Le destin contrarié de l’urbanisme de Jean-Claude La Haye

This article will analyze Jean-Claude La Haye's political career and the discourse he mobilized to justify the founding of urban planning institutions in Quebec in the 1960s. Running counter to the assessment that La Haye was motivated by a technocratic approach to land use planning, we demonstrate that his argument puts forward the inadequacy of technical knowledge and the need to go beyond the limits of a global sharing of knowledge carried out by urban planning. Rather than technically simplifying the problems of land use planning brought about by industrialization and population growth, La Haye relies on their complexity and their interdependence to justify implementing a new form of multidisciplinary and general expertise that would make it possible to embrace a 360-degree forward-looking view. After briefly discussing Jean-Claude La Haye's training, we analyze the way he argued for the creation of the Universite de Montreal's Institut d'urbanisme and the Corporation des urbanistes du Quebec, and the way he justified setting up a hierarchical institutional model in the report of the commission provinciale d'urbanisme (provincial planning commission). We conclude by analyzing the disappointments he experienced. We maintain that in conceiving the urbanist as an innovative professional generalist without an exclusive sphere of action, La Haye facilitated the transformation of the institutions that he set up and, in the end, had little control over their fate.