Introduction
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 redevelopment was infiltrated by the post-war desire to reshape urban landscapes, and associated with an array of public policies and institutions designed to manage demand-driven urban growth, both in North America and Europe.Footnote 1 The development of zoning controls, building codes, public financing and urban renewal policies, and a new set of institutional and legal structures for promoting urban renewal would help transform central city locations in major Canadian urban centres.Footnote 2 Urban planners, however, did not act alone in promoting and developing Canadian urban renewal in Ottawa and other Canadian cities.
This article focuses on the history and politics of Canadian post-war urban redevelopment and how the National Capital Commission (NCC) and the National Film Board (NFB) worked in tandem to disseminate the promise of post-war urban renewal from the heart of the nation's capital. Through the redevelopment of LeBreton Flats, federal proponents hoped to disseminate a national model of urban renewal for the modern, post-war nation through a multi-dimensional promotional campaign. Representations of the national capital in film images would be mobilized to help sell national urban renewal projects in Ottawa and in other cities.Footnote 3 By examining the connections between film representations, ideology, power and urban politics, this article investigates how the NFB's promotional efforts complemented the NCC's Canadian post-war urban planning efforts.Footnote 4 More directly, this examination of urban renewal on LeBreton Flats probes the hubris of using propaganda to promote ambitious post-war planning practices and the willingness of national technocrats to abandon democracy in favour of modernist dreams. Rather than a model of success of these planning practices, however, the failed redevelopment of LeBreton Flats is an iconic reflection of the failure of Canadian planning practices in the national capital. Ottawa's post-war urban planning, this article argues, was rooted in centralized planning, steeped in militarist rhetoric and embedded in authoritarian tendencies, with tragic implications for the marginalized and dislocated residents of LeBreton Flats.
This account begins by exploring the NFB's practice of ‘democratic propaganda’. Second, the material and political contexts of urban renewal in Ottawa are examined, showing how many of the practices of the NCC were initially perfected in Vichy France, and subsequently adapted to the Canadian context. Third, film and archival research are used to illustrate how representations of urban blight on LeBreton Flats helped sell national urban renewal.Footnote 5 Lastly, the paper revisits the (failed) redevelopment of LeBreton Flats to reveal how federal aspirations overrode local concerns, leaving lasting scars on Ottawa's landscape.
The National Film Board and urban renewal
Urban planning history and documentary film have often been understood as two separate stories. Evidence suggests, however, that the dramatic, ‘extraordinarily concerted’ character of state-led Keynesian planning relied on the fast-moving images of film to promote large-scale urban renewal.Footnote 6 In the Canadian context, the NFB used documentary film, as well as innovative non-theatrical distribution, to help promote government policy, as per the mandate established by NFB founder John Grierson. As a pioneer in documentary film, Grierson wanted to reclaim a virtuous position for propaganda and advocated the use of ‘democratic propaganda’ to sell the advantages of liberal democracy to the nation's citizens.Footnote 7 Grierson sincerely believed that, as a democratic ‘weapon’, film could, because of its pedagogical advantages, be used to improve people's lives, and to overcome social antagonism:Footnote 8
If propaganda shows a way by which we can strengthen our conviction and affirm it more aggressively against the threat of an inferior life, we must use it to the full, or we shall be robbing the forces of democracy of a vital weapon for its own security and survival. This is not just an idea. It is a practical issue of modern scientific warfare.Footnote 9
Despite these benevolent goals, Grierson directed his film empire with an autocratic flair and was explicit about using propaganda techniques to manage and enlighten the Canadian population into becoming proper modern subjects.Footnote 10 Grierson's patronizing approach to public education provided governments with an effective tool to promote their social policies. In Britain, Grierson produced numerous films portraying working-class areas as undesirable and showing urban renewal as a symbol of progress. Similarly, in Canada, NFB films would ‘stimulate a popular debate about the nature of social and economic post-war reconstruction’.Footnote 11 Beginning in the 1950s, NFB productions were closely integrated with state efforts to promote public policies; by working in parallel with the mandate of government departments, they helped to ‘disseminate administrative directives from Ottawa to the regions’, including those of the Canadian Mortgage Housing Corporation, the Federal District Commission (FDC) and the National Planning Capital Service (NCPS).Footnote 12 As part of this administration of population, the NFB developed a series called Canada Carries On.Footnote 13 The series included film features meant to foster public awareness and citizen engagement around housing and urban renewal.Footnote 14 During the 1950s, films on Ottawa,Footnote 15 TorontoFootnote 16 and WinnipegFootnote 17 showcased the potential, promise and growth of the modern Canadian city and highlighted the advantages of urban renewal, slum clearance and the importance of socio-scientific urban planning practices.Footnote 18 The negative portrayal of inner-city life in films such as Farewell to Oak Street provided the ‘visual ideology to bolster the arguments of the urban renewal movement’.Footnote 19 Inner-city districts such as Toronto's Regent Park or Vancouver's Strathcona were represented as ‘slums’ in need of complete renewal through massive reconstruction projects. These ‘didactically scripted films’ on urban renewal promoted the smooth transition ‘from the untidy’, rundown, row housing of the working-class ‘slum’ to ‘spotless modernism’: the films’ narratives identified both the ‘social problems’ and the ‘solutions’ needed to remedy them.Footnote 20
