Claire Poitras

New Challenges And Old Solutions: Metropolitan Reorganization in Canadian and U.S. City–Regions

This article examines how local public institutions, especially municipal administrations, have adapted their structures and actual practices to respond to new regionalist and metropolitan challenges. We want to assess if, and how much, governmental institutions are really adopting new ways to plan, supervise, and implement metropolitan policies. More precisely, we analyze 35 American and Canadian urban agglomerations that rank as regional capitals or mid– sized urban areas. The emphasis is on the transformation of metropolitan institutions and on metropolitan area taxation strategies. The analysis pinpoints a number of findings regarding the nature and impact of recent institutional reforms. These findings involve: 1) the return in force of the unicity in Canada, 2) the slow development in the organization of the local public sector and the adoption of institutional solutions favoring voluntary associations in the US, 3) the discrepancy between discourse and practice in terms of the objectives targeted by fiscal measures, and 4) the growing role of state and provincial governments in metropolitan institutional and fiscal reforms.

Designing sustainability for whom? Recent housing developments in Southwest Montréal

This paper sets out to show how urban sustainability issues have been addressed by social, political, and economic actors involved in housing production in Montréal. Specifically, it looks at how the environmental question has been incorporated into the practice and discourse of recent housing schemes. Principles of sustainable development such as adaptive reuse of industrial buildings and infill housing that allow for reinvestment in inner-city neighbourhoods, inclusion of affordable, or social housing in private housing developments to secure social mix, citizen participation, energy, water, and transportation matters have been increasingly circulated. By examining planning documents, design proposals, and briefs presented at public hearings on housing schemes in Southwest Montréal, a former working-class borough undergoing revitalisation, this paper shows that the values of sustainable development have been used by both private developers and local authorities to negotiate urban transformations with community groups.

‘Subways are Not Outdated’: Debating the Montreal Metro, 1940–60

This article discusses how a subway was represented in debates on its merits as public transit for Montreal, Canada, during the 1940s and 1950s. Opponents argued that subways were obsolete in the automobile age, but supporters saw subway construction as a key tool for stimulating urban development and maintaining the citys prestige in the context of rising competition from Canadas second city, Toronto. Subway supporters regarded the project as being complementary to expressway construction, not as an alternative. A new technology developed in France provided the symbolic power that brought the project to fruition, beginning in 1960.