Growth Poles and Growth Centers

Ugo Rossi, Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning, University of Turin, Turin, Italy
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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
1960sda “magic label” or a “mythic catchword” as some commentators defined it at that timedwhat industrial districts repre-
sented 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 theo-
ries 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 poli-
cies 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 postwar decades whose influence is still currently visible. This is a demonstra-
tion of the high level of homogenization at a worldscale level experienced by regional policies during the Fordist–Keynesian era. In
more contemporary lexicon, growth-pole theory is seen as a precursory example of policy mobility preceding the advent of glob-
alization, 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 postwar 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.
Considering this shift in regional development literature and policy action, this article presents and discusses the scholarly liter-
ature 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 analyzes the implementation of growth-pole strategies in several 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 can 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,

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, Volume 6 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10077-0 281

282 Growth Poles and Growth Centers

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 deploy-
ment 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 can change 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 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 géogra-
phie active. In doing so, French-speaking geographers asserted the aim of going beyond a prefixed identity and economic configu-
ration of regional spaces, placing emphasis on the role of the state and other planning entities in reshaping regional economies and
societies. While the homogenous region was the favorite regional form for Vidalian geographers, during postwar decades and most
notably during the 1960s the success of polarization theories led to the fore debates about the so-called “polarized region.” Accord-
ing 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 authorsdmost notably urban scholarsdreferred
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 partic-
ularly to the sectoral division of labor at the urban level. In advanced countriesdthese authors argueddthe 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.
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 has been directed against the geographic applications and reformulations of his theory. Geographic translations of the Per-
rouxian 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 comple-
mentary 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
 Growth Poles and Growth Centers 283

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 problem-
atic 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.

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 “underdevel-
oped” countries during the postwar 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 several 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 coun-
tries strongly differed in their political, socioeconomic, and geographic conditions. Italy was an emerging capitalist country, expe-
riencing 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 frag-
mentation 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 Mezzo-
giorno). 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
anddeven more importantlydthe 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 industrial-
ization strategy.
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 back-
wardness 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 iden-
tified 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.
284 Growth Poles and Growth Centers

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), 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. 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 domi-
nance 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 institu-
tional 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 struc-
tures 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 func-
tional base of most Latin American cities, except for coastal cities and capital cities.

Conclusion

Growth-pole strategies have been embraced in a tremendous variety of geographic settings and socioeconomic contexts: not only in
those briefly analyzed 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 postwar 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. 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 econ-
omists 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 several neighboring concepts and catchwords such as
“spatial clustering,” “spill over effects,” “local multipliers,” and the like are reviving the postwar 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 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 public policy
combined with a Schumpeterian conception of economic growth. Over the last four decades, on the contrary, imperatives imposed
by neoliberal ideologies have shifted attention from regional development strategies requiring active government intervention to
 Growth Poles and Growth Centers 285

classical conceptions premised on the perfect rationality of economic behavior in which regional inequalities are taken for granted
as a mere side effect of market competition.

See Also: Agglomeration; Central Place Theory; Corridor and Axis Development; Fordism; Industrial City; Industrial Districts; Industrialization; Local
Development; Region; Regional Development Theory; Regional Inequalities; Regional Planning and Development Theories; Regional Science; Transport
and Accessibility; Uneven Development.

Further Reading

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Economic Development. The Free Press, New York.
Boudeville, J.-R. (Ed.), 1968. L’espace et les pôles de croissance. Recherches et textes fondamentaux. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
Darwent, D.F., 1969. Growth poles and growth centers in regional planning – a review. Environ. Plan. 1, 5–32.
George, P., Guglielmo, R., Kayser, B., 1964. La ge´ographie active. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
Hall, P., Hay, D. (Eds.), 1980. Growth Centres in the European Urban System. Heineman, London.
Hansen, N.M. (Ed.), 1972. Growth Centers in Regional Economic Development. The Free Press, New York.
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. Mouton, Paris.
Hirschman, A.O., 1958. The Strategy of Economic Development. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Irázabal, C., 2004. A planned city comes of age: rethinking Ciudad Guayana today. J. Lat. Am. Geogr. 3 (1), 22–51.
Lasuen, J.R., 1969. On growth poles. Urban Stud. 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, 25–57.
Muscarà, C., 1967. La geografia dello sviluppo. Sviluppo industriale e politica geografica nell’Italia del secondo dopoguerra. Edizioni di Comunità, Turin.
Nichols, V., 1969. Growth poles: an evaluation of their propulsive effect. Environ. Plan. 1, 193–208.
Parr, J.B., 1999. Growth-pole strategies in regional economic planning: a retrospective view. Part 1. Origins and advocacy. Urban Stud. 36, 1195–1215.
Perroux, F., 1955. Notes sur la notion de pôle de croissance. Econ. Appl. 8, 307–320.
Perroux, F., 1964. L’e´conomie du XX sie`cle. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
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 Stud. 8 (1), 39–53.
Richardson, H.W., Richardson, M., 1975. The relevance of growth center strategies to Latin America. Econ. Geogr. 51 (2), 163–178.
Wood, L.E., 2001. From theory to implementation: an analysis of the Appalachian Regional Commission’s growth center policy. Environ. Plan. 33, 551–566.