Social Entrepreneurship in Urban Planning and Development in Montreal

Abstract

Urban development projects, or targeted spatial interventions driven by property logics and aiming at delivering social and economic benefits, became increasingly popular as a spatial planning device in the push for the creation of more competitive urban environments. This chapter shows how the transformation of a large-scale industrial complex in Montreal (Angus Technopolis), a special form of urban project, gave rise to a new distribution of roles and responsibilities between community organisations, union-related organisations, private business and public actors. It is argued that tensions arise between the expansion of the urban neoliberal agenda (through stimulation of a more entrepreneurial civil society); and the potential for new forms of collective action. The analysis of the emergence of a ‘not-for-profit developer’ in the Angus case suggests the potential for social entrepreneurship, incorporating broad socio-economic objectives in the delivery of urban spatial policy. However, it is also shows the emergence of new constraints and the risk of instrumentalisation of community-based organisations when civil society groups take the entrepreneurial turn.