Projet would restructure city government
Richard Bergeron says if he were elected mayor he’d abolish boroughs and cut the city into 65 districts with one councillor each. I sort of see his point that having 19 mayors in the city is kind of silly. La Presse reports the story a little differently, not saying Bergeron would abolish boroughs, but that he’d reduce their number.
Dave M 07:10 on 2012/09/25 Permalink
That seems like an odd position for them to have. If there weren’t any boroughs (or fewer), they wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things they’ve done in the Plateau, which is pretty much the only place they’ve been able to implement their policies.
Stefan 07:38 on 2012/09/25 Permalink
It makes sense, because if they have a council majority (not only mayor, since I guess the mayor cannot change the structure), they would have more direct control over the boroughs, ALSO over those which would not have voted their party on their borough council.
My opinion is that it makes a lot of sense to centralize the aspects of urban planning (as there are: traffic, developments, public transports and others). Vienna for example is extremely centralized and that works well there. Are there examples of decentralized cities with good urban planning?
Charles 08:09 on 2012/09/25 Permalink
I don’t get it either. There are a lot of good things happening thanks to the borough system all over the city. We’ve tried centralized systems before and it was slow and never fitted the local needs. It’s a one size fits all solution. Every couple of years, we centralize everything (at great cost) then realize it was a mistake then decentralize everything (at great cost).
Just centralize the management of services and decentralize decisions, like a client-server computer model where the central city offer its services to the boroughs. That way you have an economy of scale and decision are still made as close as possible to the neighbourhoods.
ant6n 08:23 on 2012/09/25 Permalink
@Stefan
Berlin. This was in the 90ies, after the wall came down. From what I can gather the city government was pretty out of touch, dreaming of grandeur, always wanting to build something new rather than keep the old, even if there’s nobody to finance it (‘let’s get rid of the old first), and generally not interested in the details of what was good for a building, a block, a district. I’m related to the person who ran the urban planning department in Mitte (the central borough) and they had a vision that fitted the area much better on a small level, and they ended up preserving a lot of buildings, keeping the area very mixed use (i.e. residents stayed) and preventing a bunch of anonymous office skyscrapers.
The city as a whole did do transportation planning, with lots of funding from the feds, and that worked out fairly well (most notably they consolidated all rail transit through one giant train station, with a couple of outlying stations) – of course the Greens would’ve preferred like 50km of TRAMs rather than 5km of new subway.
There are certain services that are centralized at least from the users perspective, like the library system (one card can be used everywhere) and pools/beaches. But I bet behind the curtain they do work together with the boroughs and the city to keep it all running.
Tux 10:05 on 2012/09/25 Permalink
All I want is to be able to pay the resident rate to use Hampstead’s public facilities (pool, tennis courts etc.) I live like a 5 minute walk away, in Snowdon, but I have to pay so much more.
david m 16:00 on 2012/09/25 Permalink
and all i want is for the pq to demerge the reactionary and far distant areas that keep montreal down.