Evaluation de l'integration 'forme urbaine---transports durables' dans les trois grandes regions metropolitaines canadiennes: Nouvelle approche exploratoire

An integrated planning approach to urban development and sustainable transportation is key to managing car travels and mitigating car dependency, which are two essential elements to the sustainable development of metropolitan areas. This research focuses on the recent evolution of urban form in the three Canadian metropolitan regions of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, through the lens of the planning paradigm of "urban form---sustainable transportation" integration.;Our research strategy centered on the elaboration of an analytical framework that would enable the full measurement and assessment of the planning paradigm. This framework takes advantage of analytical capabilities offered by geographic information systems (GIS), as well as by common Internet tools of "virtual place exploration" such as Google Earth. The result was an original, multidimensional and multi-scale methodological approach.;Its application enabled specific urban form analyses for each of the studied metropolitan regions, structured around three main perspectives: their overall performance (around 2006), performance of their metropolitan fringe, and the evolution of their performance between 2001 and 2006. Our comparative analyses revealed that Vancouver ranks first in all three perspectives, while Montreal ranks third overall, mainly because of a particularly weak performance of its periphery.;Globally, the three regions show a poor integration between urban form and sustainable transportation networks and suffer from high levels of car dependency, especially at their periphery. Despite the presence of adequate planning objectives, their urban form deficiencies and relatively weak progresses leave us to anticipate that the predominance of car dependency is there to stay in the near future.;It appears vital that public stakeholders show more "lucidity", or "maturity", in face of tough evidences that reveal how hard the implementation of their policy objectives is, as well as the dichotomy between these same objectives and what can be actually observed "on the ground". A mandatory step towards improved and, maybe, more effective planning policies is a full recognition of the limits of the actual planning paradigm and of the huge challenge that a shift in trends represents.;This would imply a greater transparency in the policy evaluation area, along with coordinated efforts to support the development and dissemination of high-quality data on urban form and urban transportation, improved monitoring tools, etc. All this could induce a new synergy among all stakeholders involved either in urban research, urban development or urban planning and transportation policies.;An improvement to our own methodological approach could also benefit from such advances, being of many potential avenues for the ongoing exploration of the issue in Canadian metropolises.;Keywords: urban form; sustainable transportation; indicators; geographic information systems; assessment; Smart growth; Canadian metropolitan areas; Toronto; Montreal; Vancouver.