Post on 27-Apr-2023
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forthcoming in:
Kobayashi A (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography 2nd edition.
Elsevier, Amsterdam (December 2019)
Growth Poles, Growth Centers
Ugo Rossi
Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning,
Università di Torino, Italy ugo.rossi@unito.it
ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5502-9842
Synopsis
In the post-Second World War decades, during the so-called ‘golden age’ of Fordist
and Keynesian capitalism, the theory of ‘growth poles’ (pôles de croissance) became
a globally hegemonic regional policy and, as such, a precursory example of policy
mobility in a pre-globalization era. Growth-pole strategies were adopted in
disadvantaged regions of both developed and developing countries, most notably in
Southern Europe, Latin America, East Africa, South Asia, and North America.
French economist François Perroux introduced this concept, theorizing the
cumulative effects generated by a complex of industries mutually linked by
functional relations and dominated by a propulsive industry (the so-called industrie
motrice). French-speaking economic geographers later spatialized the economic
concept of growth pole, turning it into a theory of the ‘growth center’ (variously
defined growth areas, development nuclei, core areas, growing points, etc.). This
contribution assesses the rise and decline of this globally hegemonic approach to
regional policy and economic planning, through a critical comparison with regional
policy models that became predominant in the subsequent post-Fordist age such
as industrial districts and technopoles.
Keywords
growth poles; growth centers; regional development; economic planning;
disadvantaged regions; economic development; Fordism; Keynesianism; external
economies; François Perroux; policy mobility; Southern Europe; Appalachian
Region; Latin America
Introduction
It can be argued that the theory of what came to be known as ‘growth poles’ (pôles
de croissance) symbolized in the 1950s and the 1960s – a ‘magic label’ or a ‘mythic
catchword’ as some commentators defined it at that time – what industrial districts
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represented in the 1980s and technopoles in the 1990s: a path-breaking strand of
research, intimately linked to the leading approaches of industrial policy being
adopted at the local level, particularly in the disadvantaged regions of both
developed and developing countries. It is thereby interesting to look back again to
the theory of growth poles and centers and to its translation into a concrete strategy
of regional policy, also because it testifies to the ways in which theories and
concepts of regional development cyclically appear and disappear within this field
of inquiry and its related policy sphere. This circulation of ideas sheds light on the
highly historicized and contingent character of regional economic development
policies and theories. Regional policies witness the spirit of the times in which they
appear and take form and all of them are, in one way or another, subjected to cycles
of rise, consolidation, decline, and then more or less rapid dismissal.
While the place where growth pole theories and strategies appeared and
gained currency was France, for industrial districts and technopoles this role has
been played by the so-called Third Italy and the Californian Silicon Valley model,
respectively. These theories and the related policy instruments have acquired an
influence transcending their respective contexts of origin and have been applied in
a growing number of regions in both the developed and developing countries.
Variants of growth poles and centers policies have been implemented all over the
world, particularly in Southern Europe, Latin America, East Africa, South Asia and
North America. The variety of policy applications shows how growth pole theory
has become a truly ‘cross-national’ instrument and conceptual framework of
regional policy during the post-war decades whose influence is still currently
visible. This is a demonstration of the high level of homogenization at a world-scale
level experienced by regional policies during the Fordist–Keynesian era. In more
contemporary lexicon, growth-pole theory can be seen as a precursory example of
policy mobility preceding the advent of globalization, at least in the way we are
accustomed to knowing it.
A difference between Fordist and post-Fordist regional concepts and related
models of economic and spatial policy lies in the fact that the former, starting with
growth pole theory, have been adopted most frequently within the context of lagging
behind regions, while the latter, such as industrial districts and technopoles, have
been formulated with reference to emerging regions and city-regions of Western
Europe (Third Italy, Baden-Württemberg, Catalonia, Ireland) and East and South
Asia (Singapore, Bangalore, Zhongguancun), respectively. This shift testifies to the
changing perspective that has gained ground in regional development studies and
policies in recent years as compared to the situation in the post-war decades, with
attention being diverted from the structural conditions of less-favored regions and
a greater emphasis being placed on key factors behind economic success rather
than on the recovery from economic backwardness.
In light of this shift in regional development literature and policy action, this
article presents and discusses the scholarly literature dealing with growth pole
theory and strategies. The article is organized as follows: first, it reconsiders the
conceptual value of growth pole theory; second, it analyses the implementation of
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growth pole strategies in a number of regional contexts at an international level;
finally, some conclusions are drawn reflecting on the intellectual legacy of this
regional development theory and policy experience.