Screened in community halls, church basements and schools by some of Canada's 250 voluntary film councils and by government-trained democratic facilitators, as per NFB practice, the Canada Carries On series was quite popular. In 1948, according to the NFB's own estimates, more than nine million people across the country gathered to watch the films.Footnote 21 During these community screenings, the NFB used trained moderators to encourage discussion around social issues of national concern and to foster ‘active citizenship’.Footnote 22 In many cases, audiences were provided with scripted questions to ask about the need for new housing. Thus discussion was often managed through normative examples of the appropriate responses to social questions: the NFB aimed to ‘widen the horizons of the schoolroom and give every individual, each in his place and work, a living conception of the community’ and ‘to light up his life with a sense of active citizenship’.Footnote 23 Despite being blocked out of television and having its funding cut, the number of NFB showings actually increased by 10 per cent between 1949 and 1954. NFB films continued to be popular in rural areas and among school-age groups. However, the NFB's success would be limited by reduced funding, the rise of television and a push by senior bureaucrats to mobilize the NFB as a Cold War ‘weapon’.Footnote 24 Grierson's left-leaning and democratic ‘real people in real situations’ approach to film making, though it had remained popular with the people, fell out of favour with the bureaucratic elite.Footnote 25 Grierson was forced to resign, and during a purge that followed, the NFB was transformed. His successor as film commissioner, Arthur Irwin warned that Canada was not doing enough to win the battle of ideas against the ‘red threat’, and at the height of the Cold War of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the propaganda techniques Grierson pioneered would be mobilized more directly as a ‘prime weapon’ against the communist threat at home and abroad.Footnote 26 However, the NFB's anti-Cold War project would be less effective than earlier campaigns.Footnote 27 The increasing popularity of television and other media would seriously erode the NFB's overall audience impact as the NFB was largely blocked out of this new medium.Footnote 28
Jacques Gréber and Canadian urban renewal
As part of the post-war social and economic reconstruction project and the broader parameters of egalitarian liberalism, a post-World War II urban reform movement emerged. A transatlantic migration of ideas led to an ‘urban renewal consensus’ that embraced technocratic management and international modernism, and a post-war urban planning agenda that demanded the demolition and reconstruction of congested and crowded neighbourhoods to create new, clean, functional cities.Footnote 29 A vast array of new institutions, appropriation acts and enabling legislation centred on housing, urban renewal and social redistribution were created and overseen by a variety of powerful planning commissions and urban renewal agencies.Footnote 30 Under the aegis of these institutions, reconstruction projects proceeded from class-based assumptions that tagged low-income neighbourhoods as undesirable ‘slums’, making it easier – if not necessary – to run expressways, large office blocks and other grand projects through working-class districts.Footnote 31 Technocratic efforts to manage urban environments provoked the ‘creative destruction’ of urban socio-environments and cleared away the ‘dead weight of past environments’.Footnote 32 In locations across the UK, the US and Germany, high-rises, office superblocks and high-speed roadways were constructed as part of large-scale urban renewal projects.Footnote 33 In the North American context, post-war Keynesian urban renewal was often characterized by the systematic disinvestment of the central city and ‘slum clearance’.Footnote 34
This post-war planning consensus also took root in Canada, although it followed a different form. Less intrusive than the US-based initiatives, and less drastic than post-war European reconstruction, Canadian urban renewal was built tentatively on wartime institutions, and a distinct amalgam of British, American and French planning ideals.Footnote 35 In fact, although scholars have emphasized the British and American influence on urban planning in Canada, the redevelopment of Ottawa's city centre is largely the result of the efforts of French architect and planner Jacques Gréber. Educated at France's influential École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Gréber, fascinated by American architectural principles, first crossed the Atlantic to survey American planning in 1919.Footnote 36 The success of his resulting book, L'architecture aux États Unis, charting the US planning terrain, encouraged Gréber to practise his cross-Atlantic approach to urban planning.Footnote 37 Having impressed Prime Minister Mackenzie King with his work as chief architect of the 1937 Paris World's Fair, Gréber was contracted to help beautify the national capital – plans interrupted by World War II.Footnote 38 While many of his contemporaries fled to North America or Britain as a result of the Nazi occupation, Gréber returned to France to help with reconstruction and to develop the architecture of technocratic, state-led ‘urbanisme’ for the Vichy administration.Footnote 39
