Experimentation in street renovations in Quebec City: Public participation and new municipal collaborations
In Quebec City, at the end of the 1960s, citizen committees reacted to urban renovation operations in the blue collar neighborhoods of Lower Town. These committees first fought large-scale urban highway projects that threatened housing accessibility and wanted to protect the working-class identity of their neighborhoods. Over time, they broaden their concerns to the way streets are renovated and to urban planning more generally. Beginning in 2014, with a pilot project, Quebec City started to experiment with new ways to address street renovations, in order to evaluate the relevance of a participative and integrated approach. This paper suggests that citizen claims, formulated with more and more “expertise’’, may have supported the emergence of this practice of municipal experimentation.