Territorial Inequalities E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 559

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Spatial planning has embraced the idea of dealing with territorial inequalities by focusing on equipment logic on a national scale, and then economic development on a local scale. Today, this issue is creating new angles of debate with strong political resonances (e.g. Brexit, French gilets jaunes movement). Interpretations of these movements are often quick and binary, such as: the contrast between metropolises and peripheries, between cities and the countryside, between the north and the south or between the east and the west of the European Union. Territorial Inequalities sheds light on the social, political and operational implications of these divergences. The chapters cover the subject at different scales of action and observation (from the neighborhood to the world), but also according to their interdependences. To deal with such a vast and ambitious theme, the preferred approach is that of territorial development in terms of public policy, namely spatial planning.

Leseprobe

SCIENCES

Geography and Demography, Field Director – Denise Pumain

Geography of Inequality, Subject Head – Clémentine Cottineau

Territorial Inequalities

Coordinated by

Magali Talandier

Josselin Tallec

First published 2023 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934057

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78945-101-6

ERC code:SH2 Institutions, Values, Environment and Space SH2_9 Urban, regional and rural studies SH2_11 Human, economic and social geographySH3 The Social World, Diversity, Population SH3_1 Social structure, social mobility SH3_2 Inequalities, discrimination, prejudice, aggression and violence, antisocial behaviour

ForewordTerritorial Capital and Spatial Inequalities

Thomas PIKETTY

EHESS, Paris, France

This book will appeal to all those interested in the issue of spatial and territorial inequalities. The subject occupies a central place in public debate; however, it is unfortunately too often simplified and a source of much confusion. Are territorial inequalities steadily increasing or are they decreasing? It all depends on what we are trying to measure and understand. If we are to make any progress on these core questions, we must adopt a patient and rigorous approach, precisely defining sources and methods and bringing together the skills and approaches of researchers from various disciplinary traditions, such as geographers, social scientists, economists, historians, political scientists, and so on. This is precisely what this magnificent work invites us to do.

It is impossible to do justice to the richness of the contributions in a just few pages so we will limit ourselves here and only emphasize a few points.

The first chapters mainly deal with inequalities on a regional level, while the following ones focus more on the municipal and neighborhood levels. In this foreword, we will follow this order, focusing primarily on the former. In terms of regional inequalities, the first source of confusion arises from the fact that we observe contradictory developments depending on whether we are interested in either the distribution of production or income. Indeed, as Laurent Davezies shows, using the available data for the French regions during the period 1960–2020, there has been a significant increase in the dispersion of regional gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in recent decades, particularly since 1990–2000. However, at the same time, the differences in average regional income have rather tended to narrow. This apparent contradiction is explained by the existence of multiple private and public flows, which considerably complicate the link between regional GDP and disposable income at the regional level. For example, the growing concentration of French GDP within the region of Île-de-France partly reflects the growing weight in national production of the headquarters of large French and international companies, particularly in Paris and in the Hauts-de-Seine, and especially in the finance, services and digital sectors. This component of regional GDP includes very high salaries located in Île-de-France: many works, such as those of Olivier Godechot, have shown how the highest salaries in the country were very strongly concentrated in the Ile-de-France region – and in certain municipalities and certain districts within it – since the 1970s. But this component of regional GDP also includes profits belonging to the shareholders of these multinational companies and which are not necessarily found in the income available to the inhabitants of Île-de-France, who, conversely, may find themselves benefiting from the flow of profits and dividends corresponding to investments they have made in other regions and other countries, directly or indirectly through their financial intermediary, sometimes without knowing it.

In addition to private flows, public ones must naturally be taken into account. As Davezies shows from the latest available data, Île-de-France pays 29% of the country’s social security contributions (which roughly corresponds to its share in the total wage bill and the national GDP), but its inhabitants receive only 18% of the social benefits paid in France. However, it is imperative that this redistribution is not misinterpreted: this does not mean that high earners in the Île-de-France region pay benefits to low-wage earners in the rest of the country (this is not how French social security works), but rather that retirees are increasingly moving out of Île-de-France to live elsewhere and so their pensions and health insurance benefits are counted in the region where they reside, even if they have worked their entire career in Île-de-France. Other systems, concerning, for example, the financing of national public services or income from means-tested transfers, are more akin to true redistribution. As it stands, the most well-established and the most striking phenomenon is the growing concentration of commodity production in certain territories; the reduction of regional inequalities in disposable income results from multiple phenomena linked to the evolution of residential mobility over the course of a lifetime and deserves an in-depth examination on a case-by-case basis, focusing on the people more than on territories as such.