The Theories of Growth Poles and Centers: Potentials and Pitfalls
As originally presented in the mid-1950s and onward by French economist
François Perroux, growth pole theory was a largely abstract conceptualization,
rooted in the then commonly held belief within development economics that “an
economy, to lift itself to higher income levels, must and will first develop within
itself one or several regional centers of economic strength” (Hirschman, 1958, p.
183). This conception underlies the idea of a complex of industries mutually linked
by functional relations and dominated by a propulsive industry (the so-called
industrie motrice), the latter being the engine of the development dynamic, thanks
to its intrinsic capacity to innovate and stimulate economic growth as well as to
nurture the formation of other economic activities and industries.
Conceptually, Perroux premised his theory upon a neo-Schumpeterian
understanding of the mechanics of development within capitalist economies.
Development proceeds, in Schumpeter’s view, by the direct and the indirect effects
of innovations that are able to take an economy away from a stationary equilibrium
(both sectoral and spatial). This means that the newer and more efficient industries
in which innovations take place grow at a faster pace compared to the older and
more static industries. Moreover, he drew on the Keynesian notion of the multiplier
in order to emphasize the expansionary effect on aggregate demand associated with
government-led growth-pole initiatives. The pursuit of regional economic
development, in his Schumpeterian-Keynesian perspective, entailed the production
of sectoral and spatial differentiation, in contrast to the classical conception of the
economic system as an entity naturally tending towards a full-employment
stationary state. This conceptual framework had many commonalities with coeval
theories of unbalanced and cumulative growth (notably those of leading economists
and planners such as Albert Hirschmann, Gunnar Myrdal, and John Friedmann).
At a more practical level, Perroux thought that in order to act as a pole the
propulsive industry should satisfy the three criteria of: (1) large size, (2) a potential
of economic leadership, and (3) a rate of growth faster than that of the local and
regional economy in which it becomes embedded. The existence of these conditions
allowed the deployment of a mechanic of polarization, which in Perroux’s view could
take place in two specific respects: first, the leading firm can make anticipation of
demand, both correct and incorrect, in favor of smaller firms; second, the effects of
the leading firm are capable of changing the balance of factor inputs in other firms.
In formulating growth-pole theory, critics have noted that Perroux referred to
a conventionally abstract, topological space of Euclidean kind. It was only at a
subsequent stage of the debate on growth poles that some scholars, especially in
France, sought to apply Perrouxian theory to a geographic dimension of enquiry
and theoretical reflection. Francophone human geographers were in the forefront
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of this attempt. At that time, human geographers and most notably economic
geographers became convinced about the necessity to rethink conventional
categories and visions of regional growth and change, particularly those inherited
from the tradition of regional geography established by Vidal de la Blache and his
followers in the first half of the 20th century. This emergent body of geographic
thinking and research advocated a proactive approach to regional enquiry,
commonly termed géographie active. In doing so, French-speaking geographers
asserted the aim of going beyond a prefixed identity and economic configuration of
regional spaces, placing emphasis on the role of the state and other planning
entities in re-shaping regional economies and societies. While the homogenous
region was the favorite regional form for Vidalian geographers, during post-war
decades and most notably during the 1960s the success of polarization theories led
to the fore debates about the so-called ‘polarized region’. According to scholars
proposing this concept such as Jacques Boudeville, a polarized region exists only
as a product of a regional economic planning and policy initiative.
Somehow consistently with the aim of spatializing growth pole theory, other
authors – most notably urban scholars – referred to a location, usually an urban
region, having a polarizing effect and potential in terms of ‘growth center’. This
latter field of enquiry offered an expanded interpretation of the Perrouxian theory
of growth poles, showing how the role played by growth centers in regional
development is illustrative of the general process of innovation diffusion. In doing
so, these scholars drew on functional urban theory: in particular, Brian Berry’s
conceptualization of urban systems theorizing a system of cities arranged in a
hierarchy according to the functions performed by each. Discussions about the
critical size of the city for being a ‘growth center’ were central to this line of enquiry,
with the 250,000 population figure being seen as the conventional threshold.
