On Good Intentions: A Critical Note on Recent Studies of State Planning in Canada

Writing about the modern state is notoriously difficult.¹ Historians have both to come to grips with the immensity of its coercive and administrative apparatus and to not lose sight of the complexities, failings, and incoherencies of the various social groups and individuals that make up this leviathan. The Canadian example, to borrow a phrase from Suzanne Morton's excellent biography of social worker Jane Wisdom, makes for a particularly "messy case file" – the growth of the liberal welfare state under conditions of capitalism and colonialism necessitates that any critical scholar grapple with the contradictory legacies of genuine good will and immense harm.²

Where there are discordant notes in the vast chorus of voices contributing to the historiography of the Canadian state, then, they are often to be found in the register of disagreements about the relative weight that should be placed on intention or impact, a debate carried out in the language of hegemony, legibility, biopower, and governmentality.³ But if this lexicon conjures up for graduate students such as myself visions of the "1990s" section of our comprehensive reading lists, recent arguments playing themselves out in the pages of this journal suggest that the conversation is far from over.⁴ In what follows, I want to register some critical thoughts on three recent contributions to the study of state planning in Canada – Larry Beasley's Vancouverism, Tina Loo's Moved by the State, and Ted Rutland's Displacing Blackness – focusing principally on their respective positions on the question of intentionality and impact in assessing state policy.⁵ Do intentions matter? Who needs them to matter, and why? These queries provide a connecting thread through what are in fact three rather disparate works of urban planning, history, and geography. While their respective arguments represent distinct positions on the benevolence of state actors, ranging from apologia to critical sympathy to radical refusal, they share, somewhat curiously, a certain distance from the quotidian experiences of those displaced and oppressed by bureaucratic state power.

The high modernism of capital

Relying on the experience and knowledge gained as the former co-chief planner of Vancouver, Larry Beasley has written a detailed descriptive and prescriptive guide to "Vancouverism" – the urban planning philosophy that led the city's development efforts from the 1980s onward – or "the way that one city … decided to transform itself to be attractive, competitive, and resilient for the future."⁶ Journalist Frances Bula, in her historical prologue to the work, situates this approach as a sort of logical and necessary evolution of the progressive municipal TEAM (The Electors' Action Movement) administration's early 1970s rejection of a grand freeway project through the inner city, and with it the '60s-era, high modern urban renewal agenda.⁷ In contrast to other major Canadian cities, then, Beasley argues that Vancouver's planning approach over the last 40 years has been characterized by an emphasis on neighbourhoodfocused, high-density development in the inner city area that prioritizes accessibility, local commercial variety, and multiple forms of transit over car infrastructure, underlining social mixing and diversity. It also favours direct physical design of new growth over broad policy guidelines while focusing on sustainability and fostering collaboration and consensus between government, the private sector, and the public.

While Vancouverism's core tenets of flexible zoning and social mixing are now axiomatic in the urban design world, these were indeed new and exciting ideas in the 1980s and 1990s.⁸ And on the surface, this would seem to be a pleasing antidote to the technocratic, displacement-driven urban planning agenda of the immediate post-Second World War years. But, as James C. Scott reminds us, "Large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency for homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay."⁹ Indeed, there are familiar ingredients in the new high (post) modernism recipe. Much of Vancouverism developed around megaprojects post-1986 World Fair and in anticipation of the 2010 Winter Olympics, and its significantly larger space for public participation...