Urban planning has long been seen as a way of improving human life through spatial means. But what if planning's commitment to human life is the cause of, rather than solution to, the destruction that it often causes? What if the human being, as planning conceives it, is more limited and race-specific than it might seem?

This presentation examines a century of planning history in the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Focusing on a series of planning initiatives that sought to protect or improve human life, is shows how planning's conception of the human being relied on particular distinctions between the normative and the pathological, and how Black life – and, thus, Halifax's longstanding Black population – was continually placed outside planning's vision of human flourishing. Drawing connections between the history of urban planning and emerging scholarship on anti-blackness, this presentation locates an anti-Black conception of the human being at the core of modern planning practice. Displacing blackness, expelling blackness from the sphere of the human, is integral to the operation of modern planning – not just in black neighbourhoods, but across the urban terrain.

Join author Ted Rutland

Ted Rutland is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University. His research examines the racial politics of urban planning, policing, and community organizing in Canadian cities. He is also a founding member of the Montreal-based activist urban research group, Collectif de recherche-action sur l'habitat (CRACH), and a frequent ally-member of local anti-racist campaigns, actions, and events, including Hoodstock and the SLAV Resistance Collective.

In conversation with Heather Dorries

Heather Dorries is an Assistant Professor at Carleton University, where she teaches in the Indigenous Policy and Administration Program. She received her MSc and PhD in Urban Planning from the University of Toronto, and worked for the City of Toronto before coming to Carleton. Her research interests focus on Indigenous politics and urban planning. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West which examines the dynamics of settler colonial city building.