During the war, Gréber was caught in several compromising positions, most significantly as president of the Société française des urbanistes.Footnote 40 As designated spokesperson for the cause of urbanism in France, Gréber exposed his sympathies to Vichy principles in his contribution to France 1941: la Révolution nationale constructive, un bilan et un programme.Footnote 41France 41 was a political and technical programme for national ‘restoration’ and a reconnection to the ‘national soil’ wrapped in Vichy's desire to create France's new ‘modern man’ according to patriarchal, conservative and religious principles.Footnote 42 Among the essays by eminent specialists in a host of domains including cinema, sports, economics, Gréber's own contribution lauded the Vichy government for providing an orderly national planning programme and centralized urban planning institutions:Footnote 43
Since the return of a healthy conception of government, urban planning has reappeared at the forefront of government decisions, sustained by extended powers given to the grand bureaucrats charged with reconstruction . . . Our sincere and ardent hope is to see a youthful, purified France, healed from its wounds, retake its rightful place in the world . . . le grand Chef, to whom we have confided our destiny, has already considered how renovation of the country, beginning with city plans, will be in the vibrant and varied image of the Rassemblement nouveau des homes.Footnote 44
The ‘national revolution’ was centred around Maréchal Pétain and his incarnation as Vichy's ideology of ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’.Footnote 45 France, under Vichy, was organized, disciplined and subordinated under the supreme authority of le Grand Chef. In lauding a ‘healthy conception of government’, Gréber implies that le Grand Chef's autocratic regime would provide urban planners with the tools and inspiration needed to improve France's social, moral and urban order. Gréber's statement also panders to the regime's pro-natalist and racist ideology and a ‘purified France’ free of its designated leftists, communists, Anglo-Americans and Jews.Footnote 46 Vichy administrators, supported by anti-Semitic laws, encouraged emigration of Jewish refugees, revoked citizenship and facilitated internment and deportations that ‘made the German's task easier when it came to the final solution’.Footnote 47 These ‘grand bureaucrats’, as Paxton argues, ‘did not save the French people from suffering’ but rather shared Vichy's ‘heavy burden of responsibility’.Footnote 48 Technocrats, as Gréber's contribution to France 41 shows, shared the ideal of a new social and moral order with le Grand Chef, and took advantage of extensive powers he bestowed upon them to reconstruct France according to the ‘technicians’ vision: urban, efficient, planned and productive’.Footnote 49
Most of the laws governing France's reconstruction, including the technical, administrative, financial and aesthetic rules of urban planning, were established between 1941 and 1943 – while Gréber was a prominent member of the urban planning hierarchy.Footnote 50 Gréber and his colleagues created a codified and coherent planning approach, a centralized administrative structure that escaped democratic procedure, then consolidated their power by creating the position of inspecteur générale de l’ urbanisme to overlook reconstruction in each of France's administrative districts.Footnote 51 From an ideological perspective, these powerful functionaries ensured that urban renewal adhered to Vichy's ‘cultural project’.Footnote 52 As Voldman argues, the inspecteurs générale were ‘zealous agents of the new urban order who ensured its [Vichy's] prescriptions were respected’.Footnote 53 Having played a prominent role in establishing the new urban planning architecture, Gréber was provided with his own appointment as inspecteur générale in northern France – a position that required the consent of the Nazi Oberfeldkommandantur.Footnote 54
The Battle of Marseille is perhaps one of the more glaring examples of how the legacy of the Vichy regime is shared by urban planners. Between 1931 and 1936 Gréber had developed a regional plan for the greater Marseille area that proposed a strict separation of functions, slum removal and a hierarchical transportation system.Footnote 55 The architect and planner drew up strict aesthetic prescriptions (such as height limits), proposed zoning rules based on class and income and called for the removal of ‘dangerous and unhealthy homes’ from Marseille's Old Port to ensure the working-class district would not impinge upon the beauty of the rocky Mediterranean shoreline for those driving along a proposed seaside roadway.Footnote 56 After numerous procedural delays, Eugène Beaudoin worked between 1941 and 1943 to update the regional plan, an effort which can be seen as part of the same urban renewal programme.Footnote 57 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 travellers with incomparable views of the coast.Footnote 58 The Old Port, which according to a municipal publication was ‘decrepit, rotten . . . full of corruption, leprosy, and gangrene’, was blocking progress.Footnote 59
