Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the lower Rhône valley, Lyons-St Etienne in the middle Rhône, Strasbourg in
Alsace, Nancy-Metz in Lorraine, Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing in the north, Nantes-
St Nazaire on the Loire, and Bordeaux and Toulouse as two separate centres in
the southwest. Following the metropoles, other plans were for industrial poles
focusing on heavy industries, at Lyons, Paris and three coastal sites (Le Havre,
Dunkirk and Fos sur Mer). Later modifications of the policies took them down to
smaller towns in more rural settings.
It is difficult to assess the success or failure of the growth poles policy in
France. There has been a major element of decentralization of economic activity
from Paris over the decades since the 1960s, but it is impossible to say how
much of this has been because of the growth poles and their successor policies.
Some individual poles must also be regarded as failures or partial failures. One
has been the industrial pole at Fos sur Mer, supposedly associated with the
Marseilles-Aix axis of development (Bleitrach & Chenu 1982). This huge
development, of a steelworks and associated oil refneries, petrochemical and
aluminium works, was proposed in order to generate industrialization and
economic development in the south of the country. It is criticized on two
grounds. In the first place, it is regarded as having been merely an agent of
central government in league with the dominant capitalist interests of the big
banks and steel companies. Government money was put into Fos which simply
subsidized moves that would eventually have been taken by the companies
themselves. In pre-war France, the main iron and steel region had been Lorraine
in the northeast. But its supplies of coal and iron were dwindling and it had
become a high-cost region, so that moves to the coast were needed and the
companies would have had to make them.
On a second line of attack, the mechanics of Fos are also criticized. Steel
manufacture failed to build up to the anticipated capacity of 7.5 million tons per
annum in the 1970s (Clout 1982). The big works failed to use local labour and
brought in workers from distant regions instead. Also, Fos failed to stimulate any
downstream industrial development, such as heavy engineering using the steel, in
shipyards, constructional steel, or car manufacturing. It was instead a “cathedral
in the desert”, isolated from the main areas of industrial development of the time.
There were few links even to the Marseilles development as a metropole, which
was based on tertiary activities and not on industry.
Generalizing the growth pole problem
The French example is inserted because it illustrates how problems might
emerge, even under the optimal conditions of a country with intermediate cities
that had been in some way suppressed by the growth of Paris, and would now
expand, and with industries that could act as motors. In other countries, all sorts
of problems exist for the operation of growth poles as planning tools for regional
development.
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