Forum on metropolitan governance and collaborative spatial planning in major Canadian metropolises : Montréal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Toronto and Vancouver

May 28 and 29 2025

Université du Québec en Outaouais (Gatineau)
283 boul. Alexandre-Taché, Gatineau
Grande salle de l’UQO + Espace Robert Renaud

This event is organized by Mario Gauthier, Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Guy Chiasson, Professor, Department of Social Sciences, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Anne Mévellec, Professor, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, in collaboration with the Villes Régions Monde network.

This event is organized as part of research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

It is open to everyone.

Please confirm your attendance by filling in the form

Registration deadline: Friday, May 2 2025

Event presentation

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.

Objectives of the day

The objectives of this event are to provide answers to the following questions:

• What conclusions can be drawn from the many experiments in governing Canadian metropolises and planning land use and development on a metropolitan scale? Are they successful, semi-successful or failures?

• What lessons can be learned from institutional reforms in metropolitan governance and collaborative spatial planning?

• What can we conclude from experiences that do not explicitly aim to build a new institution, but are based on exchanges, dialogue and collaboration between players, and on other governance mechanisms on this scale?

• What are the main success factors and obstacles to implementing metropolitan institutions or institutional arrangements for collaborative spatial planning?

• Which issues or sectors of activity – socio-territorial inequalities; the environment, sustainable development and the fight against climate change; transportation and sustainable mobility – lend themselves best to metropolitan governance and collaborative spatial planning?

• What roles should metropolitan leaders, mayors of central cities and other political leaders play in asserting and building metropolitan power?
  
• What are the most significant metropolitan-scale collaborative spatial planning experiments in Canada’s major metropolises?

Preliminary program for the day

Event moderator: Éric Champagne, École d’études politiques, Université d’Ottawa

Information and registration

Registration is mandatory. Please confirm your attendance by completing this form before May 2, 2025.

If you have any questions, please contact Salomé Vallette (salome.vallette@inrs.ca)