Theorizers of growth centers related the differential of demographic growth
displayed by cities and metropolitan areas to the local economic structure and
particularly to the sectoral division of labor at the urban level. In advanced
countries – these authors argued – the greater the earnings derived from primary
activities, the lower the growth. As earnings from manufacturing increase, the
growth rate tends to stabilize around the national average. The greater the share
of earnings from the tertiary sector, involving innovative activities such as research
and development and education, the greater the population growth rate.
However, even in those contributions that retained a closer linkage to
Perrouxian theory, while attempting to offer a spatialization of his theory, the
conceptual mismatch was evident. In general terms, the translation of the
Perrouxian theory of the growth pole into a theory of the ‘growth center’ (variously
defined growth areas, development nuclei, core areas, growing points, etc.) entailed
a translation of an economic concept into a geographic concept. This act of
translation from the realm of economic space to that of geographic space has been
among the most controversial and critiqued aspects in this literature. While
Perrouxian theory itself did not remain untouched by critiques stressing its
incompleteness and vagueness, an even much stronger and more severe criticism
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has been directed against the geographic applications and reformulations of his
theory. Geographic translations of the Perrouxian theory have been widely
criticized for absence of theoretical rigor and sophistication, for lack of satisfactory
empirical evidence and at the same time for a tendency toward empiricism.
According to critics, the concept of ‘growth center’ has exceeded the original
conceptualization of the Perrouxian ‘growth pole’, but at the same time has also
developed an ambiguous relationship with this notion. In particular, three
weaknesses have been identified within those theoretical efforts attempting to
spatialize growth pole theory and to apply it to specific geographic and policy
contexts. First, critics have questioned the basic assumption that the growth pole
in geographic space (the ‘growth center’) was simply a variant of the growth pole in
economic space; second, critics expressed skepticism about the main assumption
underlying the geographic translation of growth pole theory, that is, the idea that
the ‘natural’ growth pole existing in geographic space could be automatically
replicated in the form of a planned growth pole; third, they lamented the loss of the
original neo-Schumpeterian attention toward economic innovation and signaled,
on the contrary, a prevailing emphasis being laid on firm size with its multiplier
potentials as a distinguishing feature of growth centers and poles.
Despite this conceptual looseness about the relationship to the Perrouxian
formulation, the geographic understanding of growth pole theory provided a bridge
with an older set of theories investigating the organization of human activity in
geographic space: most notably, August Lösch’s economics of industrial location
and Walter Christaller’s central place theory. Even though these theorizations and
the geographic reformulations of growth pole theory differ in their way of reasoning,
the former embracing a distinctively deductive method and the latter an inductive
method of analysis, it can be nonetheless argued that they are complementary in
their contribution to regional science. While Jacques Boudeville’s theory provides
an explanation of the developmental impact of localized poles of growth in
geographic space, it is not by itself a theory of location explaining where the
functional growth poles are or where they will be localized in the future. To clarify
this, some authors have argued that growth-pole theory should rely on theories of
location, such as those of Lösch and Christaller. In fact, central place and
industrial location theories, despite their obsession with spatial regularities and
their blindness toward the intrinsic dynamics of economic growth, are able to
provide a more accurate analysis of the impact of development in a given center on
the other centers. In this sense, pre-Second World War locational theories were
regarded as useful complements to subsequent theories of growth poles and
centers, which on their part concentrate their analytical efforts on the functioning
of the economic process.
The translation of growth-pole conceptualizations into a geographic theory of
regional development has proved to be problematic not only at a theoretical level
but also at a practical level. The experiments of regional policy undertaken in
different regions of the world are illustrative of the potential as well as the
limitations of this controversial theory and policy tool.
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Applying Growth Pole Theory as a Regional Development Policy
The formulation of growth-pole theory and the related application to concrete
regional contexts resulted from the need for policy and planning tools capable of
solving problems of imbalance among regions in both industrialized and so-called
‘underdeveloped’ countries during the post-war decades. Despite its conceptual
vagueness and elusiveness, as highlighted in the previous section, growth-pole
theory proved to be a highly popular regional policy tool in a number of geographic
and economic contexts. Its popularity largely lies in the fact that it was viewed by
planners and policymakers as a sort of ‘complete theory’ of economic growth,
capable of combining all aspects of development in a large variety of geographic
settings.
