Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Growth poles
Growth and development in a centre, spreading out to other areas over time and
space, are also concepts contained in the earlier ideas of the French economist
François Perroux, who studied the idea of a growth pole. His work is mostly
known through its adaptation to spatial planning, but his own work was mostly to
show that developmental impulses are concentrated. For him, development was
led by a growth pole industry or sector. Its three central characteristics would be
its dynamism through constantly new technology; its rapid growth as an
industry; and its wide linkages both horizontally, to other industries round about
it, and vertically to suppliers of raw materials and to markets for its products.
Once such a view had been propounded, it was readily translated into a
geographical space, so that a growth pole could be defined on the ground, as a
place with growth pole industries having the characteristics of growth,
innovation and linkage. A growth pole could be a “naturally occurring”
industrial city, or the idea could be used as a planning tool, since growth poles
could be created to induce growth in a whole region. Through the multiple links
of such an industry, it would encourage all kinds of other industries in a kind of
halo around it.
Further extensions of the growth pole idea would link it to the whole urban
structure, making growth poles of the intermediate cities to act as regional
stimuli outside the central one. A theory of central places had already been
elaborated by geographers, with the observation of a general regularity in the urban
hierarchy, with few larger centres, and at different lower levels, many more
centres offering lower order services. Looking at real-world urban hierarchies, it
could be seen that many countries, like post-war France and Spain, had one or two
large metropolitan centres, but few intermediate cities acting as regional centres
in a second level of the hierarchy. Following on from this reasoning, growth
poles could be created through the expansion of existing intermediate cities, so
as to have a regular hierarchy which would be better able to distribute growth
down from the centre, as well as stimulate the region around it.
The French example
A major testbed of the growth pole idea was France, where it might be argued
that the best chances of success for a spatial application were found. As early as
1947, Jean François Gravier had criticized the regional structure of the country in
a report entitled
Paris et le desert français,
the title revealing how the country
had become overcentralized since pre-Revolutionary time and continued to focus
all economic activity and administration in Paris (Gravier 1970). Within
France (Boudeville 1966), the regional planning of the Fifth National Plan used a
spatial version of Perroux's ideas to create eight
metropoles d'équilibre,
regional
cities or pairs of cities which would act as counterbalances against the centrality
of Paris, and located well away from the centre. These were at Marseilles-Aix in
