"Is Sutton Brown God?" Planning Expertise and the Local State in Vancouver, 1952-1973

Abstract

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, city planning was, for the first time, drawn into the processes of the local state in a meaningful way. Planning departments and new administrative structures were created that gave planners and planning expertise a privileged and central role in the operation of the local state. Gerald Sutton Brown, first as Director of Planning and then as City Commissioner, was one such expert and he worked to implement a number of commonly held high modernist planning solutions in Vancouver. However, in the context of the global Sixties, the dehumanizing and undemocratic nature of high modernist planning expertise was revealed and confronted. This paper endeavours to explore the contours of the entrenchment of planning expertise within local government and the way in which it was eventually challenged.