For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building of spatio-temporal standardised statistical databases. We first explain the concept of a generic evolutionary urban unit ("city") and its necessary adaptations to the information provided by each national statistical system. Second, the hierarchical structure and the urban growth process are compared at macro-scale for the seven countries with reference to Zipf's and Gibrat's model: in agreement with an evolutionary theory of urban systems, large similarities shape the hierarchical structure and growth processes in BRICS countries as well as in Europe and United States, despite their positions at different stages in the urban transition that explain some structural peculiarities. Third, the individual trajectories of some 10,000 cities are mapped at micro-scale following a cluster analysis of their evolution over the last fifty years. A few common principles extracted from the evolutionary theory of urban systems can explain the diversity of these trajectories, including a specific pattern in their geographical repartition in the Chinese case. We conclude that the observations at macro-level when summarized as stylised facts can help in designing simulation models of urban systems whereas the urban trajectories identified at micro-level are consistent enough for constituting the basis of plausible future population projections.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures; Pumain, Denise, et al. "Multilevel comparison of large urban systems." Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography (2015

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Ce sont les considérations économiques qui ont présidé à la construction des premières lignes de chemin de fer en Afrique du Sud, à l’époque de la colonisation britannique. Le maillage du réseau amorcé lors de la constitution de la Nation sud-africaine en 1910 est cependant ralenti pendant le régime d’apartheid. Nous faisons l’hypothèse que ce ralentissement est lié à un objectif de contrôle des mobilités par le régime d’apartheid afin d’instituer une politique de séparation systématique des différents groupes de population. L’enjeu pour les différents gouvernements en charge de la planification consiste aujourd’hui à dépasser cet héritage et à refaire du train un instrument de lien social et de cohésion urbaine pour tous les citoyens.