Land use planning and the making of a ‘properly propertied’ Vancouver

•This paper provides insights into early 20th century Canadian planning in the city of Vancouver.•Using a lens of land use and property, it identifies key planning actors and philosophies.•It reveals discursive/moral relationships that emerged to define liberal categories of land use.•People and geographies were placed outside such categories and primed for intervention.•The paper suggests a path forward for transforming land use planning under liberal democracy. Urban land use planning is an indispensable, albeit mundane, tool of urban governance under liberal democracy in Canada and elsewhere. Such planning mediates between a multitude of competing public and private interests in relation to land, and has often been concerned with the optimization and ordering of privately propertied parcels toward their highest and best use for a so-called common good. The (often unequal and marginalizing) effects of such planning have garnered much scrutiny within urban geographical scholarship, even as the relationships and ideologies underpinning the origins of land use control in the early 20th century have attracted less attention. In this paper, I look to the roots of land use planning in Vancouver, Canada. I identify key actors and unpack the philosophies that influenced such planning at the national and local scales. In doing so, I show how three sets of discursive/moral relationships between property and planning, citizenship and propriety, and waste and improvement, emerged to define a liberal category of “land use.” Such relationships were entrenched in Vancouver’s planning system through legal means, as well as programs aimed at educating officials and citizens on the importance of land use control through zoning. I show how the land use planning process identified people and geographies of concern and placed them outside the normative urban vision of planners and civic officials, priming them for planning-led intervention and/or elimination. In doing so, I seek to expand geographical understandings of land use planning and suggest ways forward for those seeking to unearth and dismantle entrenched and privately propertied land use planning regimes under liberal democracy.