However, like Gréber, Beaudoin was, on his own, unable to complete his slum clearance project. However, 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.Footnote 60 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.Footnote 61 While ordered by Berlin, the operation was as much about urban renewal as collaboration with Nazi policies.Footnote 62 Two weeks earlier, the local newspaper published a decree which revealed that the City of Marseille had received authorization to borrow 500 millions francs to finance a redevelopment of new roadways and buildings ‘to cleanse the unhealthy slums’.Footnote 63 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’.Footnote 64 The collaboration 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 urban renewal objectives. And, while Gréber is not directly responsible for the expropriation, an arc of knowledge stemming from his original regional plan ultimately resulted in the destruction of Marseille's Old Port. Through his participation in the Vichy administration, Gréber, like his fellow urbanistes, adhered to the idea that urban planning was above aesthetic, political, economic, ideological and social conflict.Footnote 65 Expertise, such as Gréber's, enabled state actors to conceal the ideological underpinning of planning policies by ‘making them administrative, not political issues’.Footnote 66
Shortly after the conflict had ended in Europe, Prime Minister King requested that the French ambassador cable Gréber return to Ottawa to renew the work he had undertaken from 1937 to 1939. Driven by his personal interest in the beautification of the national capital, King was excited by the prospect of commissioning Gréber to complete a regional plan as a memorial to the fallen soldiers of the war.Footnote 67 Gréber's wartime experience in leading ambitious, state-led urban reconstruction projects and his faith in progress through centralized urban planning, which he lauded in France 41, would accompany him on his return to Canada. The former Vichy administrator would lead the development of a comprehensive regional plan for the national capital as principal consultant for the NCPS. King's personal support and his guarantee of adequate funds for the project provided Gréber with the ideal terrain to exercise his centralized approach to urban planning.Footnote 68 Gréber's pragmatism would prove to be significant to Canadian urbanism by reinforcing the growing distinctiveness of Canadian urban planning by drawing on the Canadian urban reform movement and social-scientific, knowledge-producing circles such as the University of Toronto's Department of Social Work. In fact, the ‘territorial stigmatization’ of ‘slums’ formed a vibrant part of the reformist imagination of social scientists and housing experts whilst urban planning professionals viewed central-city working-class districts, such as LeBreton Flats, as unnatural ‘slums’, and also as sources of disease and immorality that negatively affected the quality of family life and citizenship.Footnote 69
The residents of the Flats were thrown into this maelstrom of planning ideals and principles. Gréber's 1950 Plan for the National Capital reinforced class-based discourses by reproducing pathologies of the ‘deviant’ subject. Ottawa's crowded, congested, disordered city, Gréber argued, had not yet been organized into a well-ordered natural setting for the ‘attainment of wholesome living, work and environmental conditions’.Footnote 70 The Plan provided the design details for a restructured central core, an expansive creation of parks and green spaces (including a greenbelt), the decentralization of industry and housing and the development of an extensive network of parkways and expressways. He called for the relocation of inner-city residents in blighted and congested neighbourhoods to pristine, clean, low-density suburban environments. The NCPS would beautify and rationalize the national capital and to create a more hygienic and morally secure future for the National Capital Region (NCR). Gréber's corrective zeal would leave a permanent scar on the Ottawa landscape – especially in inner-city and working-class neighbourhoods.Footnote 71
Selling national urban renewal
As part of federal efforts to promote the Plan, the NCPS established a Public Information Sub-Committee ‘to develop national support for the Plan’ and ‘to foster public demand for the modern practices of urban planning’.Footnote 72 The Plan, in the words of the NCPS's oversight committee (the National Capital Planning Committee (NCPC)), was ‘more than a Master Plan for the Capital Area; it will be a guide of great importance to municipalities throughout Canada who are becoming conscious of the need for long-range planning of their own areas’.Footnote 73 In a very symbolic act, the model's first public showing was in the rotunda of Parliament Hill's Centre Block. From the symbolic centre of political power, the Plan and its planning practices were disseminated into the regions and to the Canadian public.Footnote 74 The Sub-Committee prepared press and photo releases, full-scale models, promotional pamphlets, a 50-page booklet introducing the Plan to the Senate, the House of Commons, schools, libraries and, later, three promotional films.Footnote 75 In addition, a travelling exhibit of models, drawings and photographs of the ‘the latest concepts in urban development’ was toured around the country to showcase the capital as a model modern city for the nation. Gréber would have been familiar with these promotional techniques since French planners had used the 1937 World's Fair as a ‘showcase for nationalist propaganda’, allocating funds to its Propaganda Office for the production of newsreels, press releases and special reports in popular magazines.Footnote 76 Canada's own propaganda campaign would build up public support for modern urban planning and highlight the Plan as the national ideal of how correctly to implement planning principles. The multi-pronged information campaign was perceived by Gréber and the FDC as being successful in promoting new practices of urban planning. ‘This kind of educational enterprise’, Gréber noted in a memorandum to the minister of public