Introduction
For over a century, the neighbourhood of LeBreton Flats in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada was dominated by milling and lumber industries that harnessed the impressive hydro-power of the Chaudière Falls. Taverns, light manufacturing, craft production, foundries and affordable housing were all interspersed in the mixed, working-class district strung along the Ottawa River. In the post-war period, modernist planners, working under direction of a master plan for reconstruction of the national capital, labelled LeBreton Flats as an undesirable ‘slum’. Real-estate surveyors would deem the Flats as an ‘inharmonious development’ with ‘a lack of pride and ownership’.Footnote 1 In April 1962, residents were notified that their neighbourhood would be flattened to make way for a massive government office complex in time for the 1967 Canadian centennial.Footnote 2 The archival photographs and reports of the expropriation reports (1944 to 1970) exemplify how national capital planners, real-estate professionals and urban renewal proponents relied on the idea of the concept of ‘natural’ progress to justify the project. Federal planners appealed to both the material and metaphysical dimensions of urban life on LeBreton Flats in order to justify their urban renewal project. The dominant view of these experts reflected the transatlantic planning consensus that viewed crowded central city districts as dirty, unhealthy, disordered ‘slums’ that needed to be removed in order to stem further infection of the city's moral and physical fabric.Footnote 3 Yet, despite this extensive attempt to remake the Flats into a national landscape of power, vestiges of the industrial staples and manufacturing trade, as well as less salubrious users such as squatters and scrap-dealers, continued to find imaginative uses for the expropriated properties on the Flats. This article catalogues, categorizes and interprets counter-images – drawn from government reports and expropriation files – to shed light on the social and political limits of the promise of post-war urbanism. It aims to disrupt the progressive view of decline and renewal on LeBreton Flats held by urban planners and urban renewal boosters by using, in the first place, Walter Benjamin's methodological approach to historical fragments and, in the second, David Harvey's understanding of ‘creative destruction’.Footnote 4
First, this article proposes that Walter Benjamin offers novel ways to evaluate critically the history of North American urban renewal. While much of his writing is ‘beyond categorization’, Benjamin's graphic approach to the study of urban history deployed a topographical imagination to retell the story of the city. Retrieved through flânerie in urban locales such as the glass and iron enclosures of Paris’ urban passages, Benjamin collected the ‘material traces and spaces of the past’ from archival and documentary sources, and more generally from the pile of debris of capitalist consumption and production.Footnote 5 His collection, cataloguing, categorizing and interpretation of everyday urban life through photographs, curiosities, toys, quotes, notices, placards, bills and ‘sign-boards’, embraced the ‘thingness’ of cities.Footnote 6 In this interpretation of Benjamin's writing, his attention to fragments of urban life, and in particular its ‘deteriorating remnants’, rescued from the wreckage of the capitalist past and exposed against each other, can be used to rub ‘against the grain of semantics of progress’.Footnote 7 In Berlin Chronicle, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project, Benjamin's project is as much about illuminating the limitless range of possibility of modern life as well as the social and political forces that impoverish that experience.Footnote 8 He is intimately interested in how the minutiae of everyday life can be used to draw out the contradictions between the material dimensions (consumer goods, technology, architecture) and the metaphysical aspects (possibility, liberation) of urban life. In distilling the nature and logic of capitalist urbanization, he exposes the contradictory facets of everyday urban life, unsettles the reductionist logic of state-led planning and simultaneously illuminates the promise and decline of capitalist consumption and production.Footnote 9 It is this method this article applies.
Second, this article argues that Benjamin's own interest in the contradictions of capitalist production of urban space can be interpreted in tandem with urban political economy to provide an additional explanatory dimension of the process of ‘creative destruction’ on LeBreton Flats. As Joseph Schumpeter argued, the guiding principle of capitalism is recurrent innovation. Under the ‘perennial gale’ of ‘creative destruction’, new products, new organizations and new desires are ‘incessantly revolutionizing the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one incessantly creating a new one’.Footnote 10 The concept of value creation and destruction in the urban built environment, as David Harvey explains, is a result of the contradictory tendency between the need to produce and the need to absorb surplus with cycles of disinvestment and devalorization in property as the norm under capitalist urbanization. In looking for a place to park excess capital, invested capital is literally stuck or fixed in a site and in its bricks and mortar, which acts as a barrier to further accumulation. Devaluation of the built environment is thus necessary to resolve the problem of the ‘spatial fix’ as a necessary starting point for reinvestment.Footnote 11
Although Benjamin is writing about the refuse and debris of nineteenth-century urban life, the rapid and dramatic changes proposed by post-war urban renewal exhibit similar contradictions. The built environment and lived spaces of the late 1950s and early 1960s are rife with the material residue of the promise of inter-war urbanism: they embody the dream (and limitations) of an urban future based on suburban expansion and central city urban renewal.Footnote 12 The expropriation files of the National Capital Commission's (NCC)Footnote 13 – the federal authority responsible for planning Canada's national capital region – offer a rich archival source of photographs, planning reports, property assessments and neighbourhood surveys from which to disrupt official claims of natural neighbourhood change. The process of representing the Flats as an unnatural ‘slum’ began decades before the expropriation in 1962. This article pries loose the detailed appraisals of each property filed by real-estate firms to revisit the discursive and materialist rational deployed to justify the demolition of housing and industry on LeBreton Flats from 1944 to 1970. This article mimics Benjamin's approach by bending down into the scrap heap of photographic and textual archives to uncover fragments of the vibrant social life in a neighbourhood that federal planners had deemed ‘blighted’ and in need of complete reconstruction. The collection, cataloguing, categorizing and interpretation of these remnants of capitalist production and consumption (archival photographs, planning reports and government documents), in a non-linear fashion, provides the material evidence to contest the narrow, mechanistic and rationalistic limits of official notions of progress on LeBreton Flats. The evidence presented through the historical geography of LeBreton Flats demonstrates how Benjamin's ideas, deployed in conjunction with urban political economy, offers a methodological device to unlock the contradictions of capitalism and to challenge the narrative of progress, and to retell the story of LeBreton Flats.
