Planning and the Culture of Governance: Local Institutions and Reform in France

Abstract

Legislation introducing major reform of the French planning system is now 6 years old. It was intentionally seen as part of a trio of reforming statutes that linked spatial planning to institutional reform of local government. Taking as its starting point, the idea that planning is inevitably an embedded activity, it explores the relationship between institutional reform and the reform of planning in France generally, and then more specifically in the Région urbaine de Lyon. It concludes that the search for greater simplicity and clarity is not borne out by results on the ground. The French case demonstrates that the success or failure of planning reform is intimately linked to the nature of local government.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges help received from the Agence d'Urbanisme de la communauté urbaine de Lyon, the Communauté d'Agglomération du Pays viennois, the commune of Mornant and the Institut d'Urbanisme de Lyon during the research for this article.

Notes

This was also a problem that had been recognized well before the Defferre reforms, notably in the report Vivre Ensemble (Guichard, 1976).

The word projet poses some difficulty for translation into English and in this context cannot be understood as project in the sense of British discourses on planning. The intention here has to do with prospective plan making and begins to equate to the way the word vision has been used in British planning but with the clear understanding that it must be linked to specific action (Pinson, 2002).

The canton is a subdivision of the département that groups several communes and forms the electoral boundary for elections to the general council of the département.