works, ‘eliminates public opposition or indifference and should gradually create a unanimous support for planning’.Footnote 77 By implying that unanimous public support could be mobilized, and that all public opposition could be completely eliminated, Gréber was reflecting his adherence to anti-democratic notions. In Ottawa, as in Vichy France, centralized planning would be crucial in creating a new modern man and propaganda techniques would teach citizens how to be proper modern subjects. The FDC shared Gréber's optimism about the importance of the campaign, noting in its own self-assessment that the travelling publicity campaign had: ‘contributed greatly towards building a favourable public reaction to the development of the National Capital and has encouraged the interest in local planning. Further, its effect on the development of Canadian Citizenship has been marked by installing in the public mind a symbol for Canada.’Footnote 78
As part of their ongoing promotional efforts, the NCPS contracted the NFB to produce films promoting urban planning in a form appropriate to the rapid speed of post-war modernization. The films, as the clerk of the privy council wrote in his screening notes, would ‘disseminate information to the public on the planning proposals for the National Capital’.Footnote 79 Two versions of the first film were to be prepared: a colour version distributed as part of the Canada Carries On series, bound for theatrical release, and a black-and-white version for release to community film councils. The first version was aimed at urban audiences and the second was prepared for rural viewers.Footnote 80
A Capital Plan, the colour version, shows Ottawa as a natural jewel. The capital, the film's script notes, was ‘built on one of the finest sites in the world’; to reinforce this point, successive scenes of the region's natural parks and Ottawa's ‘lacework of waterways’, part of the ‘natural playground’ of the capital area, are highlighted in the opening sequences. Both visitors and residents are shown engaging in sporting activities, including diving into river rapids, swimming in area lakes, downhill skiing on the Gatineau Hills, sailing on Dow's Lake and cycling down majestic parkways.Footnote 81 The story, however, quickly takes a turn for the worse. These opening scenes are contrasted with the dangerous and nefarious quality of life in the un-planned and un-modern capital, where everyday life has deteriorated rapidly and become dangerous. Ottawa's natural beauty, the narrator tells viewers, has been marred by the industrial residue of its lumbering past and, perhaps more significantly, because of a lack of planning. The capital ‘grew up without a plan’: it was ‘a capital in name but not in appearance’.Footnote 82
The second sequence of images shows the pollution, smoke, grime and noise that characterize the march of industry as the evil twin to the capital's elegance. In a key sequence of A Capital Plan, the camera pans on to the mills of LeBreton Flats, clouded in smoke and mist. The viewer is shown the stark industrial landscape, a worker moving hefty, rusty steel turbines and the disorder of lumber and rail yards. Parliament Hill is barely visible in the distance as the narrator adds, in a tragic voice, that ‘the beautiful Ottawa River is for the most part inaccessible to the people of the region. From south, east and west, Parliament Hill, the hub of the capital, can hardly be seen from the jungle of buildings that surround it.’ According to the film's overriding narrative, chaotic conditions ruled the city and ruined the capital's aesthetic. Heat, dirt, noise, squalor and un-modern roadways were the ‘symptoms’ that ‘disfigured’ the NCR.Footnote 83
A second film, Ottawa: Today and Tomorrow (1951), destined for international distribution, uses the same footage, edited, and a less didactic script. This film also identifies Ottawa as an ‘industrial city that grew too quickly’. ‘Ottawa’, the narrator notes in the 1951 re-dux, was a city that ‘continued to grow helter-skelter’.Footnote 84 Like A Capital Plan, the script of Ottawa: Today and Tomorrow takes aim at the Flats.Footnote 85 The factories in the central district, as this second NFB film reiterates, were in ‘direct contrast with the elegant capital’ and symptoms of an unhealthy city.Footnote 86 Clearly, Ottawa was in need of a serious correction, and the Flats, which lay at the centre of this ‘disfigured’ city, were one of the principle symptoms that needed a cure. The NFB documentaries repeated the Plan's call for the removal of the unsightly relics of staples production of lumber near Parliament Hill.
The horror of everyday life in an unplanned city was a dominant theme of the NFB's promotional films. In a scene from A Capital Plan viewers are presented with a visual time-bomb: a massive traffic jam near Confederation Square – a major arterial junction in downtown Ottawa at the edge of Parliament Hill. Male truck drivers and commuters are shown honking and berating each over the slow-moving traffic. The visual imagery is reinforced with dark, brooding music, and the menacing chime signalling five-o-clock. Clearly, the ‘strain of rush-hour’ is a serious hazard to modern life. As the narrator reminds the viewer, because work and home are not ‘properly related’, commuters get ‘bogged down in the bottleneck of Confederation Square’. The narrator warns of the dire consequences: these largely male workers are unable to get home on time, and as a result ‘tempers get hot and dinner gets cold’.Footnote 87 Presumably, the invisible part of this gendered equation is that unhappy wives have also had their day ruined as the family dinner gets cold: the city's unplanned landscape strains the life of the ideal nuclear family, and threatens the central unit of the post-war nation.
