Transformative Urban Transport and the Making of an Urban Regional Mode of Governance
Résumé
This case argues that the transformation of urban transport in Paris and the Ile-de-France Region is inextricably linked to evolving relationships between three levels of government—the City of Paris, the Ile-de-France Region and the French State—entailing as much competition and conflict as negotiation and cooperation. Where transport planning and implementation was mainly organized at the national level prior to the 1990s, it became increasingly territorialized at both the regional and the urban level as local and regional authorities struggled against the State, its agencies, and state-owned companies in assertion of their political autonomy amidst long-term decentralization, metropolisation, and urban competition. Beyond its substantive importance, transport provided a critical issue and instrumental mechanism for asserting political and institutional leadership, developing new alliances, and gaining visibility at various levels and scales. As key individuals and collective actors—including mayors, their deputies, state elites, political parties, public-private partnerships, and municipal collaborations—initiated myriad policy actions, some were radical and others incremental, resulting from negotiation as well as reaction. This mix of experiments and leadership competition not only combined to vastly transform the urban transport system in the city and region, but the emerging mode of governance further transformed the way through which transport is planned and implemented in terms of scale, modes, and collective action/networks of actors in the capital-city region.