Lendemains d'échecs

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size In the year 1998, two important urban planning projects were rejected by the inhabitants of the city of Geneva. The first one concerned “Place des Nations”, the second one “Place Neuve”, which both are considered strategic locations within the city. As these two rejections of local authority policy followed shortly after each other, they created considerable traumatic experience at the local level. Nevertheless, the series of events which lead to these rejections has never been examined in depth. Consequently, the learning process of the public remained limited. To better understand the reasons for the two rejections, this article proposes to reopen these files and concentrates its analysis on the course of the projects. It shows that the definition of “public interest” in both cases was incomplete and therefore it concludes with a short inventory of procedures aimed to formulate a coherent definition of “public interest”.