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The Thomas Mawson Plan for Calgary

The conjunction of gardens, horticulture, and town planning defines the philosophy of the City Beautiful, whereby social ills can be solved by introducing parks and gardens throughout the city. This kind of architectural determinism has its roots in Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of social reform and utilitarianism, where “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.” Legislation’s only use to society is the maintenance of pleasure rather than pain, and to that end, when the industrial city began to be problematized as a behavioural sink that results from overcrowding, the shape of the city became an important condition of this greater happiness — reform of the city and its institutions will lead to the reform of the people in those institutions.

Although Bentham is mostly known now, via Foucault, for his Panopticon prison of 1791 — a drum of stacked cells, a prison of maximum surveillance — such utility can be seen a century later in something so seemingly innocuous and dreamy as Mawson’s Calgary plan. And today, although behavioural determinism is felt to be discredited as a social hypothesis, it still exists in urban renewal theory, believing that problematic areas of the city can be reinvented, problematic people relocated, and undervalued land reinvested in. This is precisely the thinking that underpins the Mawson Plan.

When Mawson, an English landscape architect, met Calgary in 1911, probably at the invitation of the Calgary Horticultural Society, formed in 1906, the city had a population of 44,000 — an increase of 960 percent over the 4,000 inhabitants of 1901. Growth was stupendous, unthinking, and expeditious. The Bow River flooded regularly in places; in others it had sawmills, railway yards, and shacks. The downtown centred on the CPR station, the Palliser Hotel, and the sandstone banks and buildings of 8th Avenue, eight safe blocks away from the Bow River.

Figure 8-2. In direct contrast to the reality of the CPR station forecourt shown in chapter three, the company space has been transformed into a civic space: lawn, trees, and a clock tower. No longer is the station faced by scrappy hotels and wooden buildings. Rather, there is an imposing six-storey symmetrical set of buildings flanking Centre Street on the north side of 9th Avenue. The CPR owned this property, and the Marathon Realty Tower was built there in the 1970s, illustrating again the difference between a corporate urbanism and a civic urbanism: different values, different spatiality.

Thomas Mawson. The City of Calgary Past, Present, and Future: A Preliminary Scheme for Controlling the Economic Growth of the City. London: Thomas H. Mawson & Sons, 1912.

Figure 8-1. This is the most telling redirection of Calgary away from the landscape of the CPR on 9th Avenue. This, for Mawson, was to be the Civic Centre, a series of plazas and monuments on Centre Street leading to a low, wide bridge over the Bow River. There is a discussion about incursions into the Bow River in chapter 25 with the River’s Edge project, where eddies and quiet channels can be cut to increase riverbank frontage and to tame the flow of water into an amenity. However, Mawson’s inclusion of rowing eights indicates that he saw the Bow as something like the Thames, rather than the blue-green glacier-fed river it is.

Thomas Mawson. The City of Calgary Past, Present, and Future: A Preliminary Scheme for Controlling the Economic Growth of the City. London: Thomas H. Mawson & Sons, 1912.

Mawson proposed an image of Calgary on the Bow derived almost directly from Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. This world’s fair was designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted as a Beaux-Arts vision of the new American city: white, symmetrical, splendid, and neo-classical. It was an argument for comprehensive city planning over piecemeal, haphazard development driven by land speculation, as was the modus operandi in Calgary. The discourse of the City Beautiful was one of sight-lines and axes, uniform buildings, monuments and flanking public spaces; there was no room for the kind of rhizomatic, anarchic growth based on the self-interest found in a boom town on the Canadian prairies. It seems to have been floated as a material vision to which Calgary could aspire, as it is difficult to conceive of the social and political structures that would have been needed to facilitate Mawson’s plan. To enact such a plan would take a Napoleonic force, as happened in Paris in the 1850s under Haussmann, when the old city was buried under ceremonial boulevards, plazas, monuments, and avenues suitable to an imperial capital.

The Mawson plan came at the end of Calgary’s building boom, which was succeeded by the First World War, the difficult 1920s, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. By time the next building boom occurred, coinciding with the oil boom associated with the discovery of the Leduc oil fields in 1947, demolished European cities and imperialist ideas were no longer considered models — the U.S. was. And it was a postwar American model, not the 1791 Beaux-Arts plan of Washington D.C., but rather the postwar American city of freeways and suburban development, the space age and libertarianism, that changed Calgary radically.