In Southern Europe, growth-pole policies were pursued in Italy and Spain in
the 1950s and the 1960s. At the time, these countries strongly differed in their
political, socio-economic, and geographic conditions. Italy was an emerging
capitalist country, experiencing an intense process of industrialization in the years
between 1958 and 1963, with an economic geography deeply characterized by the
North–South divide. For its part, Spain was politically isolated, the economy
strongly nationalized and heavily regulated from the center, while the distinctive
features of its economic geography were not those of dualism as in Italy but of
fragmentation and dispersal: Spain’s main centers of activity were far apart from
each other and were linked by an imperfectly developed transportation system. In
Italy, a growth pole strategy was devised in the southern regions of the country (the
so-called Mezzogiorno). The growth pole strategy took the form of an
industrialization plan that was organized by concentrating public investments in a
relatively large number of industrial poles, in which the mechanic of growth was
associated with a newly created propulsive industry specializing in a capital-
intensive and relatively technologically advanced sector of the economy. A law
approved by the Italian Parliament in 1957 identified about 100 industrial poles,
even though those that proved to be effective were much fewer and – even more
importantly – the propulsive effect of many of them proved to be weaker than that
envisaged by the Perrouxian theoretical framework. Critics also pointed out that
several poles of industrial growth had been created with consensus-building
purposes, in line with the Italian system of political clientelism. In the end, only a
limited number of regions benefited from the growth pole strategy: the Campania
region with some large industrial complexes created in the wider urban area of
Naples; the Puglia region with a large chemical industrial settlement in Brindisi
and a big steel plant in Taranto; and then Sicily with the industrial sites of Gela
and Syracuse specializing in chemicals and petrochemicals. Geographically, the
policy strategy was therefore implemented mainly in the coastal regions, while
Mezzogiorno’s inland areas became only marginally involved in the
industrialization strategy.
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In Spain, the growth pole policy was much more selective than in Italy. In
1964, seven poles were created (Saragoza, Sevilla, Valladolid, La Coruña, Vigo,
Burgos, and Huelva) and, in 1969, five more poles were added by the national
government. A common trait in Spain was that growth poles were not concentrated
in the most backward regions. In this country the growth pole strategy was not
used as an instrument for developing the poorest regions, but was mobilized in
order to find suitable centers for expansion along the major (existing or planned)
transport and development axes. Preoccupations with regional equalities,
therefore, were not central to the pursuit of the policy strategy. In general, the
strategy suffered from a lack of interinstitutional coordination between the national
and the regional levels of government. Moreover, its effects were limited by the scant
attention devoted to crucial goals for regional economic development in a Fordist
context, such as a firm-size increase (Spanish industry was dominated by small
firms at the time) and the creation of an adequate welfare system, particularly in
terms of public housing for the working classes.
A well-known example of growth-pole strategy has been the one pursued in
the Appalachian region in the United States. This was a peculiar kind of lagging
region, being located between two of the most highly industrialized and urbanized
regions of the world, the Atlantic megalopolis and the industrial Midwest. The
Appalachian Regional Commission viewed the lack of urban centers capable of
providing producer services, trained labor, and other external economies as the
factors lying behind the backwardness of this region. It is in light of this context
that the Appalachian Regional Development Act approved in 1965 has to be
understood. In contrast to the scattering of public investments that characterized
earlier attempts to aid depressed areas, the Act concentrated public investments
in areas where there appeared to be the greatest potential for future growth. The
Commission identified 30 ‘growth areas’ as main recipients of public investments.
Each area was organized around a ‘growth center’, which was defined as ‘‘a complex
consisting of one or more communities or places, which, taken together, should
provide, or were likely to provide, a range of cultural, social, employment, trade
and service functions for itself and its associated rural hinterland.’’ A recent
assessment of this policy experiment has pointed to some critical issues that
resemble those underlined with reference to the Italian and the Spanish
experiences (especially the former): an inconsistency between theory and
implementation; the low level of place selectivity and the identification of an
excessive number of areas, many of which could not reasonably qualify as growth
centers; the policy’s inherent exposure to political pressures. Especially the latter
has proven to be a decisive factor in growth pole strategies’ failures or only partial
success. The selection of only a few growth centers, amid political demands and
pressures to designate many, has been the main contradiction in the
implementation of this policy.
