Regional Land Use Planning in Quebec, the Poor Relative of Regional Sciences

Although planning gives the illusion to benefit from a favoured status, it barely helps in fact to face Quebec's major development challenges. Confined to the local scale of its practice since the end of the 1970's, planning is mostly related to macro zoning activities, based on the production of municipal plans and regulations. This restricted vision explains, in some ways, the lack of interest among regional scientists. Nevertheless, the actual changes in economic geography and the organisation of territorial resources around renewal and revival appear to give new arguments in favour of planning as a practice as well as an object of science.