CIAO DATE: 02/2009

Urban Sustainable Development and the Challenge of French Metropolitan Strategies

November 2008

Centre for European Political Sociology

Abstract

This article focuses on some salient issues of urban sustainable development in France, specifically with regard to six urban agglomerations: Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Montpellier, Nantes and Toulouse. The reticular dimension of these issues is analysed with reference to the ways a plurality of actors imagine, project and realise the construction of cities, rather than through sectoral points of view. This relational approach is divided according to a triple focus in which we successively address: firstly, the state of SD policies in the listed major French cities, in terms of contents and conception; secondly, their implementation from the perspective of instruments; and finally, the circuits of their realisation. Thus, urban SD appears within a (locally variable) set of linkages that place these issues firmly in areas of interrelations and intersections.

Resource link: Urban Sustainable Development and the Challenge of French Metropolitan Strategies [PDF] - 1.6M