Planning the great acceleration: spatial norms and urban expansion in Prince George, Canada, 1946-1981

The decades following the Second World War are characterized as a Great Acceleration in global energy and resource use. Norms related to urban planning and development in these decades created social-ecological structures that led to elevated carbon use and biodiversity loss. In this paper, we connect perspectives on the mass suburbanization that transformed North American cities to a global scale discourse on the Great Acceleration and Anthropocene. Taking Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, as our case, we review how two dominant spatial norms (Howard's Garden City and Perry's Neighbourhood Unit) were deployed between 1946 and 1981 to both rationalize and accommodate urban expansion in the province's northern capital. Archival sources and historical land development data relate a pattern of growth over this period to the actors, mechanisms, and planning theories that were used to promote urban expansion for a population that would ultimately never come.