Benthamism in the Countryside: The Architecture of Rural Space, 1900–1930

Abstract

Historians of state formation have increasingly recognized what Foucault has described as the ‘dark side’ of the enlightenment institutional principles of representation, transparency and accountability and explored the parallel principles of legitimation, surveillance and discipline. In this paper, I pursue these themes in a neglected area, the institutional architecture of rural space. I do so by examining ideologies for rural planning in western Canada and the American midwest in the early twentieth century. These ideologies were linked to state projects, and found institutional expression in Canada in the ‘town planning movement’ attached to municipal and provincial planning offices, and in the United States in agricultural extension services and the ‘county agent’ system—the local ‘inspectorate’ of the Federal Department of Agriculture. The aim was a restructuring of rural space in the interests of rationalizing agricultural production and controlling large populations of settlers, recently displaced, and disturbingly ‘isolated’ and inaccessible in the vast spaces of the great plains. Despite common aims, American and Canadian reformers adopted fundamentally different principles of spatial design. Town planners inherited the European assumption that community networks and class relations were embedded in particular spatial arrangements, so that rural reform required re‐drawing the boundaries of fields and settlements. As early as 1915, American reformers developed the idea that networks of sociability and domination were defined first by abstract structures, formal organizations and the cash nexus, and could, using modern media of communication, be ‘disembedded’ from particular locales and distributed spatially.