Regarding regional inequalities at the European level, the data available at present do not allow for much of a historical perspective. If we look at the subregions of the member states of the European Union (EU), on a constant and homogeneous basis, then we observe contradictory developments. As Frédéric Santamaria shows, the differences in GDP per capita seem to have decreased between 2000 and 2009, before again increasing between 2009 and 2018.

In their respective chapters, Davezies and Santamaria insist on small scale regional redistribution mechanisms at the EU level, especially compared to the redistributions between regions carried out at the national level (in particular, via the financing of public services by national taxation). This is due to the well-known fact that the European budget (about 1% of GDP) is extremely small compared to national budgets (between 30% and 50% of GDP depending on the country). As such, it is more advantageous to be a wealthy region in an even wealthier country than a poor region (or even an equally rich one) in a less prosperous country. For example, the former Midi-Pyrénées region, although richer than Catalonia in terms of GDP per capita, is relatively poor inside France, which allows it to benefit overall from a significant additional amount of public expenditure compared to the taxes paid by its inhabitants. Conversely, Catalonia is relatively wealthy inside Spain, thus part of its taxes escapes it. As Davezies shows, this negative system has the consequence that rich regions within their country of origin may have an interest in seceding and aiming for reintegration within the EU as an independent country. It would be different if there were more powerful systems of regional redistribution at the EU level, for example in the form of a federal income tax (as in the United States), with the consequence of the richest Catalan taxpayers continuing to pay the tax in question in all cases, whether or not they leave Spain. In the current EU architecture, it is quite the opposite: systems, such as the 1996 Posted Workers Directive, certainly bring benefits to a certain number of workers from the least prosperous regions and countries, such as Poland and Portugal (while bringing even greater profits to their employers), but this redistribution is essential to the detriment of other relatively modest German or French workers, and not of the wealthiest taxpayers from the different countries. This is not necessarily the best way to ensure the political sustainability of the EU, as the experience of Brexit has shown.

It is imperative to note that the (sometimes substantial) transfers made by European regional funds always must be examined together with the private flows affecting the regions concerned. Take the case of Eastern European countries (see Figure F.1): the inbound net public flows to the EU are certainly very significant (between 2% and 4% of GDP per year on average between 2010 and 2018), but it turns out that the outbound private flows from these countries in terms of profits and property income are nearly twice as high (between 4% and 8% of GDP).

Figure F.1.Inflows and outflows in Eastern Europe (2010–2018).

COMMENT ON FIGURE F.1.– Between 2010 and 2018, the annual flow of net transfers from the EU (the difference between total expenditure received and contributions to the EU budget) amounted to an average of 2.7% GDP per year in Poland; over the same period, the outflow of profits and other property income (net of the corresponding outflow) amounted to 4.7% of GDP. For Hungary, the same figures were 4.0% and 7.2% (source: Piketty).

These private outflows include the profits made by investors from the West, especially from Germany and France, who have profited due to the eastwards expansion of the EU and the manufacturing sites they have established there, often while keeping wages low, or at any rate lower than what the countries in question would have expected. For the continent’s dominant economic powers, these private flows should be set aside in favor of public transfers, which are seen as an act of generosity on the part of the market winners. This way of naturalizing market forces is convenient for the dominant actors, but it is hardly convincing: the ways in which wages and profits are set at Eastern European manufacturing sites are not particularly natural. They depend on specific rules and institutions, such as labor law and trade union law, corporate governance of companies, the existence or not of social and fiscal harmonization and tax harmonization, etc. Given the large amounts involved, it is critical that these issues are included in a more general discussion of territorial inequalities and on the overall distributional balance of political and economic integration at the EU level (as well as at the level of Global North-South relations, where we find the same hypocrisies, only worse). More generally, the notion of regional GDP and “regional productivity” must be placed in perspective and approached critically. The fact that a given territory is confined to the role of a reserve of cheap labor, within the framework of highly hierarchical center-periphery relations, is not an objective reality that falls from the sky: it depends on the strategies of public and private actors, which must be analyzed as such, in comparison with other possible strategies, carried out by alternative institutions. The very measurement of regional GDP reflects specific power dynamics. For example, if a large company (such as McDonald’s) managed to increase the salaries of its executives in its Paris headquarters, while reducing the salaries of its waiters in its provincial restaurants, then the GDP of the Île-de-France region would increase at the expense of the provincial GDP although it has not suddenly become more “productive” than the provinces. The same would be true if the Société Générale (SocGen) were to increase the salaries of its managers and traders because of the savings made on the backs of its managers, and so on.