The form of this article is as follows. First, it reviews the narrative of slumologists who, through racialized and class-based assumptions, acted to refashion entire districts, such as LeBreton Flats, into new urban landscapes as part of post-war urban renewal. Second, the article offers photographic and textual evidence, drawn from expropriation files, to the counter-narrative to the official rent-based determination of urban decline. The article concludes by exposing, through these various fragments, the ongoing urban vibrancy of the declining industry on the Flats and the incomplete nature of the state-led smoothing of urban industrial landscapes.
Post-war reconstruction and ‘excess condemnation’
Urban planning in post-war North America adopted the ‘transatlantic urban renewal consensus’ that favoured the demolition of congested and crowded neighbourhoods.Footnote 14 As part of the post-war effort to tackle housing supply and social redistribution, central city neighbourhoods in Europe and North America were subject to systematic ‘slum clearance’ programmes.Footnote 15 In the reformist imagination of social scientists, politicians, planners and urban reformers, central city working-class neighbourhoods were ‘blots’ on the map that need to be surgically removed to stop further infection of the city.Footnote 16 It was also, as David Harvey argues, a way to overcome the problem of the ‘spatial fix’ whereby invested capital in the built environment gradually garners lowering rates of return, necessitating the devaluation of land, infrastructure and housing stock as a starting point for investment and new accumulation to be produced from the built environment.Footnote 17 Yet, Canadian urban renewal was less audacious than in the United States and Europe. It was limited by several domestic factors: an ideologically driven reluctance to engage the state in public housing, a lack of federal funding for urban renewal, a relatively limited role for the federal government in urban planning and the constitutionally mandated provincial oversight of municipalities.Footnote 18 Despite such limitations, a nascent urban planning profession launched and completed several high-profile urban renewal projects, such as in Halifax where the city expropriated the black residents of Africville, or in Toronto's Regent Park where the federal government experimented with large-scale social housing projects.Footnote 19 As with other locales in Europe and North America, the post-war plan for Canada's capital was driven by a desire to renew the city centre and to increase property values in the central business district (CBD).Footnote 20 However, Ottawa's urban renewal programme held a unique role for the Canadian federal government. Unlike spatially delineated and project-based urban renewal efforts in Toronto and Halifax, the federal government, through its national capital planning authority, would play a lead role in accelerating the process of property re-evaluation throughout the entire capital region. Federal planners designed and built massive government office complexes in the city's central residential neighbourhoods and provided land and subsidies for residential and industrial development in the suburbs.Footnote 21 No other Canadian jurisdiction was subject to such extensive and direct federal involvement in land purchasing and land banking.
The direction for the federal government's vision can be attributed to French architect and planner Jacques Gréber. His interest in American villes ouvrières and his experience as a powerful urban planning functionary for the Vichy regime contributed to the unique approach to regional planning that combined French and Anglo-American planning traditions.Footnote 22 The result of his efforts, the 1950 Plan for the National Capital prescribed a restructured central core, decentralized industry, the expansion of regional parks, green spaces (including a greenbelt) and an extensive parkway system. This massive urban realignment was reinforced by the representations in planning reports of Ottawa's central neighbourhoods and industrial districts as unnatural havens of immorality, ill-health and ‘blight’. Gréber devoted considerable efforts to identifying key deficiencies in the CBD that prevented the city organism from being healthy, such as the substandard ‘slum’ housing and noxious industry that infected the city's central districts.Footnote 23
More than simply being preoccupied with questions of morality and health, the state-led intervention was also aimed at increasing land values. The ‘blighted areas, congested and unsanitary housing’, Gréber added, were located in sections of the city with low land values.Footnote 24 Moreover, added the federal planning authority:
The land value plan of Ottawa, Hull and vicinity is an excellent guide for the planner; its direct relation to the urgent problems to be solved is obvious: railroad situations, blighted areas, congested and unsanitary housing, are clearly incident to sections of the cities where land values are comparatively low. Improvement of such sections is therefore made possible, and, by fostering land revaluation, becomes a profitable operation.Footnote 25
As lead consultant for the newly created National Capital Planning Service (NCPS), Gréber urged the National Capital Planning Committee (NCPC), the body charged with the oversight of Gréber's NCPS, to follow the example of several western European countries by engaging in ‘excess condemnation’. The practice of targeting low-income communities for a land-assembly programme, as the Secretary of the NCPC later argued, had been successfully implemented elsewhere and had the additional advantage of appreciating immediate and bordering land values:
In countries like France, England and Germany, by applying the principles of ‘excess condemnation’, that is the requirement of lands in excess of actual needs, it has been possible to effect many improvements and to rapidly repay their costs from the resale of such excess lands at enhanced values and from the appreciated assessable values of the land bordering on the improvements.Footnote 26
Rather than a sub-dimension of its urban renewal plans, land revaluation was a key aspect of the urban renewal plan as well as its public relations campaign. As an NCPC press release noted in 1949, ‘the project is economically sound because of the great increase in land values which will result from the improvements’.Footnote 27 The NCPC and the NCPS were clearly interested in engaging in the process of equalizing rents across the city by targeting the lower rents in low-income districts such as LeBreton Flats.
