Place Matters and Multi-Level Governance: Perspectives on a New Urban Policy Paradigm

Abstract

there is “no question that the path to Canada’s future runs through municipal governments large and small, urban and rural ” (Girard, 2003) This article takes stock of the recent explosion of interest in Canada’s cities, exploring the factors driving the new urban agenda, and the strategies needed to build healthy vibrant cities. Observing that Canada has become an urban policy laggard in the last decade or so, we consider possible lessons for moving ahead from recent developments in the European Union and the United States. In the 1990s, both of these jurisdictions experimented with novel forms of multi-level governance to tackle increasingly complex and localized public policy challenges. Paradoxes of Globalization The attention now being paid to cities is somewhat surprising. The burst of ‘techno-enthusiasm’ that initially accompanied globalization and the information revolution led many observers to predict the demise of cities as factors of production dispersed across the landscape freed from the constraints of geography (Cairncross, 1997). But researchers now track a convergence of three flows – people, commerce, and policy – positioning cities as the strategic places in the global age (Gertler, 2001). In Canada, nearly 80 percent of the population lives in cities, with fully 51