It also happens that the GDP statistics, on which some of these analyses are based, were manipulated simply for venal reasons. Santamaria notes that the deduction of outgoing income (in practice, mainly profits and other property income) explains why gross national income (GNI) is about 20% lower than GDP in Ireland and over 25% lower in Switzerland and Luxembourg. In all three cases, it is very likely that a large part of the excess GDP accounted for in these countries does not correspond to any actual economic activity carried out there and represents a pure accounting device: large multinational corporations bill their subsidiaries in areas with the lowest tax rates for valuable services and then show the corresponding amounts as low-taxed profits and dividends. There may come a day when these practices will be subject to legal action and correction by the European public authorities, or failing that, by the injured national public authorities. At this stage, the sacrosanct principles of the absolute free movement of capital and business secrecy have prevailed, with the result that the statistics on which we base our analyses of regional disparities are sometimes somewhat obscured. For example, it is unclear whether the current GDP per capita in Southern Ireland and Eastern Ireland is much higher than that of the Île-de-France, despite what the European statistics say.

Let us turn to the inequalities at the central and municipality levels. Here again, we must unfortunately be brief. In her chapter, Magali Talandier strikingly illustrates the importance of questions concerning method and measurement. By using tax data on the evolution of the distribution of average incomes by communes in France between 1984 and 2018, she shows the complexity of the transformations underway, which the sometimes too systematic opposition between city centers and towns has made clear: towns gentrified and peripheral areas tends to mask. In fact, Talandier shows that in the majority of French metropolises, the suburban municipalities have now become richer than the city centers in terms of average income (although the case of Paris is an exception in this respect). This was not the case in the 1980s and early 1990s, but has become the norm over the course of the 2000s and 2010s.

This is particularly interesting, especially in a country with a long tradition of rigidly opposing large and small municipalities (“urbaphobia” whose long genealogy Philippe Estèbe and Xavier Desjardins trace, at least since Gravier’s publication of Paris et le désert français in 1947). Éric Charmes insists on the immense diversity of the suburbs, often caricatured as anti-ecological and anti-social in its existence, whereas it can also be the bearer, under certain conditions, of innovative forms of solidarity and promotion of local production. In their chapter, Sylvie Fol and Leïla Frouillou present a thorough and fascinating overview of the literature on urban segregation and its development in France. Moreover, they demonstrate the limits of simplistic oppositions based on the size of an area’s distance from the city center. These often prevent us from measuring the complexity of the changes at hand, for example, with segregation increasing according to certain criteria (such as age or non-European origin) and decreasing for others, or even a stronger socioprofessional segregation in Île-de-France as opposed to former industrial areas in the north of the country.

Let us conclude by underscoring the fact that territorial inequalities are on the whole still significant and that there is an urgent need to rethink modes of redistribution and decentralization. The fact that some spatial inequalities have increased while others have decreased should not obscure the fact that territorial inequalities have always been substantial. Growing up and living in a particular department, and even more so in a particular municipality, leads to major inequalities in terms of access to public service and to life and development opportunities. In other words, inequalities in average income between communes may have remained broadly stable since the 1980s and 1990s, but they are nonetheless very high. In concrete terms, if we rank the communes by percentile of average income, we can see that the poorest communes currently have an average tax income per year and per household of barely €15,000–20,000, whereas the richest communes have average incomes exceeding €100,000. These income scales of 1–5 or 1–6 are found for almost all commune sizes. Notably, modest and medium-sized suburban municipalities often have average incomes of €100,000, which is in stark contrast to other slightly larger and equally “suburban” municipalities with average incomes of less than €20,000 per household.

