have they promoted a more dense and environmentally sound (day we say “smart”) planning approach, but, Ecology Ottawa, a local group battling sprawl and promoting sustainability, has demonstrated to what extent the UGM is at play by highlighting the relationship between developers and zoning decisions. In discussing a revealing report looking at the contributions of developers to local councilors, Ecology Ottawa spokesperson argues the following:

“It seems large developers and their interests are being put first—ahead of the broader public interest—in key decisions about how our city will grow. What is most revealing about this report, however, is how widespread the acceptance of political contributions from these influential vested interests is.”

All of this debate shows how the UGR theory, as an agency centered theory, takes into the struggles over local hegemony and counter-coalitions organized around environmental and redistributive concerns. At times, these interests will contend and sometimes over-power the urban growth machine. In short, UGR explains a politics of locality based the rearrangement of local interests into coalitions where various interests compete and co-operate depending on the development and economic initiative.

Le Crisis

"We're surrounded by their credit lines,
and their payment plans,
with interest piled high.
Why do you think they fucking advertise,
it's because we'll make them rich,
while they ruin our lives"

Shout Out Out Out Out (2006)

Was Shout Out Out Out Out, not just saying this but much more? Sounds appropriate to the predatory lending practices now leading us into a recession...

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.”

Expropriation

"The LeBreton Flats expropriation and demolition created a considerable climate of uncertainty for the Dalhousie area. While the expropriation order included only the lands as far south as Primrose Street, there was little indication to property owners that land acquisition would stop there. Indeed, even to-day the “rumour mill” produces stories of imminent expropriation in the area adjacent to Primrose, perhaps as far south as Spruce Street. As a result, a small number of units are put on the market either to sell them or simply to test the prevailing real estate market."

Impact of LeBreton Flats on the Dalhousie Neighbourhood, DPA Consulting/NCC/CMHC, 1979, p. 27, COA.

What is the colonization of everyday life?

"He (Lefebvre) said, prophetically, everyday life was being colonized. Colonized by what, exactly? Colonized by the commodity, by a modern postwar capitalism that had continued to exploit and alienate at the workplace but had now begun to seize the opportunity of entering life in general, into nonworking life, into reproduction and leisure, into free time and vacation time. Indeed it was a system ready to flourish through consumerism, seduce by means of new media and advertising, intervene through state bureaucracies and planning agencies, ambush people around every corner with billboards and bulletins... lived experience was changing in advanced capitalist countries: it was under fire from the forces intent on business and market expansion, producing fast cars and smart suburban houses, consumer durables, and convenience food, processed lives and privatized paradises."

Andy Merrifield explains the colonization of everyday life in Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, 2006, p.9-10.

Lefebvre

"In the 1970's, somebody asked Lefebvre if in fact he was really an anarchist. "No," he replied. "I'm a Marxist, of course, so that one day we can all become anarchists."

From Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction, 2006.