Family life is not ruined only by unplanned traffic, but also by the trains that cross the central city. The film script reserves special scorn for the ‘cross-town trains which feed the factories, and emit soot and smoke . . . in locations where people live’. In a scene that reinforces this idea, a woman is shown hanging her laundry in a yard directly adjacent to an elevated train track. As the narrator tells the viewer, homes ‘jumbled’ near railroad tracks such as this are an unhealthy proposition for families, leading to social dysfunction. The visual and textual representations of inner-city life reflect how post-war ‘images of poor housing conditions, poverty, filth and moral wickedness’ were used as ‘a rhetorical technique intended to sufficiently unsettle the social imagination of the public’ about the urban ‘slum’.Footnote 88 ‘Slums’, in the imagination of reformers, media and state offices, were ‘blots on the map’ that need to be surgically removed to stop further infection of the city.Footnote 89 In the social-scientific understanding of ‘slum dwellings’, only a total clearance of the affected area would succeed in eliminating its pathological ‘deviance’. The representations of housing conditions would anchor the rationale for ambitious redevelopment schemes.Footnote 90
With much authority, Gréber's Plan for the National Capital is presented as the cure to this chaotic mess. In a subsequent scene in Ottawa: Today and Tomorrow, Gréber is filmed walking up the stairs of Parliament Hill with two other well-dressed men. In the next frame, from the top of Parliament's Peace Tower, Gréber explains to his fellow experts how his ‘far-sighted plan’ would correct the city's disorder. The future of the city, viewers are informed, is in ‘the hands of town planning experts’.Footnote 91 The elevated expert view is a sharp contrast with the mole's eye view of chaotic everyday life depicted in previous scenes. From atop their lofty perch, Gréber and his associates could properly assess, survey and plan the future of the NCR. The Olympian rule of experts was central to this modernization project.
In this vision of the future, railroads are removed, factories are moved to decentralized locations, housing is suburbanized, and administrative offices are moved on to green campuses. To reinforce this point, the chaos of rush hour is repeated and then rapidly juxtaposed with clips of easy driving on new parkways. The careful representations of smooth parkways provide a view on to Gréber's preferred urban landscape: segregated districts connected by parkways and surrounded by green necklaces (greenbelts). In the films’ narrative, Ottawa's ‘rapid’ transformation into a ‘modern and pleasant city’ with ‘pleasant driving’, and ‘smoother moving traffic’ would be performed through a ritualized clean-up of the city.Footnote 92 Parkways would whisk federal employees away from the city centre into their newly prepared suburban homes and funnel industrial workers to the new suburban industrial parks developed on land assembled by the NCC.Footnote 93 As a colourful animation shows, these projects represent progress: the smoke, railroad tracks and traffic jams of the disordered city are replaced by the white lines of expressways, where traffic moves quickly and efficiently; new residential areas, growing in perfectly ordered communities, are offshoots of the expressways; single-family homes, each on their own patch of green, rise far from industry. The city, and the family, is being brought back to its natural state of beauty through planning principles which resemble Vichy's ideology of ‘famille et patrie’ and the regime's concerns with efficiency and function. In the ‘green’ city of the future, family life would be more pleasant, orderly and healthy. Efficient, open and un-congested suburban, industrial and administrative landscapes replaced the congestion and tight living confines of central-city neighbourhoods. The ‘dreams or far-reaching vision’ of planners, as Gréber argued, were essential to a city where ‘progress was on the march’.Footnote 94
Unveiling a new dream image for LeBreton Flats
In the decade following the release of Gréber's Plan, the NCPS and the FDC used a $25 million National Capital Fund to begin relocating railroads, industry and back-office functions to the suburbs, expanding the parkway and expressway network, and expropriating lands for Ottawa's greenbelt – even as suburban opposition hampered full implementation.Footnote 95 The government rewarded the FDC by passing the National Capital Act (1958). The legislation gave the federal planning authority, renamed the National Capital Commission (NCC), new powers over real estate management, planning and expropriation, new resources. Moreover, the NCC absorbed the NCPS and its staff, and under recommendation from a parliamentary committee, the NCC's annual budget was doubled.Footnote 96 And beginning in 1953, at the urging of Louis St Laurent, the federal Department of Public Works which maintained responsibility for construction of federal buildings, developed new administrative systems to meet the federal government's growing demand for modern office buildings.Footnote 97 As a result of these legislative changes and new financial resources, from 1957 to 1963, under John Diefenbaker's Conservative government, the NCC was able to implement major aspects of the Plan.Footnote 98
The NCC exercised these new powers aggressively. On 17 April 1962, the federal cabinet sanctioned the ‘acquisition by the National Capital Commission, without the consent of the owners’ of all the properties on LeBreton Flats.Footnote 99 With only 24 hours notice, 270 affected owners were notified by mail of the pending public announcement.Footnote 100 The mixed-use, largely French-Canadian and Irish working-class neighbourhood was being expropriated in order to make way for a massive government office complex centred around a new Department of National Defence headquarters. At a cost of $17 million, 53 acres of the Flats would be expropriated as part of the new dream of making ‘the capital into a showcase for the nation’ in time for Canada's centennial in 1967.Footnote 101 Added to the adjacent rail yards being secured by the NCC, and to the 29 acres the NCC planned to reclaim from Nepean Bay, the total footprint of the urban renewal site would reach 153 acres.
