In this inquiry, we will examine how we should plan to achieve a democratic community in a city of market democracy such as Montreal: we will propose to learn to plan with equal political influences, for equal opportunities in land-use and for equal urban welfare. For that learning, I will assess two planning projects that the Montreal Citizen's Movement (MCM) experimented with while in power, from 1986 to 1994. The MCM was a municipal party which idealised social justice and participative democracy. The MCM implemented an unprecedented public consultation policy and it tried, in a redevelopment project known as "Overdale", to put in place a compensation policy for equal land-use opportunities.
In assessing these experiments, we will first propose planning principles built on egalitarian ethics and apply them as evaluation criteria in the assessment. We will also compare the MCM public consultation policy with the Participative Budget of Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the Overdale experience of compensation with a case from Santa Monica, California. The MCM public consultation experiment was an exciting start that made more democratic planning decisions and the Overdale experiment was a good source of heuristic learning on how to plan for equal land-use opportunities. Finally, we will examine the MCM efforts to make the unprivileged areas more secure, more sustainable and more beautiful.
