The Borough System of Consolidated MontréAl: Revisiting Urban Governance in a Composite Metropolis

:In the last decade, new political and institutional arrangements have begun emerging in differing European and North-American metropolises. These new institutional arrangements deal in different ways with the rescaling of jurisdictions in a context of evolving intergovernmental relations, social movements, visions of urbanity and mobilization, urban public policies, etc. This article is about the case of Montréal (Quebec, Canada). This case is important because from 1996 to 2004 Montréal experienced intense public debates and implemented a diversity of institutional innovations. A multi-level reform of the municipal regime was introduced that comprises measures of metropolitan governance, large-scale amalgamations of local municipalities in the urban core area, and the introduction of a new political and administrative scheme at the borough level. Our focus is on this third pillar as it has shifted the municipal reform into an unusual direction as it activates the expression of the numerous spatial logics of the fragmented metropolis and gives way to a composite rescaling of urban governance.