Only days after the expropriation notice had gone out to homeowners, the minister of public works announced a ‘spectacular government development’ to correct the ‘real eyesore’ the Flats had become. Altogether, the federal government planned to spend $70 million on 10 government buildings to be completed in time for the centennial.Footnote 102 Newspaper coverage of the minister's announcement was positive as the expropriation would mean an end to the ‘unsightly junk piles, rundown commercial buildings, and better housing for some of their unfortunate neighbours’.Footnote 103 The proposed office development on LeBreton Flats would provide six million square feet of new office space − of which one million square feet would be used by the new National Defence headquarters (NDHQ). The new NDHQ would help provide support for the pending reorganization of the army, navy and air force into a single command and ‘make a significant contribution to fostering the drive and enthusiasm for these new defence goals’. In total, with a future development of two million square feet on the western end of the building site, the massive complex would eventually have room for 18,000 employees.Footnote 104
The building not only met the functional requirements of the newly amalgamated military administration, the NDHQ would become an important symbol of the centrality of national defence to the post-war nation.Footnote 105 Rising 67 feet higher than the Parliament Hill's Peace Tower, the building would tower over other buildings in the government district (thus breaking a longstanding by-law limiting buildings to the height of the Peace Tower).Footnote 106 The proximity of the proposed NDHQ war towers to Parliament Hill's Peace Tower was also a twisted reminder of the state's most violent acts: war, displacement and urban renewal. The military constructs used to expropriate for the NDHQ were equally an ode to war. Such post-war urban renewal projects, Klemek argues, were ‘conceived and executed as a kind of frontier action, drawing red battle lines around entire districts and neighborhoods, advancing against blight, imposing form’.Footnote 107 And in the wake of the announced redevelopment, the NCC sub-contracted a small army of professional assessors and real-estate experts to survey each individual property and resident of the Flats.Footnote 108 Far from being static documents, these judgments mobilized the federal juridical-legal apparatus and helped provide a rationale for the dispossession of the Flats.
Federal expropriations left the city reeling. Altogether, the three largest federal projects in the national capital involved 207.8 acres in the city's core, an amount that was more than twice the acreage of combined development projects in the cities of Montreal, Toronto and Halifax.Footnote 109 The expropriations significantly worsened housing conditions, and as the city clerk noted to the provincial minister in charge of urban affairs, the expropriations ‘being implemented daily’ placed ‘very unusual pressure’ on housing conditions.Footnote 110 Ottawa's recalcitrant and combative Mayor Charlotte Whitton, having reversed her earlier enthusiasm for federal involvement, directed city staff to prepare a special report to document the housing crisis created by the federal government's post-war construction programme in the national capital.Footnote 111 City council and Mayor Whitton had taken issue with the secrecy and heavy-handed tactics involved in the federal government's urban renewal projects. However, Whitton would put this critique aside to continue to lobby the federal government for ‘immediate provision of more low rental housing for the city’.Footnote 112 Federal incursions in ‘slum clearance’ provided municipal leaders and city officials with an argument for asking the provincial and federal governments to fast track the approval process for joint provincial-federal housing funding programmes.Footnote 113 In the face of this extensive lobby, the NCC reiterated its hands-off approach to the housing question, noting that it had no plans for any housing projects, and was unlikely to consider any action on this front. Like the minister of public works, NCC general manager Eric Thrift responded dismissively to the municipal concerns, noting there was ‘little pressure or concern’ on housing in view of ‘the comparatively heavy and progressive expropriation’ undertaken by the NCC. As an extra insult to hopeful city officials, Thrift remarked that the NCC had ‘little land available or likely to be available’ for housing projects, despite being the area's largest single landowner.Footnote 114
The NCC's ongoing reluctance to accept responsibility for Ottawa's housing crisis pushed civic leaders, such as Mayor Whitton, to continue to sour on the federal government's promise of a new capital. Immediately after her defeat in the 1964 mayoral election, Whitton made a spirited attack against the NCC, charging them with being a land speculator: of expropriating land, ‘mixing it up a little’ and reselling the reassembled parcels for profit. Whitton, in her characteristically bombastic style, claimed NCC expropriations were ‘a brutal invasion and disregard of civil rights’.Footnote 115 Urban development, she maintained, required new housing, and the NCC urban renewal scheme for LeBreton Flats did not meet this criterion, nor did it address the needs of Ottawa's residents.Footnote 116 Moreover, she was also concerned with the spatial distribution of housing projects, noting that she would not ‘place (housing) miles from people's work’; rather, she would locate new, affordable housing ‘in older neighbourhoods where there would be the least disruption to family life’.Footnote 117 The NCC's involvement in urban planning, the ex-mayor claimed, especially in the case of the Flats, put large-scale beautification of the capital ahead of the pressing housing needs of Ottawa's residents.Footnote 118
Proposed NDHQ, July 1967
Source: Briefing slides, National Defence Headquarters Planning Group, NALC, OS0067 1B/DAP-30, 1985–171.
