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 Montre´al (Quebec, Canada). This case is important because from 1996 to 2004 Montre´al 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.

This article examines how local public institutions, especially municipal administrations, have adapted their structures and actual practices to respond to new regionalist and metropolitan challenges. We want to assess if, and how much, governmental institutions are really adopting new ways to plan, supervise, and implement metropolitan policies. More precisely, we analyze 35 American and Canadian urban agglomerations that rank as regional capitals or mid-sized urban areas. The emphasis is on the transformation of metropolitan institutions and on metropolitan area taxation strategies. The analysis pinpoints a number of findings regarding the nature and impact of recent institutional reforms. These findings involve: 1) the return in force of the unicity in Canada, 2) the slow development in the organization of the local public sector and the adoption of institutional solutions favoring voluntary associations in the US, 3) the discrepancy between discourse and practice in terms of the objectives targeted by fiscal measures, and 4) the growing role of state and provincial governments in metropolitan institutional and fiscal reforms.

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International audienceDo territories change public policies? This would appear to be a rather unusual research orientation. It is even a reversal of the most commonly accepted approaches to the study of territorial public action, which tend to look at this issue from the opposite perspective, that is, in examining how public policies affect territories. The municipal reforms that have simultaneously occurred in Québec and France since the late 1990s afford an excellent opportunity to consider this inversion of the issues. To do so, we take as our theme culture and municipal cultural policies. We try to define and understand to what extent there exist in Québec and France retroactive links between municipal restructuring and municipal decisions about cultural facilities and activities and, more generally, municipal cultural intervention in the urban milieu. This comparative analysis of the cases of France and Québec focuses on discourse as well as achievements. First, we look at the changes arising from institutional reforms in the supply of cultural activities, budgets devoted to culture, and cultural policies. We then consider culture as a vector in the construction of a new municipal institution and a new municipal territory

In the field of urban planning and housing, particularly, the fourties and the fifties constituted a specific period: a period of transition, of passage to the contemporary era. In the light of concrete events, issues and debates surrounding major developments in housing and urban planning, this paper examines the political and social "arrangements" brought in view by three sets of issues related to the transformation of the urban space in the Montreal area. The first part of the paper deals with the willingness of the federal government to intervene in the housing field and the local resistances to that intervention. The second part, to be published in the next issue, will focus on the linkages between housing types and models of living conditions with a case-study of the cooperative housing movement, on one hand, and on the orientations of urban development and more precisely the spatial redistribution of urban activities and social classes, on the other hand.Dans les domaines de l’aménagement urbain et du logement, en particulier, les années quarante et cinquante constituent, pour Montréal, une période particulière : celle de la transition, du passage à l’ère contemporaine. À la lumière des événements, des enjeux et des débats surgis à l’occasion d’opérations marquantes en matière de logement et d’urbanisme, cet article examine les enjeux de la transformation de l’espace urbain montréalais. La première tranche de l’article est consacrée à l’évolution du rôle de l’État fédéral en matière de logement et de ses rapports avec les forces locales. La deuxième tranche, à paraître, portera sur l’articulation entre les modes de logement et l’aménagement des modes de vie, analysée principalement dans le cas de l’action coopérative, d’une part, et sur les volontés de redistribution et les redistributions effectives des fonctions urbaines et des groupes sociaux dans l’espace, d’autre part