Towards a new metropolitan approach – Review

"Metropolization is not a natural phenomenon, but rather the result of private and public decisions. To this end, public actors, the operators of metropolization, have developed a metropolitan approach, i.e., a set of doctrines, public policies, and operational actions. This metropolitan action is based on convictions about the benefits of metropolitanization (creation of wealth and jobs) and its knock-on effects. However, while metropolitanization has produced many of the expected effects, cities today find themselves in a situation where metropolitanization and its benefits coexist with worsening crises. As a result, public actors are taking a different approach to metropolitan action. It is no longer (or no longer solely) a question of supporting metropolitanization, but of ensuring the sustainable functioning of the metropolitan urban areas that they have helped to create and which are now recognized as a problem. Neither a critical-normative discourse nor an alternative narrative, the book draws on a review of thirty years of actions in favor of metropolitanization to examine not what should change but what is changing in response to the problems of metropolitan areas. It argues that metropolitan public action, metropolitan action, is being (re)constructed in and from operational practices, highlighting the innovations underway but also the difficulties to be overcome in order to act. The book explores this moment of bifurcation by focusing on the issues that have been at the heart of metropolitan development and are now being re-examined: employment, living environment, commercial real estate, and economic development. The turning point that is emerging amounts to a considerable shift in perspective, objectives, planning and operational practices, as well as a shift in the classification of strategic activities and jobs, and even in what constitutes a good quality of life.