In Latin America, growth pole strategies were devised in almost all countries,
even though concrete results were poor. In Chile in the late 1960s a growth pole
strategy was adopted in each of the 11 regions (starting with the provincial capital),
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a few of which were selected as functional poles: for example, Arica for automobiles
and electronics, Santiago for electronics, Concepción for steel and petrochemicals,
and Punta Arena for petrochemicals. However, despite promising signs of economic
resurgence, polarization strategies were adopted too passively on the regional level
and were abandoned by the national government too early to be effective. In Peru,
the 1971–75 plan attempted to alleviate the economic dominance of Lima–Callao
through a decentralization policy that identified two novel axes of national growth
where secondary cities were located. However, the industrial aspects of the growth-
pole strategy were overlooked and the political will behind the strategy itself proved
to be weak. The Venezuelan case has been relatively well-known, particularly for
the Ciudad Guayana project of 1961, in which planners from MIT and Harvard
along with national professionals were invited by the Venezuela government to
create a growth pole in the southern part of the country. This intervention, on the
one hand, transformed a frontier region into an integral part of the national
economy, but on the other hand it could not escape the enclave effect that is typical
for planned cities. In Colombia, the 1969–72 Development Plan aimed to counteract
Bogotá’s dominance by developing three large cities (Medellín, Cali, and
Barranquilla) as so-called equilibrium metropolises. However, the strategy never
got off the ground as the Borrero administration that came into power in 1970s
subjugated polarization to sectoral priorities. In Bolivia, the 1971–91 Plan
announced in 1970 included a growth pole strategy with Cochabamba designated
as a service pole, Santa Cruz and Oruro as industrial poles, and the much smaller
centers of Sucre and Tarija as agro-industrial poles, but was never implemented
and remained a ‘paper plan’. In Argentina, the 1970–75 Plan identified several
regional growth poles, but the spatial choices were poor and conditioned by political
motives rather than by a policy rationality: for instance, three of the poles were in
Patagonia, which has only 2% of the population, while the high-density areas of
the North were relatively neglected. In Brazil, the most successful polarization
strategies have been the promotion of small metropolitan poles within the São Paolo
state and the transfer of the administrative capital to Brasilia. However, regional
policies and programs in this country have been too heterogeneous to be described
as a coherent growth pole approach. Generally speaking, Latin American
experiments of growth pole policies have suffered from similar limitations that have
been detected with reference to other geographic contexts: political
instrumentalization of localization choices, lack of integration with wider national
development strategies, and neglect of institutional factors. Moreover, these
experiments have grappled with different regionally specific issues: most notably,
the weakness of democratic political structures within mostly authoritarian
political regimes; the predominance of monopolistic industrial structures and
associated autarchic economic policies; the relative absence of national elites,
managerial talent and associationist leaders, particularly in secondary cities; and
the lack of an interdependent urban network as well as the weak economic and
functional base of most Latin American cities, except for coastal cities and capital
cities.
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Conclusion
Growth pole strategies have been embraced in a tremendous variety of geographic
settings and socioeconomic contexts: not only in those briefly analysed here of the
Italian Mezzogiorno, of Spain, Latin America, and the Appalachian region in the
United States, but also in other Western countries (Canada and the United
Kingdom) as well as in developing countries such as India, Tanzania and
Mozambique. While these development strategies have occasionally achieved
success, overall the final verdict is negative: the idea of growth poles has not met
original expectations within academia and the wider public. Its advocates lament
the suspicious volte face that has led scholars of regional economic development
first to celebrate the virtues and potentials of growth pole theories and policy
recipes then to quickly dismiss them as something passé or even as a sort of relics
of post-war top-down planning approach. Still, it is widely agreed now that the
theory originally proposed by François Perroux and subsequently amended by
other scholars of regional economic planning has substantially failed to generate
self-sustaining regional development processes and then has almost everywhere
dissolved along with the general decline of Keynesian policies and of related
demand-driven mechanisms of local economic governance.
Even so, the intellectual legacy and influence of growth pole theory are still
remarkable. In particular, some of the fundamental tenets and concepts in this
literature survive within contemporary strands of research commonly labeled as
‘new geographical economics’ (the work, among others, of Paul Krugman, Edward
Glaeser, and Michael Porter) and ‘endogenous growth theory’ (led by economists
such as Robert Lucas and Paul Romer), which are highly influential in today’s
mainstream regional and urban economics. Most notably, ideas about
agglomeration and localization economies and a number of neighboring concepts
and catchwords such as ‘spatial clustering’, ‘spillover effects’, ‘local multipliers’,
and the like are reviving the post-war tradition of regional development studies of
which growth-pole theory has been an important part. Some overly simplistic
versions of growth pole theories have become clearly obsolete, particularly those
associating economic externalities with the size of a city (or a region). Other aspects
of growth pole theory are certainly outdated (the main are probably the rigidly top-
down approach to economic spatial planning, and the neglect of the sociocultural
factors in regional development processes), but of course it would be ungenerous
to expect from a theory that was formulated in the 1950s to express views and
conceptual sensibilities that at the time had not appeared yet.
