From Planning to Spatial Foresight in Québec: What Future-Telling Means in a Context of Sub-regional Governance. The Case of Vision 2031

Abstract

All Rights Reserved © Faculté des sciences sociales, Université d 'Ottawa, 2017 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit.Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. During that four-year period, this RCM led a sub-regional coalition of both public and private actors in a cross-cutting and joined-up process called Vision 2031. This process involved more than experts and decision-makers; it opened its future-oriented process to the wider civil society. This was significant for three reasons. First, it expressed a shift from the retrospective to more forwardlooking knowledge building. Second, it translated a switch from sectoral planning to cross-cutting planning. Third, it represented an on-going process towards more collaborative ways of proceeding. Territorialization and horizontalization of spatial planning policies constitute a same process; it implies that responsibility for development stems not only from decision-makers but from the entire sub-regional community. In other words, in a context of challenging public institutions' political capacity and crisis of top-down model of management, such new spatial foresight proceedings highlight the emergence of a new type of sub-regional public regulation -a governance by the future.