Urban Forest Conservation: What Kind of Strategies Should be Adopted in the Montreal Metropolitan Area?

A report on the difficulties of implementing a metropolitan-wide plan for natural area protection in Montreal, QC (CAN) .

"This paper presents the results obtained with respect to the protection of natural areas in the Montreal metropolitan area (Canada) following the publication of government policies in 2001. These policies were developed by an ad hoc task force made up of experts and lay people from three disciplines – plant biology, urban planning, and landscape architecture – all working for government agencies and community-based groups. Discussions revolved around defining the concepts of “urban nature” and “urban forest,” as well as on deciding which strategy should be adopted. An approach based on landscape ecology was proposed. Two years later, the task force’s main recommendations have yet to be implemented. The argument being made is that transactions between disciplinary cultures and organizational affiliations are largely the reason why it is difficult to apply the proposed strategy. The theory of transactional analysis was used to counter the argument. Interviews conducted with the ad hoc group participants have shed light on the terms of the social transaction that occurred and allowed its subsequent fragility to be determined. A correspondence analysis performed using the content of interviews shows that the terms of the compromise were not accepted by the participants following the report’s publication and that the experts remained grouped around their original positions. The concepts of urban nature and urban forest thus remain difficult to define from a theoretical and methodological standpoint, which makes them even more difficult to apply." [Abstract]

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