In the decade following the release of Plan for the National Capital, the federal government carried out signature components of the Plan such as extensive land purchases. In 1958 the process was accelerated when the federal government created a new entity, the NCC. With new legislative powers over land management, and a doubling of its annual budget, the federal planning authority was now equipped to engage in large-scale land banking and assembly.Footnote 28 The Commission's reach extended into suburban lands. From 1944 to 1970, sites in the urban fringe were assembled, prepared and made available by the NCC for industries to relocate.Footnote 29 Although the fixed capital of public services, such as sewers, water, streets and streetcars, were already established in older districts, new arenas of accumulation were being sought out.Footnote 30 In short, as Harvey has argued, the restless formation and reformation of Ottawa's urban landscape was an expression of the inner contradiction between the fixity and motion of invested capital. Urban renewal would allow for the systemic devaluation of central city land, assist the spatial relocation of work into suburban industrial parks and begin the process of revaluation, thus freeing fixed capital and enabling the capture of new land rents from expropriated lands. In this process, representations of LeBreton Flats as an unnatural slum – fragments of which will be revisited in the following section – were essential, if not central, to the state-led process of urban change.
Subject: LeBreton Flats
On 17 April 1962, the NCC recommended that the federal cabinet approve the ‘acquisition by the National Capital Commission, without the consent of the owners’ of the properties on LeBreton Flats in order to meet the objective of building a large government complex.Footnote 31 As part of the expropriation, the NCC sub-contracted local real-estate firms to survey each individual property in the neighbourhood.Footnote 32 Working block-by-block and building-by-building, professional appraisers photographed the exterior of each individual property, sketched the interior layout of each unit and made observations on existing uses and conditions for the NCC Property Division. The reports also analysed individual lots and properties according to their function within the neighbourhood and the larger urban context. These accounts, conducted by real-estate appraisers, overwhelmingly projected a narrative of neighbourhood decline and urban blight. Appraisers argued that the ‘spotty mixture of commercial, industrial and housing development scattered throughout the area’Footnote 33 created ‘heavy traffic, noise, dust or noxious odours, an atmosphere not homogenous with residential use of any type’.Footnote 34 The ‘inharmonious development’ of the Flats,Footnote 35 in particular the conversion of row houses into multiple-family occupancy, led many professionals to claim that ‘the area does not represent a desirable community’.Footnote 36 For these appraisers, federally induced change was necessary to empty what they perceived as an undesirable and unregulated zone taking up crucial land directly adjacent to the CBD. The judgment of these real-estate experts helped embed the stigma of the Flats as a slum into the public record and supported the impulse for radical urban reconstruction of the urban-industrial neighbourhoods by underwriting the script of neighbourhood decline.
Map of LeBreton Flats, 1936
Source: Ottawa Room, City of Ottawa Public Library.
Street scene, LeBreton Flats
Source: Library and Archives Canada/National Capital Commission fonds/RG 34, Accession 1979–80/128, box 15, file F-10–6. © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2014).
Like other Canadian central city neighbourhoods, the number of residents on LeBreton Flats had been falling since the early 1940s. By the 1950s, LeBreton Flats and the adjacent Chaudière District had ceased to experience industrial growth. Residents were more likely to be employed as clerks in the civil service than as industrial workers in the few remaining mills.Footnote 37 Yet, even as the old lumber town became a city dominated by the expansion of the post-war Keynesian state, LeBreton Flats remained a mixed-use ‘community of the workingman’.Footnote 38 In 1961, the year before expropriation, the population of the Flats had actually increased by over 10 per cent to 2,292 residents, and housing was dominated by long-term tenant occupancy, pointing to a neighbourhood with a vibrant internal fabric.Footnote 39
Industrial debris
Using Walter Benjamin's time-distorting methodology, the following section revisits the expropriation files to recapture and juxtapose these micro-views views of everyday life on the Flats with those of appraisers, planners and state officials. In Benjamin's approach, the goods displayed within friperies, or second-hand shops, offer dramatic counter-images. As the residues of the promise of capitalist consumption, the discarded objects located within rub against the grain of progress. Fittingly to Benjamin's interest in the rusting fragments of capitalist consumption, a large number of garages and car parts depots were located on the Flats leading one appraisal to note that:
In spite of its central location in the City of Ottawa, this area has never been dynamic commercially. A number of commercial and industrial type businesses have located in the area over years, mainly of a type which do not require prestige locations but need relatively cheap land close to the center of the city. The area is almost 100% built up with old houses and commercial businesses such as; exterminators, junk yards, machine shops, lumber yards, factories and warehouses, etc.Footnote 40
As the Flats continued to de-industrialize in the post-war decades, collectors of ruin such as Federal Scrap Dealers of Canada increased their presence in the neighbourhood, providing visual reminders of the texture of decay. Created during World War II, Federal's activities consisted of ‘transporting, sorting and delivering’ ‘tonnes and tonnes of materials’ to ‘war-time factories’.Footnote 41 After the war, Federal continued to occupy land owned by the federal planning authority to dump the debris of government demolition and construction, which it collected as part of its contract with the federal Department of Public Works (DPW).Footnote 42 However, Federal's collecting, sorting and shipping of relics did not fit with the neat, smooth capital national planners imagined for the post-war capital. Federal was no longer welcome to operate its friperies in such close proximity to Parliament Hill. Over 20 attempts were made to encourage Federal's Director and Manager J.A. Cronier to ‘move his lumber and junk’.Footnote 43 These administrative efforts faced resistance on a number of fronts. As the proposed relocation from city centre would entail a substantial increase in costs for the firm, Federal was unwilling to acquiesce to state-led demands for a smoothing over of the space.Footnote 44 It continued to use the Flats to dump the government's construction and demolition debris – much to the consternation of federal officials.Footnote 45