Rubble and ruin on LeBreton Flats, July 1965
Source: Briefing slides, National Defence Headquarters Planning Group, DND Collection, NLAC, OS0067 1B/DAP-30, 1985–171.
Federal aspirations for urban renewal overrode these local concerns, and the preference for slum clearance was replayed in a later NFB film, Capital on the Ottawa. One of the key sequences of the 1967 film features the demolition of early nineteenth-century row housing. Juxtaposed with a newly built modern office tower, where white-collar commuters wait patiently in straight, organized lines for the bus to arrive – in a vast, open green space – this sequence provides evidence of the prescription of slum pathology. The grief imposed on Ottawa's residents by its lack of planning, the viewer is told, will be alleviated by creating segregated and scientifically determined districts for housing and industry in the suburbs, connected by the ‘key commodity vehicle’: the automobile.Footnote 119 In the open fields of the outer areas of the city sprout contained administrative spaces and placid commutes to suburban homes, where tempers are cool and dinners are hot.
Yet, while demand for new office buildings remained high, the vast federal building programme of the 1950s and 1960s was beginning to disintegrate.Footnote 120 Stagflation had set in, and as part of the battle against inflation, a federal-provincial agreement was implemented to limit public spending on public works projects.Footnote 121 Under pressure from the Treasury Board, ND opted for a cheaper building being planned for the Department of Transport at Confederation Square, thus assuring itself of capturing one of the last ‘crown-jewels’ of the federal building programme.Footnote 122 Faced with rising fiscal pressure, the disintegration of the post-war urban reform consensus and the unravelling of Keynesian urbanism, the project collapsed. Urban renewal on the Flats the official line now stated would be ‘held for future Government buildings and private sector development’.Footnote 123
Conclusion
The post-war state, in full expansion, bestowed the NCC with considerable authority to transform the landscapes of power in the national capital. Without a care for the past, local history, municipal objections or the pressing housing needs of Ottawa's residents, the NCC acted swiftly to buy up and level the Flats to make way for the National Defence Headquarters. By 1965, the last buildings were demolished, and an era ended with a clean scar: the rubble and ruin of expropriation. The streets of the Flats had fallen silent, and in short time, the expropriation was exposed as a gigantic disaster. Despite the ambitious expropriation, the Flats stood in fallow for the next 40 years – a testament to the tragedy of the modernist dream-image.
The emphasis on British and American influences within urban history has overlooked the origins and implications of French reconstruction policy, planning models and institutions on Canadian urban planning. In the post-war period capital planning was not a result of ‘noblesse oblige’ but rather of anti-democratic planning practices developed during World War II. As a senior bureaucrat during the fascist Vichy regime, Jacques Gréber helped develop the architecture of technocratic, centralized and autocratic urbanism. This coherent and codified planning approach was later imported to Canada during his tenure as principal planner for the NCPS. Similarly film and propaganda, closely integrated with state policies and practices of urban renewal, were also redeployed to foster support for and eliminate public opposition to urban renewal in the capital city. In the quest for an ideal post-war urban dream, the authoritarian disposition of national urban renewal on the Flats – like elsewhere in the capital – was too easily overlooked.
When Gréber, from atop the Peace Tower, proclaimed that a far-sighted plan would correct the city's disorder he echoed France 41 and Vichy's programme for a new healthy social order. Ottawa would be a clean, modern showcase of the effectiveness of modern planning, an ideal-model used to promote technocratic urban renewal across the nation. LeBreton Flats was thrown into this maelstrom. Modernist capital planners had deemed the Flats as a dangerous, ‘blighted’ slum, unfit for the order required by a modern national capital. The messy lives of the residents of LeBreton Flats were unsuited to the rapid pace of the state-initiated modernization Plan for the National Capital. The working-class, industrial district would make way for a grand project, and the fast-moving imagery of film helped sell the rapid transformation of the post-war capital. The proposed NDHQ war towers were an iconic reflection of the aspirations for a sanitized, modern national capital (even if they had been completed) left a lasting demonstration of the failure of this vision. In this post-war episode, the NFB and the NCC provide complementary stories, redeploying practices developed during World War II: the renewal of LeBreton Flats was supported by planning techniques perfected in Vichy France, and fortified with Cold War rhetoric. Acting in tandem, the NCC and the NFB contributed to the dramatic character of state-led urban Keynesian planning. Tragically, in the remaking of this urban landscape, military practices, film propaganda and the (masked) ideological underpinnings of urban renewal were used to bypass democratic opposition. In their quest to promote these (failed) modernist dreams for the national capital, federal capital planners displayed a rather shocking willingness to overlook the authoritarian tendencies of liberal modernist planning.
