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Ted Rutland is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University. His research focuses on the racial politics of urban planning and policing in Canadian cities.

Modern urban planning promises to improve the quality of human life. But what if the human being, as planning conceives it, is more limited and race-specific than it might seem? And what if planning's commitment to human life is the cause of, rather than solution to, the destruction that it often causes for racialized communities? In this talk, Ted Rutland discusses his new book, Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax. The book examines more than a century of planning initiatives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In doing so, it develops a unique critique of urban planning by focusing, not on its subservience to economic or political elites, but on its efforts to improve people’s lives and the racial limitations that these efforts entail.