Given the circumstances, and the objections of Federal, the Chief Architect solicited the federal police force to remove the company from the property.Footnote 46 However, Federal had a political ally. The local member of parliament, J.A. Pinard, who had originally secured permission from the Minister of Public Works for Federal to use the site, lobbied on behalf of his constituent. Pinard wrote to the minister pleading that the work of Federal Scrap Dealers had been ‘100% part of the war effort’. He argued that by providing raw materials to the war factories under control of the Ministry of Munitions and Supply, and that because of the firm's service to the nation, special consideration should be given to allow ongoing use of the site. Despite objection from his fellow Liberal, the Minister insisted that Federal vacate immediately to allow Public Works to clean up the site. As officials lamented, Cronier had still not cleared ‘the stored materials such as a large quantity of second hand brick, steel beams, etc.’ or ‘the broken bottle chute and pile of broken glass’.Footnote 47 More egregiously, noted the Superintendent of Government Buildings, the firm continued to be active in ‘buying refuse collected door-to-door by the different fripiers in the city’ with the result that ‘motor vehicles with out-of-town licenses’ were ‘unloading and pilling second-hand 2 × 4 lumber’ and ‘utilizing the narrow strip of land between the road and rock cliff for parking of old motor trucks and discarded vehicles’.Footnote 48
Despite new orders to vacate the property from the Minister and the Federal Court, and a stated intention to co-operate, Federal continued to occupy the site. In the summer of 1945, Federal erected a ‘new modern warehouse’ on the property once owned by the Bronson Company, a once powerful and prosperous lumbering concern. Federal also occupied a second site, recently expropriated by the DPW, which it used to dispose of a ‘considerable quantity of second hand lumber, bricks and several steel smoke stacks’.Footnote 49 By taking ‘possession of some 500 feet which runs parallel to the Ottawa River’ at the foot of Parliament Hill, one letter noted, Federal ‘was in effect expanding the realm of the operation’.Footnote 50 This expansionary activity led the Chief Architect to ‘recommend the Departmental Photographers take pictures’. These photographs offer a fascinating visual record of the ruins of the war effort, with the gothic Parliament buildings looming on the cliffs above.
Federal scrap-dealers of Canada
Source: Library and Archives Canada/Department of Public Works fonds/RG 11, vol. 3503, file 12820-12 (PT A). © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2014).
Federal Scrap continued to stymie federal regulation of urban space and idealized urban future by storing relics of the past that were collected door-to-door by various fripiers in the city. Cronier used his political allies to extend his tenure on the Flats and secured considerable support from thousands who petitioned the Minister of Public Works to allow Federal to occupy the site for another year. This list of supporters is fascinating: a cross-section of the occupations of the residents of the Flats and Eastview (another francophone working-class area); labourers, housewives, clerks, salesmen, truck-drivers, foremen, painters, waitresses and mechanics – most of whom had French-Canadian names.Footnote 51 It is a telling correspondence between the objects and people deemed surplus and no longer wanted on the Flats as they and their professions did not fit with the image for the post-war capital, its emerging civil service class, and nuclear family ideals that accompanied post-war urban renewal.Footnote 52 While the government attempted to push these relics out of sight, the area's residents and workers held on to a view of their neighbourhood as a working landscape, and of debris as having value. The materials collected door-to-door, and through demolition contracts, took on a new half-life, trash given value through collection. Federal's recovery of the ruins of industry reminded the government of the failed promise of its modern spectacle of a capital city and provides a counter-view of the capital as a working industrial landscape ripe with the visual imperfections of productive landscapes.
‘See-saw’ and the recalibration of urban geography
Several streets on LeBreton Flats remained almost exclusively occupied by light and heavy industrial users including a number of foundries such as the Victoria Foundry.Footnote 53 In business for 118 years, its shop works consisted mainly of custom foundry and machine work in the manufacture of new products and the maintenance and repair of existing machinery for customers such as the Federal Government, the City of Ottawa and various building supply companies.Footnote 54 The 1965 real-estate appraisals of Victoria Foundry – assessing both the value of the property and the associated costs of relocation – offers a fragmentary record of the life-world of the plant. The valuations from competing appraisal firms offer insight into the process of devaluing the residue of production 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’, or the ‘very ancient’ fixtures such as ‘shafting, pulleys, belts that jointly provide the power of the few pieces of machinery’.Footnote 55 The somewhat contradictory valuation reports substantiate other residue such as the ‘cupolas, blowers, brass furnaces’ to be ‘economically worth removing for re-installation elsewhere’.Footnote 56 The very heart of the plant's production, the forges and ovens, were, according to one appraisal, far from obsolete and still had ‘a good proportion of their active life remaining in them’.Footnote 57 As another appraisal noted, the overall structure ‘had adequate utility and physical stamina for the next 25 years’.Footnote 58 Despite its ongoing functionality, the foundry was completely devalued in the report's conclusion. Hauntingly evoking Harvey, appraisers argued that a new suburban site would increase efficiency, and this rent-based argument was reinforced by an analysis that relocation would offer a new visually compelling modern shell on the suburban fringe.
