Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
One general problem area was in the interrelationship of city and hinterland. In
a country such as Brazil, these relations might be very different, as between
different parts of the country. For Brazil, the city of São Paulo has acted as a
kind of growth pole to much of the eastern state of São Paulo, with a ring of
industrial satellites around it involved in manufacturing for the steel and car-
making industries, among others. Here there has been a positive link as dynamic
industries have expanded and sought lower cost sites than those available in the
city.
In the northeast of the country, the relationship is quite different. Cities such
as Recife and Fortaleza are generally regarded as centres of wealth, where the
surplus from traditional farming is consumed, but receiving no new investments
in industry since labour costs in the city are already low and infrastructure is
weak in the countryside. As a result, in the Nordeste, there are huge differences
in levels of living, as well as in income levels (see Ch. 4). Apart from the
industrial relationships differing, the São Paulo and Nordeste areas differ in
farming systems. In the case of São Paulo, large capitalist farms exist which
provide money incomes to their workers and market goods for the urban
consumers. There are, in other words, good city-region economic linkages in
place. In the Nordeste this is not so, and a near subsistence agriculture produces
little for the urban markets, and cannot pay its workers enough to create a
demand (Lopes 1977). We might summarize this general point by saying that
growth poles cannot exist in isolation, and that a pre-existing positive city-to-
region relationship needs to be in place in order to allow the pole to operate.
Despite all these difficulties in getting growth poles to function as originally
proposed, they became part of standard thinking on regional development, not
only in France but very widely in the world, and were pursued in some form up
until very recently. In most cases the results have been very limited, but the policies
have been attractive, presumably because they appear to be limited in need for
legislation or investment on the part of government.
Growth poles could be thought of at different levels in the urban hierarchy. In
France itself, the emphasis moved down from major cities to smaller towns
within more rural settings. At the lowest level, small market towns might be
given the growth pole status, as centres of exchange and industrial poles for their
own tiny hinterland. Something of this view is contained in Rondinelli &
Ruddle's (1978) advocacy of the building of market centres in underdeveloped
countries. They considered the absence of such centres to be a major stumbling
block for development because farmers could never move above a subsistence
level without proper marketing systems, including the markets themselves and
roads to link to them. There were elements of truth for such an argument in
countries such as Bolivia up to the 1950s, where markets had been suppressed by
the landlordtenant contracts that required peasants to deliver all their surplus to
the owner. Rondinelli (1985) did in fact use his arguments in Bolivia, along with
the Phillipines, to construct a set of policies for economic development. In
