One of the hallmarks of late political modernity may be that grassroots groups and urban social movements are fixed in increasingly distal relations with left of center parties. We examine the history of these relations in the city of Montreal, where there has been an historic progression from left parties, with significant constituencies, to parties without local actors. The 1994 municipal election in Montreal is reviewed in this light. Our findings indicate, however, that urban movements have developed a 'transfunctionality'. This places them in a conflict-laden stance to urban social policy, by signaling that which has been excluded from that relationship, through the arbitrariness of the service function they have taken on. These transformations have ushered them away from protest activities and towards a politics of everyday life (needs satisfactions, well-being), increasing their base constituencies, while lowering their ideological and rhetorical positions. Grassroots groups are bringing an unaccustomed political diversity into the discourse of the traditional and new urban left. These are not programmatic rehearsals, in search of a reworked or revised totality, but rather represent strategically placed claims to appropriate greater political, social and cultural spaces around issues of mutuality, self-help and effective local power Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
L'examen des rapports entre la ville de Montréal et l'État québécois permet de cerner les limites de la démocratie et les frontières de l'autonomie municipale. Le développement des institutions politiques à Montréal s'inscrit dans la rationalisation du système étatique québécois; les mouvements sociaux urbains remettent en cause les limites de ces institutions municipales et leurs pratiques sont la base d'une nouvelle citoyenneté urbaine.The relationship between the city of Montreal and the Quebec state is a rich terrain for posing questions about the limits of democracy and the frontiers of municipal autonomy. This paper examines the development of formal political institutions in Montreal as part of the rationalization of the Quebec state System. I argue that the types of citizenship practices that have emerged in Montreal, particularly through the actions of urban social movements, test the limits of these institutions. This is the sociopolitical foundation for what I call the «new urban citizenship», a contemporary conflictual field for claims-making
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.