Manual charging of cupola, Victoria Foundry, LeBreton Flats
Source: Library and Archives Canada/National Capital Commission fonds/RG 34, Accession 1979–80/128, box 10, F-4-7. © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2014).
The logic of devaluing building stock that had been adapted for other uses is even more telling of the impulse to raze the symbols of decline. One such property at the corner of Booth and Duke included manufacturers such as International Paint, National Applicators, Connor Washer, Atlas Hockey; small-scale craft work such as cabinet maker Manfred Krusher, the shops of Cambell Fibreglass and Presley Painters; and various moving and storage companies, such as Boyd Moving and Storage. Yet, such mixed and creative reuse of buildings was not, in the realm of real-estate appraisers, perceived as optimal use. It was, as another appraiser noted, reason to call for a complete ‘upheaval to change the character of the neighbourhood’.Footnote 59
It was not only the ‘dead labour’ of machines evaluated in the appraisals: ‘living labour’ would also face the scrutiny of accounting practices – including evidence stating the financial advantages of locating industrial production so closely to affordable housing.Footnote 60 Specifically, the proximity of housing was identified as ‘a boon to some of the heavy industries such as foundries and paper mills since the low cost living accommodations provides housing for the economical labour needed for their operations’.Footnote 61 Assessors added that Victoria Foundry, in one of the ‘most central locations in the Ottawa-Hull area’, was ideally located in close proximity to the ‘source of semi-skilled labour who find it difficult to commute to the periphery of the city’.Footnote 62 Relocation, assessors noted, would inconvenience workers by increasing the cost of commuting, result ‘in higher labour costs’ for the firm and impose additional costs on the foundry's customer base.Footnote 63
Red Line taxi, LeBreton Flats
Source: Library and Archives Canada/National Capital Commission fonds/RG 34, Accession 1979/80/128, box 12, file F-6-6. © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2014)
The large contingent of workers at Red Line Taxi would also face the increased costs associated with relocation of the taxi garage and dispatch.Footnote 64 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 provided easy access to major downtown thoroughfares and placed drivers conveniently within one and a half miles of Union Station and the luxury hotel Chateau Laurier – from which 60 per cent of business was produced.Footnote 65 Due to NCC mandated zoning rules, Red Line would no longer able to operate in the CBD, and the firm received $236,000 as part of its forced relocation to a site near the new suburban railway station.Footnote 66 While Red Line received compensation, the additional labour costs associated with the new suburban location would be borne by the individual drivers. Just as the move was being completed, the company changed its wage relationship with drivers. The company abandoned salaried remuneration and instead rented out cars and sold gas to the drivers.Footnote 67 Additional mileage costs would no longer be borne by the company but by the taxi drivers – in essence externalizing the increasing operating costs to the drivers. In short, relocation of industry and workplaces from the city centre would alter travel and living arrangements of the firm's workers.Footnote 68
The desire creatively to destroy functional landscapes gives credence to Neil Smith's argument that the recalibration and equalization of rents across territory is a significant geographical feature of the production of urban space.Footnote 69 The NCC played an active role in purchasing and assembling land for new suburban industrial parks.Footnote 70 As one appraiser noted, these cheap tracts offered the potential to create value, thus reinforcing the logic to relocate the working landscape of the Flats: ‘With regard to both industrial and housing construction in the area, it should be emphasized that many sites already serviced are presently available and larger tracts of land in the marginal areas between the main built up districts and the proposed greenbelt are available for development as soon as demand increases.’Footnote 71 While the narrative of decline had lent legitimacy to the urban renewal project, local boosters promoted the project as a means to encourage city-centre businesses and to extend the tax base.Footnote 72 The editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen called on the city to emulate Montreal and to construct major cultural facilities in ‘slum’ districts with an eye on attracting hotel, apartment and restaurant construction in areas that were formerly ‘derelict’.Footnote 73 As part of this reshaping of the regional geography, sites in the unclaimed lands of the fringe, more tenable to industrial production, were assembled and made available by the NCC for that express purpose.Footnote 74 New ground rents would be created in formerly undervalued suburban land. In the city centre, ‘fixed’ capital would be liberated through urban renewal and clean-slate demolition of buildings and infrastructure. In the ‘see-saw’ battle to equalize land rents across the city, workers would be caught in the squeeze of rent equalization.
Social life-world
The property surveys commandeered by the NCC underwrote the dominant narratives of post-war urban renewal. 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’.Footnote 75 Yet, this socio-technical process would erase the working landscape of the past, obscure the French-Canadian and Irish background of the majority of the working-class residents and overlook the growing community of Italian and Lebanese residents that had recently settled on the Flats.Footnote 76 In fact, contrary to reports marking the area as transient, the Flats was dominated by long-term occupancy.Footnote 77 For many of these residents, expropriation and demolition would sever community and family ties – an especially crushing blow to existing social networks. Among these long-time residents, widower Mrs Cora Albert had lived on the Flats for 36 years, 26 of those at 119–25 Sherwood. Her family, two daughters and a son, rented the three other units of the four-unit row house.Footnote 78 The family had recently undertaken several renovations including a new furnace, new electrical and new plumbing, a new roof and new verandas. Despite compensation of $45,000, Mrs Cora Albert expressed her displeasure: ‘I’m not too happy to move because this is my home and my family is all happily settled here.’Footnote 79 Yet, such sentiments about home and belonging were not part of the valuation process.
