Planning for property? (Counter)performing property within and beyond “land use” planning

Trevor Wideman, PhD student @ Simon Fraser University

This project questions the concept of “land use” as it has been used in the discipline and practice of urban planning. Land use guides development and helps organize urban space, but in practice, the term is often left vague and undefined, and its on-the-ground effects in impoverished, marginalized, racialized, and otherwise vulnerable neighbourhoods have never been fully analyzed. Planning concepts of land use often safeguard property values, implement property regimes, and maximize utility according to the interests of the powerful, while uses that are implicitly lacking (such as affordable housing, businesses, or services, regardless of their social value) are often “othered,” rendered wasteful, and potentially threatened. To address this issue, this project will illuminate the under-theorized relationship between land use and private property by unpacking and following the concept of land use through key moments and sites of conflict in two unique Canadian planning contexts (Vancouver and Winnipeg). The project aims to demystify and reimagine the role of “land use” planning in relation to grassroots understandings of property, and it asks how counter-performances of property might be used to mobilize alternative conceptions of land use to ultimately challenge spatial injustice and offer marginalized groups the power to (re)define the city.