At the beginning of this article it was noted how growth pole theory reflected
the spirit of the times in which it appeared in the ways in which it gave prominence
to the intervention in the regions lagging behind both in developed and developing
economies. This vision emanated from a Keynesian-inspired idea of demand
stimulation at the regional level as the main goal of economic policy combined with
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a Schumpeterian conception of economic growth. Over the last four decades, on
the contrary, the imperatives imposed by neoliberal ideologies have shifted
attention from regional development strategies requiring active government
intervention to classical conceptions premised on the perfect rationality of
economic behaviour in which regional inequalities are taken for granted as a mere
side effect of market competition.
See also: Agglomeration; Cassa per il Mezzogiorno; Central Place Theory; City-
Region; Corridor and Axis Development; Firms; Fordism; Fordism, Post-Fordism and
Flexible Specialization; Functionalism (Including Structural Functionalism); Industrial
City; Industrial Districts; Industrial Location; Industrialization; Latin American
Structuralist School; Local Economic Development; Métropole d’équilibre; Neoliberal
Economic Strategies; Neoliberalism and Development; Region; Regional Development
Theory; Regional Inequalities; Regional Planning and Development Theories;
Regional Science; Transport and Accessibility; Uneven Development.
Further Reading
Berry, B. J. L. (1972). Hierarchical diffusion: The basis of developmental fi ltering
and spread in a system of growth centers. In Hansen, N. M. (ed.) Growth Centers in
Regional Economic Development. New York: The Free Press.
Boudeville, J.-R. (ed.) (1968). L’espace et les pôles de croissance. Recherches et
textes fondamentaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Darwent, D. F. (1969). Growth poles and growth centers in regional planning – a
review. Environment and Planning 1, 5--32.
George, P., Guglielmo, R. and Kayser, B. (1964). La géographie active. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Hall, P. and Hay, D. (eds.) (1980). Growth Centres in the European Urban System.
London: Heineman.
Hansen, N. M. (ed.) (1972). Growth Centers in Regional Economic Development. New
York: The Free Press.
Hermansen, T. (1972). Development poles and development centres in national and
regional development. In Kuklinsky, A. (ed.) Growth Poles and Growth Centres in
Regional Planning. Paris: Mouton.
Hirschman, A.O. (1958). The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Irázabal, C. (2004). A planned city comes of age: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana
today. Journal of Latin American Geography 3(1), 22-51.
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Lasuen, J.R. (1969). On growth poles. Urban Studies 6(2), 137-161.
Meardon, S.J. (2001). Modeling agglomeration and dispersion in city and country:
Gunnar Myrdal, François Perroux, and the New Economic Geography. The
American Journal of Economics and Sociology 60(1), 25-57.
Muscarà, C. (1967). La geografia dello sviluppo. Sviluppo industriale e politica
geografica nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra. Turin: Edizioni di Comunità.
Nichols, V. (1969). Growth poles: An evaluation of their propulsive effect.
Environment and Planning 1, 193--208.
Parr, J. B. (1999). Growth-pole strategies in regional economic planning: A
retrospective view. Part 1. Origins and advocacy. Urban Studies 36, 1195-1215.
Perroux, F. (1955). Notes sur la notion de pôle de croissance. Economie Appliquée
8, 307-320.
Perroux, F. (1964). L’économie du XX siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Picard, F., Coulibaly, M., Smaller, C. (2017) The Rise of Agricultural Growth Poles
in Africa. International Institute for Sustainable Development
https://www.iisd.org/sites/default/files/publications/rise-agricultural-growth-
poles-in-africa.pdf
Richardson, H. W. (1971). Regional development policy in Spain. Urban Studies
8(1), 39--53.
Richardson, H. W. and Richardson, M. (1975). The relevance of growth center
strategies to Latin America. Economic Geography 51(2), 163-178.
Wood, L. E. (2001). From theory to implementation: An analysis of the Appalachian
Regional Commission’s growth center policy. Environment and Planning A 33, 551-
-566.