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This event, part of a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), focuses on metropolitan governance in relation to “collaborative” spatial planning activities in Canada's major metropolises: Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Toronto and Vancouver. For several decades, the question of city government and governance at the metropolitan level has been on the agenda of academics, politicians and land-use and urban planning professionals alike. Here, the notion of governance refers to activities aimed at governing by producing collective action to solve complex urban problems through effective public policies and other activities aimed at guiding the development of cities and metropolises. In this respect, a number of academic studies have highlighted situations of ungovernability, or relative governability, pointing in particular to decades of disappointing experiments or situations of failure or semi-success in metropolitan governance. These studies emphasize the persistence of a series of obstacles to the implementation of effective metropolitan governance: states that are not very favorable to metropolitan governance, local governments that are still reluctant, conflicting relations between central cities and local municipalities, and local democracy mechanisms that are confined to local territories to the detriment of the metropolitan scale. On the other hand, these studies insist on the importance of building a metropolitan identity and asserting territorial leadership to turn metropolises into genuine political territories and meet the major challenges of metropolization.

On May 24, a webinar will be held to launch the Cities, Climate and Inequalities Collection of reseach summary. During this event, you will have the opportunity to discover the main topics addressed in the Directory, as well as three presentations by contributors on their research synthesized in the Collection of reseach. The public will have the opportunity to exchange views and ask questions with the various contributors to the project.