Contenu du sommaire : Gouverner les très grandes métropoles - Institutions et réseaux techniques

London's new metropolitan government : reaching the promised land ? In 2000, a new metropolitan government was set up in London, headed by a mayor elected by direct universal suffrage and a local assembly. These new institutions, created to focus on issues concerning competition and the city's social cohesion, were given broad competencies while having little means to exercise them efficiently. Moreover, numerous difficulties have been encountered : points of friction with the Boroughs, which have competencies in related areas and, due to insufficient powers and personnel, the mayor's dependence on other levels of government.

Towards an end to the crisis ? Indecision continues in the Berlin metropolis after a decade of political rivalries. Despite radical changes in the political scene, a form of urban government developed in Berlin during the 20th century, characterized by the predominance of the public sector with a consequent structural weakness in the private sector, centralized decision-making, and the central role of the political parties. Although this form of government — a legacy of the Cold War — continued throughout the period of reunification, the grave political and fiscal crisis of 2001 revealed its limitations by favoring the appearance in local politics of new public and private actors. What we see today suggests the emergence of a local form of urban governance, supported to a great extent by the private sector. It also shows a new mutation in a system based on the institutional and political heritage of the city, since the political parties still constitute a central element in in Berlin's system of government.

The Paris metropolis : looking for a pilot ? The Parisian agglomeration is very fragmented. It is made up first of all of Paris, a capital city governed by the state that long ensured the direct management of its affairs. It also includes the numerous local authorities that link together the metropolitan area, as well as the Ile de France region, which has grown considerably since its belated establishment. These political institutions have competencies that overlap to a very great extent, since all powers are urban. As a result, the Parisian agglomeration has neither a single pilot, nor even a truly stabilized procedure of governance and coordination. However, this is no reason to consider it ungovernable : first of all, because of the rapid growth of the region surrounding the capital, and secondly, because the various institutional actors share the same image of the metropolis.

Time, power, and space. The metropolization of Barcelona. The economic and social appeal of Barcelona was responsible for its having become one of Europe's major urban centers. However, it was only in the mid-19th century that the city began to spread beyond its medieval walls. Although this belated expansion can be explained in economic terms by the fact that urban policies follow the evolution of production systems, such an approach overlooks the political and institutional aspect of Barcelona's metropolization, which is also a consequence of changes in the power relationships between the various institutions on the metropolitan level and in the relationships they create with the major city service enterprises. This kind of “territorial governance” possesses characteristics which, though comparable to those found in the big French cities, are nonetheless specific to Barcelona.

Montreal as a political laboratory : a metropolis confronted with the power of the agglomeration. Both the territory and the social and economic fabric of Montreal are extremely fragmented. Faced with this problem, at the end of the 1990s the government of Quebec announced its intention to implement a sweeping reform of local institutions. However, it was the provincial government of Quebec that took the lead, overhauling institutions with an unexpected result : Montreal's urban area, the core of the government's project, was paradoxically divided, and Montreal, a new city located on its central island and which integrated all the so-called “suburban” communities, was given powerful institutions allowing it to restructure municipal competencies and the services of the agglomeration. Determined overall by the rationales of the city's élites, this reform reflects a hybrid political model.

Policy without saying so : the repercussions on city government implicit in the reforms of the World Bank. At first glance, the World Bank's actions in favor of development seem sectorial and technical. On final analysis however, it is clear that they add up to a “vision” of city government embodied in an intrinsically political language of public action. Particularly in the 80s, the evolution of the principles guiding its actions led the World Bank to an interest in institutional reform, and from there to the big metropolises of developing countries. The resulting model of city government was characterized by a rather complex institutional configuration, high spending for city services, and a certain unawareness of questions of power. Contrary to the holistic vision developed at the time, only a political economy concerned with detail can provide insight into the reality of the situation and implement efficient reforms.

Metropolitan governance and the piloting of technical networks : the case of the metropolitan region of Mumbai. The particular configuration of the city of Mumbai (12 million inhabitants, a city center representing less than 2 % of the surface of the metropolitan area, and more than half the population living in shantytowns) has given rise to a state model of administrative management of networks based on the hierarchy and rigidity of procedures. It has also generated the proliferation of diverse public actors whose actions overlap anarchically. However, faced with the weakening of this model due to the dilation of territorial scales, a change is beginning to take place in the institutional model of network enlargement. It is characterized by the rapid increase in the number of private operators and associations collaborating with administrations and elected officials, and at the same time, by organized intergovernmental cooperation.

Metropolitan giganticism and transport management in Sao Paulo Despite the rapid growth of the city of Sao Paulo, its administration has remained centralized : the mayor, whose competencies are relatively limited, is the single municipal authority. The administration of the metropolis however, which has no higher authority and takes into account Brazil's federal nature, is more complex : it has evolved more as a consequence of adjustments between various levels than as the result of a specific rationale. As transports show, a certain vagueness exists which is indicative of the difficulties faced by the administration due to the tremendous size of the metropolis. In particular, the weakening of the administration's role in transport regulation shows that political intervention is being challenged.

Institutions regulating land use in Singapore. Singapore is a completely urbanized city-state with no surrounding countryside. As a result, building land is scarce and precious. This is why land management has been placed under the control of the government, which owns 90 % of building land, either directly or through its organizations. The improvement of this management rests both on the creation of a group of urban institutions in charge of regulating land development, and on the purchase of state land, for which government companies, administrative authorities, and private actors are in competition. Thus, though Singapore is an administrative state, it is clear that a mode of flexible governance is emerging, based on the decompartmentalization of urban institutions.

Water services and metropolitan construction in Cape Town (South Africa) : difficulties of urban integration. The City of Cape Town was created in December 2000 in answer to a dual objective : the dismantling of the administrative tools of a segregated city under apartheid, and the reform of local institutions in the aim of furthering the transformation of urban society. Through the institutions piloting urban technical networks, local authorities were soon faced with the problem of extreme social inequality, which only worsened with time. As shown by the example of the water supply, the process of unifying the metropole depended on balancing out efficiency and fairness, challenges of a practical nature and the objectives of urban integration promised by the political power, but is also being carried out thanks to the influence on the government of New Public Management theories.