119–25 Sherwood, LeBreton Flats
Source: Library and Archives Canada/National Capital Commission fonds/RG 34, Accession1979–80/128, box 15, file F-10-2. © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2014).
For many appraisers, federally induced change was necessary to empty what they perceived as a noxious, undesirable and unregulated zone taking up crucial land directly adjacent to the CBD. Still, this representation was far from complete: other reports portrayed the Flats in a more positive light, and these fragments display the ongoing vibrancy of the neighbourhood. As ‘one of Ottawa's oldest sections’,Footnote 80 the Flats was also characterized as a neighbourhood with ‘schools and churches for all denominations within easy commuting distance’ and convenient ‘shopping facilities’.Footnote 81 With extensive bus services, one appraiser noted that ‘the neighbourhood is quite attractive from the standpoint of its proximity to the downtown shopping, office and commercial area’.Footnote 82 In the eyes of its assessors, as with those of its residents, there was more than one LeBreton Flats.
Indeed, the dynamic changes in the neighbourhood's social life were being reflected in the built environment. Individual land-owners had improved the overall condition of the building stock. As one assessor noted in his observations of 130 Fleet Street:
The couple, Italian immigrants, were anxious to buy a stake in this their newly adopted land. The price they paid would normally be considered high for the area and condition of the house. A tremendous change has taken place in the building, the back yard and the lane. The building has reverberated to the clanging of hammers, saws, chisels and paintbrushes. The yard has been converted from dust and garbage to a garden and vegetable patch and even the laneway has taken on character.
Yet, despite the seemingly positive contribution to the neighbourhood, these changes to the urban landscape were perceived as slowing down the ‘natural progression’ of the area. As another assessor noted in a report to the NCC Director of Planning and Property, rehabilitations ‘carried out by a few homeowners’ only ‘retarded the deterioration of the area as a whole’.Footnote 83 Many reports were more direct and overt characterization based on ethnic identity and blamed Italian newcomers to the area for the ‘unnatural’ upswing in property value. As an assessor noted: ‘I feel that the reason for this demand is caused by the influx of Italian immigrants in this area. For the most part the subject neighbourhood is in a period of disintegration and ripe for redevelopment and to a higher and better use.’Footnote 84
Not only were the contributions of new Italian residents of the Flats overlooked, but the lending habits and the family structure of these families were also viewed with suspicion. Real-estate assessors blamed the ‘noticeable integration of the Italian Ethnic group’ and the ‘influx of Italian immigrants in this area’ for the ‘unnatural’ increase in housing prices in the area.Footnote 85 As R.E. Assessments notes in their report to the NCC: ‘A fair proportion of the houses in the “Flats” have been purchased by Italian families and this has had the effect of pushing sale prices up due to the fact a house is often shared by two or more families. . .these families frequently pay more for a property than a typical buyer.’Footnote 86
Mortgages on the Flats were still guaranteed by neighbours, family or other personal networks, practices that pre-dated the post-war state-supported corporate finance of the housing market.Footnote 87 These ongoing practices were, in the view of expert appraisers, out of step with the post-war norms of institutional lending.Footnote 88 Moreover, many of the improvements were multiple family conversions, seen as undesirable in view of post-war Canadian housing policy that favoured detached, bank-financed and corporately built single-family homes.Footnote 89 Multiple-family or multi-use conversions, the official view stated, were a sign of the undesirability of the neighbourhood and an affront to the nuclear and non-extended, family post-war ideal.Footnote 90
The professionalized judgment of these appraisals helped embed the stigma of the Flats into the public record. The overall view presented in the reports held that the ‘lack of planning and controlled development’ had ‘resulted in the creation of a heterogeneous neighbourhood furnishing second class accommodation for residential, commercial and industrial users’.Footnote 91 The dominant representation of the Flats was of an incorrigible, deteriorating neighbourhood in need of need of massive government intervention. As appraisers King and Constam reflected in their catastrophic view of the Flats:
There are no apparent factors or trends which would tend to indicate that development would occur which would revitalize the area. It is our opinion that unless the area were completely redeveloped, no changes in character would occur and the area generally would continue to gradually deteriorate from its present unsatisfactory level.Footnote 92
The destruction of the built environment, central to further accumulation as it frees up immobilized capital, was sustained by the judgments of the real-estate appraisals. The appraisals provided part of the rationale for the expropriation and helped state actors obfuscate how the project limited the range of possibility for residents of the Flats, not the least of which was the reduction in the available stock of low-cost and affordable housing.
Disintegration
As car ownership rose rapidly in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, so did the aspirations of planners to centre the automobile as a key feature of urban renewal.Footnote 93 This promise of rapid post-war transformation around the car was central to the promotional materials produced by federal planners. In particular, film, which in Kristin Ross’ reading was the perfect medium from which to display the automobile and produce a desire for the automotive way of life, was used in Ottawa to promote urban renewal.Footnote 94 The rapid imagery of documentary film helped promote the capital's new post-war plan where factories and industrial workers would be relocated to the new suburban industrial parks developed on land assembled by the NCC, and where federal employees would escape from the city to their new suburban homes.Footnote 95 More directly on the Flats, a massive highway interchange planned for the expropriated land would lead the way to urban decongestion.
Billboard on LeBreton Flats (1964)
Source: Library and Archives Canada/National Capital Commission fonds/RG 34, Accession 1979/80/128, box 19, file F-18-3. © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2014).
