Regional science: economy and geography in France and French‐speaking countries

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to assess the French‐speaking countries contributions to regional science since its creation in the 1950s. France, and other French‐speaking countries, very quickly adhered to the approach of the founding fathers of regional science. French‐language research developed for several years without maintaining major relations with the main streams that flow through regional science. However, the years 2000 and 2010 saw the emergence of streams of thought that strongly irrigate at the international level. The authors of this paper are part of this movement. Here we trace the origins and development of the French‐speaking contribution to regional sciences, while highlighting the originality of the French‐language approach. First, the question of academic and institutional contexts is discussed, with the role of the founders and the peculiar place of Journals and public institutions. Further sections analyse the main contributions coming from economics (local systems of production and innovation, innovative milieus and proximity analysis) and geography (regional development at a global scale, and urban systems and complexity). We conclude with cross‐disciplinary contributions including intra‐urban organization and mobility, territorial governance and territorial development, as well as other approaches to the social sciences, in the contemporary issues of city and territorial governance.

From networks of cities to systems of cities

“…The first axiom of geographical urban theories is that cities are never isolated but organized in systems of interconnected cities, over territories of more or less large dimension (Berry, 1964;Rozenblat et al 2018;Pumain, 2020). Based on observations of cities over the very long term, whatever the forms of political and economic organization of societies, it seems established that cities never appear in isolation, but always (or, let us say, with a very high statistical frequency) as sets of cities connected by different types of relations and exchanges (Fletcher, 1986;Renfrew & Poston, 1979;Liu 1996).…”

“…The specialization of a limited number of cities in activities that are not trivial services to the population is, however, a characteristic property of urban networks, admittedly of secondary importance but just as universal as their hierarchical organization (Paulus and Vacchiani-Marcuzzo, 2015). Present in Lösch's models, postulated by the economic base theory (Hoyt 1961) as well as by that of growth poles (Pumain & Torre, 2020), specialization has nevertheless remained until recently poorly integrated into the territorial theory of urban networks, perhaps due to the lack of an explicit formulation of the nature and form of the relations that are established between cities. It is only recently that the improved availability of data on a variety of interurban flows enabled to map the multilevel spatial organization of French cities in different types of sub-systems according to the range an nature of their interactions (Berroir et al 2017).…”

Contributions by Italian scholars to regional science

“…This fruitful concept has enabled the direct, quantitative consideration of a wide variety of territorial assets that can be physically produced (public and private goods), supplied by history (cultural and natural resources, both implying maintenance and control costs), intentionally produced despite their intangible nature (co-ordination or governance networks) or unintentionally produced by social interaction undertaken for goals wider than direct production. Their 5 On the Milieu innovateur theory, see also Pumain and Torre (2020). inclusion in a spatial production function with heterogeneous capital assets makes it possible to calculate a "territorial relational surplus" (conceptually similar to "technical progress" in a time dimension) built with different combinations of the individual assets across space (Camagni, 2019).…”