Pierre Mansat and Christian Lefèvre. Ma vie rouge. Meurtre au Grand Paris, Grenoble, Presses universitaires de Grenoble (“Engagement” Series), 2021.
Commented by Mariona Tomàs-Fornés, international member (August 2021):
Ma vie rouge. Meurtre au Grand Paris, written by Deputy Mayor of Paris under Delanoë, Pierre Mansat, and political scientist Christian Lefèvre, is a mixture of reality and fiction. The book explains the difficulties of politically building the Greater Paris and the failure of the model implemented. It contains many interesting elements for those who are passionate about politics and especially metropolitan governance.
Mansat’s experience expresses the need to build a metropolitan history shared by citizens. I highlight this fragment:
“Governance must improve the effectiveness of collective action of public policies and legitimize them. (...) There is no miracle solution for all metropolises. And the question of legitimacy is central, hence the imperatives of introducing democracy on a massive scale into the systems of public policy development and decision-making, but also of integrating foreign populations, of legitimizing the metropolitan scale, of producing a senseof belonging to the metropolitan territory, and of supporting the empowerment of individuals and groups. It raises two key questions: that of leadership, which is not necessarily linked to one person but which must develop relationships between the multiple actors; and that of the role of the state in legitimization, which is necessary because the local actors probably do not have the necessary power.”
These words highlight: 1) the importance of the metropolitan project behind the governance model, which must be adapted to the particular case; 2) the necessary democratic legitimacy, leadership, and sense of belonging related to the metropolitan project.
These reflections can be applied to all metropolises, including Montréal. The elements of soft governance (narrative, leadership, legitimacy) are also key aspects of metropolitan governance, complementary to those of hard governance (competencies, financing, electoral system).
