Suchergebnisse

The quest for quality, or excellence, is virtually universal. In the search for competitiveness, firms embarked upon this path in the 1980s. The public services followed in the 1990s. Today it is the territorial entities - regions, départements, cities - which have set out to improve their "quality" . This article explores the problems posed by this new search for territorial excellence. Is the quality of a territorial entity (of a city) similar in nature to that of a consumer durable or a service? If it is true that the common denominator of every quest for quality is customer satisfaction, who are the city's "customers" ? Who defines the quality of the city? How can we find organised ways of hearing what the citizens have to say? How are the frequently contradictory interests of the territorial protagonists to be reconciled? How is a project geared to excellence to be put in place? Is it possible to transfer the tools and methods of total quality management to a territory? Only one thing is certain: building the quality of a city is a task to be performed together.