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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.