This 1964 billboard on the end of a row house on Albert Street is a reminder of incomplete promise of urban renewal, but also of the importance of reconsidering the residue of decay on the Flats. Despite the determined state-sanctioned efforts to cleanse the Flats, neither the expert-based representations of natural decline, nor the dream-image of an auto-centred modernist infrastructure were enough to extinguish activity on the Flats. The abandoned relics on LeBreton Flats retained a half-life: condemned houses, closing factories and abandoned stores became an attractive playground for various unsanctioned – and often illicit – activities. Salvage, theft, fire, arson, squatting and, less dramatically, breaking and entering marked the years following the 1962 expropriation. In one such instance of transgressive activity, a routine inspection by NCC officials found that a garage was still occupied by an occupant ‘recently out of jail’ and ‘several tough looking characters’. According to the incident report, they had been using the garage to store old cars in ‘various states of demolition’. The garage, police suspected, was part of a car theft ring.Footnote 96 The partial and decaying automobile carcasses, an image of disintegration, contrasts with the advertisement ‘success’ of post-war consumption, the 1964 Pontiac (fittingly itself exposed among the boarded-up remnants of the Flats). Juxtaposed fragments help dispel the spell of automobile ownership by showing the wasted promise of the automobile as the ‘key commodity’ of post-war capitalism.Footnote 97 The everyday life of residents on the Flats would be obliterated as part of the auto-centred remake. The rubble and ruin of urban renewal and the massive roadways that would pave over the Flats provide an apt juxtaposition to this promise of the post-war car-commodity dream.
Despite the death-knell of expropriation, active everyday commercial life on the Flats continued. For example, the building at 84–90 Duke housed a store, apartments and a restaurant, Cathy's Lunch Bar, a 450 sq. ft lunch counter. With its low overhead costs, the store provided an accessible entry into commercial activity for its owners who had recently moved to Ottawa. After expropriation, sales fell dramatically, and by February 1964, only four years into a ten-year lease, the co-owner noted that sales had dropped to seven dollars a day. No longer able to stave off commercial ruin, the store and its scrapped contents were put up for auction – putting an end to their tenure on the Flats.Footnote 98 The inventory of the store provides an even closer glimpse into the mundane objects of everyday life on the Flats: dishware such as cups and saucers, plates, glasses, ice cream dishes, sundae dishes, hand baskets and milk shake glasses; pots and pans; equipment such as a coffee maker, salad table, French Fry machine, frozen food counter, meat slicer, pop-up toaster and a Hamilton-Beach milk shake machine; furniture such as stools, chairs; displays such as a food island, a pie showcase and a frozen food counter. The owners, despite an agreement to terminate their business, returned to rescue items from impending capture. They, too, tried to reclaim what they could from the ruins of the Flats.Footnote 99
In face of the impending demolition, there was a ragged retrieval and destruction of everyday objects: heaters, thermostats, cables, motors, wash-basins and hot water tanks were collected; toilets, kitchen sinks and faucets were removed and disappeared; windows broken.Footnote 100 More dramatically, a few months later, fire consumed a corner store and the adjoining used auto parts store.Footnote 101
Post-expropriation fire on LeBreton Flats
Source: Library and Archives Canada/National Capital Commission fonds/RG 34, Accession 1979/80/128, box 15, file F-10–18 © Government of Canada. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2014).
Left behind were the residual symbols of the rapid pace of post-war modernization: the television, the automobile and packaged food goods. The charred remains, worked against the grain of progress, displayed the burnt remains of post-war consumption, hinted at the failure of consumption-driven post-war urbanism, but also showcased the broken dreams of residents and workers. These images of cars, consumer goods and household commodities, both in their promising and ruined form (the burnt and looted remains of TVs and candy bars) evoked a sensation of how the post-war planning dream was a failure for many residents and ongoing users of the Flats. Their attempts to remain and to draw on its residue point to another story of the Flats: a life-world that disrupts the notion of progress, the spell of the present and the fetish of commodities.
In the wake of disintegration, the NCC's land-brokerage practices caused consternation among certain members of the local business class. Among these, the custodians of the Bronson Company were perturbed by the further effacement of their once mighty industrial prowess. The fading lumber barons were left to negotiate with the NCC over the dwindling value of their expired lumber empires.Footnote 102 In a series of letters with company President A.M. Laidlaw, long-time employee Bill Munroe displayed his clear disdain for the NCC and their expropriation of LeBreton Flats.Footnote 103 Munroe attacked NCC Chairman Lt.-General S.F. Clark and railed against its highly secretive governance structure: ‘It would appear’, Munroe noted in a letter to Laidlaw, ‘that the NCC has allowed this man to develop into a stupid overbearing bureaucrat.’ The Commissioners, charged with oversight of the NCC, Munroe noted, had little consideration of their public duty, leading to a situation whereby ‘a pushing, ambitious, senior member of the hired help’ used ‘smooth talk. . .in undertaking every job for them’.Footnote 104
In an odd twist, given their historic maltreatment by lumber barons of unskilled labourers on LeBreton Flats,Footnote 105 Munroe fused the plight of local residents with that of the decaying lumber empire. He questioned the legality of the expropriation and the secretive nature of the operation: ‘I cannot believe that the sweeping, wholesale, carelessly carried out demonstration of so called expropriation, by the N.C.C., in the Flats at Ottawa, is according to law – the expropriatees not even being told of it except by newspaper comment.’Footnote 106 Clearly, the recalcitrant industrialists of the old staples trade were upset at being excluded from the very locale they had once dominated. Munroe and Laidlaw attempted to lead an unruly coalition of the lumber workers and industrialists against the increasing power of the NCC and published a series of commentaries in the Ottawa Journal to ‘stir the pot’ and bring attention to the ‘injustice’ carried upon them.Footnote 107 Specifically, the remaining shareholders and managers of the Bronson Company argued that the vestiges of water-driven industrial production could be transformed into a picturesque hydro-power generation facility. As Munroe argued in a letter to Laidlaw: ‘The place is littered with evidence of abandoned pioneer water-power sites and equipment and all existing developments on the Ontario side, are over fifty years of age. The time is ripe for Ottawa to clean house as regards this picturesque, historic and commercially valuable feature located close to the very centre of the City.’Footnote 108 To recall Benjamin, their proposal attempted to reform vestiges of the past into new commodity forms.Footnote 109 Yet, the death bell was ringing for the local staples class. With their power waning, they would not succeed in winning special consideration from the federal government, as had earlier executives of the staples trade. Their overtures were ignored by the Board of Trade, as by most others in power, many who would profit from the large turnover of land and the building contracts to come.
