ARTICLE IN PRESS PROGRESS IN PLANNING Progress in Planning 66 (2006) 7–59 www.elsevier.com/locate/pplann Comparing metropolitan governance: The cases of Montreal and Toronto Julie-Anne Boudreau, Pierre HamelÃ, Bernard Jouve, Roger Keil Universite de Montreal Sociology, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, Montreal, Quebec, Canada 3150 CHAPTER 1 Introduction The transformation of metropolitan governance cannot be understood without adopting a double reading frame referring on the one hand to the actual content of policies aimed at the metropolitan scale, their raison d’eˆtre, the macro-economic logics that underlie them, and on the other hand to the configurations of actors and institutions which evolved strongly in the last 20 years. Essentially, the metropolitan level, beyond the municipal, progressively became (and not without conflict or opposition) the new territory of reference for political leaders as well as for economic ones.1 Big cities bring pressures for a new configuration of intergovernmental relations. In this institutional and political flux, the main challenge of public policy-making is to stabilize a place for exchanges between institutions. There seem to be an emerging political space at the metropolitan scale, where collective action and claims for local democracy unfold. The recent reforms have created more and more organized local and metropolitan societies. Metropolitanization also means an internal reconstitu- tion of the political sphere and its articulation with civil society. There is a diversification of local and metropolitan responsibilities and activities, from the à Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 514 343 6423; fax: +1 514 343 5722. E-mail address:
[email protected] (P. Hamel).