Vous consultezGouverner « dur-mou » : neuf très grandes métropoles

Hard-soft governing : nine very large metropolises
Aside from functional and social problems, the growth of very large metropolises results in a gap between the city area and its corresponding institutions. This in turn makes for increasing complexity in the institutional system, in which institutions piloting technical networks play a more and more important role. What then, does “governing” mean ? Something other than the usual sense of the term : the metropolitan control authority “accompanies” more than it directs and orients more than it decides. This gives rise to a “hard-soft” form of government : beneath the formal weakness of the political institutions lie structuring decisions — budgets, norms, etc. — originating in a hard level of authority and constituting reference points for the other actors.