Residential property owners just outside the target now faced a debris-filled wasteland and felt the stinging effect on land values. Several residents pleaded with the NCC to acquire their land in adjacent areas as part of the expropriation. Others urged the NCC to ensure its buildings were being maintained, expressing among other things concern over houses being torn down, boarded up or abandoned.Footnote 110 A recently formed Neighbourhood Improvement Committee requested that houses in the area be rehabilitated and made available as rental units.Footnote 111 The NCC acknowledged the declining land values in an internal memorandum and noted how ‘expropriations in the area have made this side of the street in particular a most undesirable place to live’.Footnote 112 Yet, although the NCC feared complaints and negative press coverage if the ‘people get stirred up’, it rejected calls for repairs and further property acquisition on the grounds that it ‘could not be economically justified’.Footnote 113 In a speech to the Ottawa Real-estate Board, the NCC General Manager, Eric Thrift, reiterated that the NCC was bound by a duty of ‘radical’ progressive change, and that such objections only stood in the way of ‘progress’:Footnote 114
The Commission, by virtue of its very functions, is a tool of change. Originally the Ottawa Improvement Commission was brought into being to bring about radical changes in the social and geographical environment which was not suitable to Canada's Capital. We were not created to preserve the ‘status quo’ – otherwise there would still be sawdust heaps and lumber piles along the length of the Rideau Canal and the Ottawa and Rideau Rivers would still run past hulking obsolete warehouses of another era.Footnote 115
The lumber piles and sawdust heaps were relics of the past, and with ‘forward thinking’, the federal planning authority was ‘embarking on an imaginative forward looking program well suited to the 1970's which, in Canada, will be a time of change and transition’.Footnote 116 This optimism about the post-war urbanism, however, was left unrealized. In the early 1970s, as the transatlantic post-war planning consensus collapsed, stagflation set in and large-scale government-sponsored building projects such as the massive government complex on the Flats were put on hold.Footnote 117
Conclusion
The state-mediated smoothing of the Flats entered every nook and cranny of urban life on LeBreton Flats. Real-estate expertise provided the rationale for expropriation, provoked the ‘creative destruction’ of urban socio-environment and legitimized the clearing away of the ‘dead weight of past’.Footnote 118 Federal planners and civic boosters hankered for the redevelopment of the Flats as a sign of progress. The expropriation and demolition had an immediate effect. Homes and industry were forcibly relocated to the suburbs as part of an extensive stretching of the process of urbanization to the outer extremities of the urban agglomeration. The NCC's eradication of LeBreton Flats necessitated the huge upheaval of everyday life – in the process destroying familiar places.
Yet, the persistent residue of lived-lives on the Flats challenged the federal state's attempt to clear the relics of the past: the official narrative was far from totalizing. Even within the official accounts, fragments of the Flats as an active, dynamic, ongoing life-world can be reclaimed. Read against the grain of the narrative of progress, this documentation exposes how neither the discursive formation of ‘blight’ by real-estate appraisers, nor the modernist design principles of architects were enough to provide on their own the conditions for the complete destruction of the neighbourhood. Voices from the archives disrupt the notion of a neighbourhood in decline, and illuminate the ongoing vibrancy of everyday life in LeBreton Flats. The reclaimed water tanks, busted windows, soiled candies, burnt-out televisions, piled tyres and disassembled car carcasses are more than objects. Drawn from the wreckage of the past, and juxtaposed against the promise of post-war capitalism, these fragments stand as a reminder of the incomplete promises of post-war urbanism. Rescuing commodity objects from the debris of industrial and residential landscapes, and making them visible, as Gunn eloquently suggests, unveils the fetishism of commodities and helps ‘denaturalize capitalism.’Footnote 119 Methodologically, these historical fragments underscore Walter Benjamin's contribution to urban history. His writing and approach to urban history provides an invaluable methodological compass to inquire critically into the official narrative of natural decline and a way to debunking the myth of progressive change held by planners and real-estate professionals during the post-war urban renewal craze. By melding urban political economy with Benjamin's insight, urban historians can use government archival sources, both textual and visual, to dispel official narratives of progress. By drawing from these relics, and Benjamin's insights, critical urban scholars complement urban political economy and enhance scholarly efforts to shed light onto the promise and failure of capitalist production and consumption.
