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Humphrey Stephen Mumford Carver  (1902 – 1995) was a Canadian architect and urban planner, who served as the first urban policy advisor of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The Depression shaped Humphrey Carver into a social reformer and advocate for affordable housing and community planning. After the war, he would emerge as a leading proponent of a more progressive national housing policy and the development of social housing, a role that is well-documented in the literature.

Early life and education
Humphrey Carver was born in Harborne, a suburb of Birmingham UK in 1902. His father, Frank (1860-1943), and his mother, Ann Creswell, were both born in Gibraltar, where the Carver family ran a small export business. Humphrey followed his brothers to Rugby School, and then Oxford, where he was inspired to become a housing advocate by a chance reading about the founding of London’s Hampstead Garden Suburb and the Garden City Movement. (ref Compassionate Landscape pp. 14-15) From 1924-1929, Carver studied at the school of the Architectural Association (AA) in London, living in a settlement house in East London, then Hampstead Garden Suburb and Chelsea. Although the AA taught architecture in the classical style, Carver was influenced by Le Corbusier’s books and became an early convert to Modernism. In 1930, after a dull year as a junior architect in London, he emigrated to Canada. Carver was lucky to get a job at Wilson, Bunnell & Borgstrom, Town Planners and Landscape Architects, but he was out of work within a year, after the Canadian planning movement collapsed early in the Depression. He formed a small landscape firm with Carl Borgstrom, living on a farm outside Toronto.

Carver stayed in Canada because in 1933 he married Mary Gordon, sister of King Gordon, a founder of the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Carver was an early member of the LSR and joined the editorial committee of its journal, Canadian Forum. Throughout the 1930s, he wrote numerous articles on housing, community planning, and social policy. In 1935, Carver contributed the housing chapter in the LSR’s influential book, Social Planning for Canada, outlining the need for community planning, a national housing program, and funding for slum clearance and public housing. He was a fine student and won several prizes during his training at the École.

Early Career
By 1937 Carver had emerged as one of Canada’s leading advocates for housing reform,, curating a CBC Radio series, and organizing conferences on housing and planning in Ottawa in 1937 and Toronto in 1939. He taught in the University of Toronto’s School of Architecture from 1938 to 1941. Following his war service, Carver was appointed to the university’s School of Social Work, where he managed research at the Housing Centre, producing the book Houses for Canadians with CMHC’s first research grant. He was concerned chiefly with housing policy in the immediate postwar period), promoting the need for social housing, including Regent Park North, Canada’s first public housing project.

He continued to advocate for better community planning. He was a prominent participant in the first community planning conference organized by CMHC in June 1946.

War Time Housing
After the collapse of the TPIC in 1932, there was no professional organization for the few practicing planners in Canada. Carver was one of nine founding members of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects in 1934, which at his suggestion was initially named the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and Town Planners: “I argued that we should found a Society of landscape architects and town planners. There was, at that time, no Town Planning Institute in Canada. I thought that it would be a splendid Canadian achievement to found a profession which would be concerned with our whole environment of life: the built-up area and the landscape together. For a time our society was called the CSLA and TP. And I’m sorry that sectoral professional interests pulled us apart.” However, the CSLA did not attract the handful of architects, surveyors, and engineers who were practising planning at the end of the war. These included Aimé Cousineau (Ville de Montréal), Tracy leMay (City of Toronto), Eric Thrift (Metropolitan Winnipeg), and Toronto planning consultant Eugene Faludi. Instead, Thrift helped organize the CPAC, and Faludi organized the Institute of Professional Planners, which attracted a few dozen members from central Canada. He joined ASPO’s board from 1952 and hosted a joint ASPO/CPAC conference in Montreal in 1955. It attracted 1,400 delegates, thought to be the largest gathering of planning advocates to date.

Soon after his arrival in Canada, Carver became a strong advocate for affordable housing and community planning. His early years in Toronto turned him into a social activist. He practiced landscape architecture with Carl Borgstrom (with whom he helped found the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and Town Planners in 1934), taught at the University of Toronto School of Architecture, and launched its first housing course in the School of Social Work in 1946. He was associated with Regent Park North in Toronto, Canada’s first low-rent, public housing project, and began a prolific writing career with his first publication, Houses for Canadians. By 1937, he had emerged as one of Canada’s leading advocates for housing reform and a national housing program. He gave numerous speeches, ran a CBC Radio series, and organized conferences on housing and planning, including the ground-breaking 1939 Housing Conference.

Work at the CMHC
When the Community Planning Association of Canada (CPAC) was formed, in January 1947 Carver was immediately appointed to the Ontario executive and then elected as vice-president of the national organization at its founding conference in October.

CMHC also encouraged better training for Canadian planners by sponsoring a 1948 McGill summer school in subdivision planning, led by Harold Spence-Sales. With the aid of a CMHC grant, the materials from this program were transformed into an attractive full-colour practice manual, How to Subdivide, which was distributed by CPAC. Under Carver’s direction, CMHC provided more advice to planners, designers, and consumers with other handbooks. Urban Mapping, by architect-planner Blanche Lemco, provided spatial analysis methods and graphic design standards for early local use planning studies. Choosing a House Design (1952) was another example of Carver’s strategy of combining housing and planning advocacy. This fifty-page monograph showcased modern house designs, but it also contained discussion of neighbourhood planning principles. CMHC distributed over 750,000 copies of Choosing a House Design during the 1950s and 1960s suburban boom. It was followed by Principles of Small House Grouping (1954), which contained illustrations of small-scale site design, using neighbourhood unit principles.

Humphrey Carver managed CMHC’s research program through his twenty-year career with the agency. His initial position was chairman of CMHC’s Research Committee, where he dispersed the grants to external agencies and scholars. The National Research Council was CMHC’s partner for most research into house construction and building codes. In contrast, most community-planning funding went to external agencies and individual researchers. For example, Gordon Stephenson prepared CMHC-supported planning and urban renewal studies for Halifax (1956), Kingston (1960), London, ON (1960), and Ottawa during his summer breaks from teaching at the University of Toronto.

Later career and retirement
When CMHC President David Mansur searched for a manager for the new agency’s community planning and research program in 1948, it was not surprising that Humphrey Carver was offered the job. He remained with CMHC until his retirement in 1967, leading in community planning advocacy, encouraging planning legislation, enabling planning practice, reviving the TPIC, and supporting Canadian planning education and research.

Four honorary degrees, fellowship in the CIP (1968), and the Order of Canada (1988) are evidence of the high regard in which he was held across the disciplines that shape Canadian communities.

Personal Life
Carver appeared to have come to Canada for adventure in 1930, but Mary Gordon was certainly the reason that he stayed. They were married in 1933. Mary was the sister of King Gordon, a founder of the League for Social Reconstruction (LSR) and the CCF. After planning and landscape architecture work declined in 1933, Humphrey and Mary moved into a collective settlement on Carl Borgstrom’s farm in Lorne Park, ON, where they could grow their own food and eke out a meagre living during the Depression, surrounded by their artistic and political friends.