Pierre Hamel

Community Organizations and Local Governance in a Metropolitan Region

In a context of globalization, municipalities and metropolitan regions are involved in international competition to support economic growth. This leads to new forms of collaboration between public authorities and businesses, giving birth to new forms of urban and metropolitan governances. Moreover, many old neighborhoods of the central city and some districts of the old suburbs face growth in unemployment and poverty. In these local territories, community organizations put forward local development practices that aim to improve living conditions. These organizations cooperate with other community organizations, public institutions and private agencies. Thus, they are embedded in a kind of governance: a local governance. This article, based on the case of the metropolitan region of Montreal, highlights the conception of local development of these community organizations, the local governance in which they participate, and the link between this local governance with the urban and metropolitan ones.

In search of a stable urban regime for Montreal: issues and challenges in metropolitan development

As with many major North American urban areas since the 1960s, Montreal has faced contextual changes that have brought to the fore the question of its development. However, because of its history and the uncertainties linked with Quebecs constitutional future, attempts to stimulate its development have required certain compromises, often with unexpected results. In order to evaluate the performance of coalitions formed with the objective of meeting the challenges associated with urban and metropolitan development, we have drawn upon the concept of urban regimes. Focusing specifically on Montreal, we ask whether it is possible to transpose urban regime analyses that consider both structural and cultural factors specific to local organized forces. Revealing though they might be, these analyses nevertheless possess certain limitations, notably the underestimation of the weight and increasing importance of players and forces occurring on a metropolitan scale. This is particularly true in the case of Montreal.

Governance in an emerging suburban world

Cities are increasingly defined through their peripheries. This observation is the result of what has been explored by urban researchers worldwide. Suburban development, with diverse modalities of governance – through the state, capital accumulation and private authoritarianism – is transforming city regions in an unexpected way. The diversity of spatial forms shaping urban/suburban development is part of a peripheral growth bringing in a new scale for understanding urban issues, the metropolis or the city region. The paper is subdivided in four parts. First, we take into account the expansion of suburban spaces in order to highlight the new urban issues emerging at a city regional scale. Second, we look at framing the mechanisms of suburban governance. Then, after paying attention to the Canadian situation, we compare the model of suburban governance in Anglo Saxon settler societies to other forms and/or models of suburbanization prevailing in other parts of the world.Cities are increasingly defined through their peripheries. This observation is the result of what has been explored by urban researchers wor ldwide. Suburban deve lopment , wi th diverse modalities of governance – through the state, capital accumulation and private authoritarianism – is transforming city regions in an unexpected way. The diversity of spatial forms shaping urban /suburban development is part of a peripheral growth bringing in a new scale for understanding urban issues, the metropolis or the city region. The paper is subdivided in four parts. First, we take into account the expansion of suburban spaces in order to highlight the new urban issues emerging at a city regional scale. Second, we look at framing the mechanisms of suburban governance. Then, after paying attention to the Canadian situation, we compare the model of suburban governance in Anglo Saxon settler societ ies to other forms and /or models of suburbanization prevailing in other parts of the world.

Introduction: the Shifting Global Frames of Collective Action

This collection of essays is about collective action and globalization. To even utter this juxtaposition belies a certain prejudice or acquiescence to a mindset of globalization problematics in their many similar and opposing voices. But, is globalization as a process, event or discourse conceivable without the deeply evocative nature of collective action? We doubt it is. Indeed, as is pointed out in many of the contributions to this collection, globalization and collective action are in deep dialogue, if not fused to one another’s future practical and theoretical agenda. This integrality may be the only way to escape the discursive minefields which accompany the varying portraits of globalization in economics, political science, sociology and a litany of other social sciences. Hence, our starting point is that collective action can never be far from an analysis of global phenomena or a global focus on human organization and its complex arrangements. Nor should it, if globalization is to be viewed as a way to better understand this period of late modernities, and the spinning of human action beyond the local, or conversely deeply spun within the local, and the cross-border implications these entail for global democratic practices.

Towards a Theory of Global Collective Action and Institutions

Our intent here is to begin a rethinking of the institution as a global phenomenon for the sociology of social movements. That which we have long understood to be the main function of institutions, for example, normative regulation associated with the spatiality of the city or nation-state, is being re-routed through a growing awareness of the ambivalences contained in systems of human action more and more configured through complex processes of globalization. One result has been a move away from the study of structural features of institutions to a focus on the way institutional actors and new collectivities recognize and acknowledge each other as players in a diversity of social/cultural practices which are more and more institutionally defined in global terms. Institutionalization, as an agonistic, conflict-laden process, constrains and enables the experience of cultural practices. Hence, it is infinitely more inscribed with meaning than that captured in approaches which point to the routinization of the emergent norm, or in Weber’s term, the unfolding of instrumental rationality as the basis for a social relationship. Indeed, with the advent of globalization the institution has become a concept that requires re-theorization. The present chapter is a modest contribution to this overall task.