Property, waste, and the “unnecessary hardship” of land use planning in Winnipeg, Canada

Abstract

Planning, in the context of the liberal democratic state, has long been concerned with the ordering and improvement of landed property toward a “highest and best use.” In this paper, I look to early 20th century planning in Canada – specifically in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba – to interrogate questions of land use in relation to planning and property. I connect land use planning to property by looking at how ideologies of waste, deployed by planners at the national scale to evaluate people and land and motivate rationalistic land use control, touched down in 1930s Winnipeg. I scrutinize if and how Winnipeg officials acted upon waste within planning schemes of improvement. Ultimately, I show that powerful professional planning discourses around the implementation of scientific order and the avoidance of waste were taken up selectively by Winnipeg officials in the interests of maintaining a propertied landscape. Private property, in Winnipeg, trumped planning.