Those latter statistics form the core of the argument by the Communauté Métropolitaine de Montréal (the Montréal Metropolitan Community or CMM): that metropolitan governance is a key issue for the New Urban Agenda, the 20-year urbanization strategy that will come out of next year’s Habitat III conference. To that end, CMM will host the second thematic meeting ahead of Habitat III from 6-7 October with a focus on metros.
Last month, CMM published a discussion paper to prime the pump for debate ahead of the Montréal Declaration, which will come out of the meeting. A draft of the declaration was also published in August. The meeting will be the first major international event on cities to be held in Canada since the first Habitat conference in 1976, which took place in Vancouver.
The CMM was created in 2000, replacing the Montréal Urban Community, which had provided public transit and police service at the metropolitan scale. It survived a transition period from 2002 to 2006, when all municipalities in the area were merged into a Montréal megacity, only to splinter back into individual administrative jurisdictions following elections and referenda.
In 2011, the CMM council adopted the Metropolitan Land Use and Development Plan (PMAD in French). The plan provides a framework for greater Montréal and has guided planning efforts down to the local level. Thanks to a law passed by the Québec provincial government, local municipality planning must conform with regional county municipalities, which must in turn conform with the PMAD, in a relationship the new paper describes as “nesting dolls.”
The paper argues that this approach is the best way to ensure sustainable development, urban and otherwise:
Both in developed and in developing countries, concerted metropolitan action is the main solution to sustainable development challenges, at the heart of which lie issues of reconciliation between urban development and the protection of farm land and natural environments, issues of urban mobility, increasingly constrained by traffic congestion, and the issue of greenhouse gas reduction.
These challenges require solutions that encompass the entire metropolitan area, underscoring the importance of metropolitan governance and the introduction of mechanisms to coordinate local, regional and national actions from a metropolitan perspective on sustainable development.
It offers several models of metropolitan governance, from informal coordination to authorities that work between municipalities to bodies with supra-municipal jurisdiction to the special status of “metropolitan cities”.
Metropolitan innovation
The Organization for Cooperation and Economic Development (OECD), the Paris-based grouping of rich countries, has a longstanding research and policy interest in metropolitan areas.According to its 2014 Metropolitan Governance Survey, which the discussion paper cites, two-thirds of the OECD’s 275 metro areas with over 500,000 inhabitants have some kind of governance structure. They mainly tackle regional governance, transportation and spatial planning. But fewer than half address water and sewer provision, waste disposal, energy, tourism or culture.
The CMM, meanwhile, continues to be a global leader in metropolitan innovation. It is home to the Greater Montréal Observatory, which compares data on the region with peer metro areas throughout North America. In November 2014, the CMM was a charter member of the Pan American Network of Metropolitan Areas, which determined in February that Montréal should host a thematic meeting in the run-up to Habitat III.
The CMM also organizes the Metropolitan Agora, a public-outreach effort to generate support and buy-in for the PMAD and other metropolitan initiatives. In 2013, the Agora brought together 700 elected representatives, citizens and other stakeholders. The second such event will take place on 5 October, just in time for the Habitat III meeting.
This article originally appeared at Citiscope.org. Citiscope is a nonprofit news outlet that covers innovations in cities around the world. More at Citiscope.org.
