Réinventer Montréal : une archéologie du discours urbanistique des Trente Glorieuses

This dissertation focuses on the structure of the urban discourse in Montreal during the Trente Glorieuses (Glorious Thirty). Against the dominant interpretation, according to which the urban planning of the Glorious Thirties was disproportionately technophile and had confiscated the power to speak of the city, we show that by dramatizing the decomposition of the urban object and by making the very definition of the city a problem, urban planning creates a discursive space in which technique presents itself as both a problem and a solution.  First, we analyze the significance of the critique of technocratic urban planning (the typical expression of which is found in Jane Jacobs) in contemporary political theory, by means of an analysis of the best-selling book Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott. We show that this critique is based on an “overhang hypothesis”, the operation of which is analogous to what Michel Foucault calls “the repressive hypothesis”. We explain its success by showing that it corresponds to the dominant view of criticism as the trial of reason. Rejecting the reception given to it by the anti-planners, we then show that one can find in Foucault's archaeological method elements for an analysis of urban planning that is not only centered on the flaws of modernist ideology and the disproportionate growth of technocratic power.  Secondly, we forge a hypothesis about the structure of the urbanistic discourse by means of a rereading of Immanuel Kant, Reinhart Koselleck and Hans Jonas. Rather than assimilating urban planning with a disproportionate form (hubris) of rationalism, it is a question of finding in it a particularly sophisticated reflection on the limits of the power to know, of which the analytic of Kantian finitude is the paradigmatic form. We then use the history of Koselleck's concepts to shed light on the functioning and the intradiscursive effects of the questioning of the traditional concept of city that is carried out by urban planners Finally, Jonas’s ethics of technology allows us to show that modern planning relies on (and is justified by) the dangers of  uncontrolled techno-industrial development.  Thirdly, we test this hypothesis by means of a study of Montreal's urban planning discourse from 1941 to 1967. Analyzing how the first professionals of the City's Planning Department represented Montreal, we deal with the idea of a city in motion, the methods of representing urban space and the injunction to reinvent the city that we find in urban discourse. Based on three transversal figures—namely Hans Blumenfeld, Claude Robillard and Jean-Claude La Haye—we show that the urban planning discourse of the Glorious Thirties in Montreal is polyphonic, which is to say, we find different legitimization tactics that all form variations of the same great discursive strategy of decomposing and recomposing the urban object. We will see these tactics at work in urban renewal (the Dozois plan and the project for the Little Burgundy district (Petite-Bourgogne)), the organization of urban planning expertise (l’Institut d’urbanisme et la Commission provinciale d’urbanisme), and metropolitan planning ideas (Horizon 2000).

Keyphrases: Discours, James C. Scott, Jane Jacobs, Trente Glorieuses, Michel Foucault, Technocratie, Urbanisme, Archeology, Discourse, Immanuel Kant, Modernization, Planning, Urban renewal, Technocracy, Urbanism, City