From this perspective, being a country with 36,000 municipalities is perhaps a strength in terms of the richness of democratic life (although this is open to debate), but it is also, and perhaps above all, an objective factor of fragmentation into extremely unequal communities. It should also be pointed out that the differences are even greater if we consider them from a basis of local taxation and not revenues. For example, if we classify the municipalities by percentile according to the property tax base per inhabitant, the differences range from 1–10, not 1–5. Insofar as municipalities finance access to multiple public services public services cultural and extracurricular activities or sports facilities, it is obvious that this leads to considerable structural inequalities for people with disabilities. The existing mechanisms – such as the overall operating grants or the various measures developed under the “urban policy” – only partially compensate for these inequalities. In some cases, the hypocrisy borders on indecency: the starting point is a structural inequality where resources per capita vary by a factor of 1–5 or 1–10, then puts in place a patch that reduces a small fraction of this gap, and at the end of the process, we pretend to be surprised that the social situation has hardly improved, when we do not loudly wonder where all this good money has gone. The solution of pooling resources at a higher level by encouraging groupings of municipalities and communities of agglomerations has well-known limits, if only because it clashes with old communal political sociabilities.

Under these circumstances, it is not impossible to imagine other ways to reconcile decentralization and equity, local freedom and equal opportunity. For example, each municipality could continue to set its own tax rate for municipal taxpayers within certain limits, but with a national equalization mechanism to ensure that the revenue collected by the municipality is equal to the product of this rate and the average base per inhabitant at the national level and not the average base of the municipality (the latter being the result of a long history of territorial inequalities and the absence of a corrective mechanism). Switching to such a system would naturally result in losers on the side of the wealthiest municipalities and would likely only be possible after a gradual transition period of 10 or 20 years, including the approval of a much more progressive tax system compared to what exists at present. For example, this could consist of making greater contributions to large estates, by naturally taking into account financial assets and debts and by favoring small estates, within wealthy municipalities as well as less prosperous ones; that is, by finally replacing our archaic property tax with a progressive and modernized tax on global net worth.

Although there is nothing in the provisions currently being debated which suggests the future adoption of such a system, there are, in fact, many systems in the current fiscal and social landscape that no one could have predicted 50 or 100 years ago and so profound changes are not impossible or hopeless endeavors. This is without a doubt the main strength of this collective work: by contextualizing preconceived certainties and innovative and multidisciplinary approach to transforming territorial inequalities, this book invites everyone to take ownership of these issues and to participate in these reflections and debates.

Introduction

Magali TALANDIER and Josselin TALLEC

Pacte, Université Grenoble Alpes, France

Land use planning is the idea of dealing with territorial inequalities by focusing first on the logic of equipment (transport infrastructure, construction of services and housing, etc.), and then on local economic development. Today, the question of territorial inequalities, understood here as the socioeconomic gaps between multiple geographical units (between regions, municipalities, etc.), is changing the face of the debate. For instance, we are increasingly seeing the emergence of more plastic notions, such as “territorial fractures”, “peripheral France”, territories with “several lives” or even spaces to “repair”. A strong political resonance can thus be observed, in the image of the decoupling between the metropolitan region and the rest of the United Kingdom on the occasion of Brexit or the French Gilets jaunes movement. These divergent trajectories of development between territories often give rise to hasty interpretations that are essentially binary, posing oppositions between metropolises and the “peripheries”, cities and the countryside, the Global North and the Global South and between the East and the West of the European Union (EU). Ultimately, all of these perspectives concern the aggregate characteristics of social groups present in various territories and their political expressions.

This book offers a detailed analysis of these differences, that is, what distinguishes certain social groups in a territory and what causes them to be discriminated against and sometimes penalized. Here, we can very quickly think of the concepts of disparity, discontinuity, discrimination or egoism, to mention only a few examples of the diversity of forms taken by the spatial imprint of inequalities. To this end, the contributions have been chosen in order to approach the subject of land or regional planning in its economic dimensions at different scales of action and levels of observation, that is, from the local to the global level.

The aim of the book is to describe inequalities and how they are dealt with according to the geographical units in question and in terms of the interdependencies between them. This approach makes it possible to reconsider which scales of analysis pertain to these processes and the much debated “right scale” of action needed to contain them.

When it comes to shedding light on such a vast and ambitious subject, the preferred angle of approach is that of territorial development. Territorial development measures the improvement (or lack thereof) of the living conditions of a specific population and the consequences in terms of public policy, that is, the development of space. Territorial action plays out in many different fields of intervention, including the economy and production, transport and mobility, education and training, etc. The primary objective of these policies is to reduce territorial disparities in order to progress toward spatial equity or to provide access to services, employment and housing anywhere in a given territory in order to equalize development conditions. In this sense, planning constitutes the territorial facet of national or community solidarity mechanisms within the framework of the EU’s policy for cohesion, for example. This leads us to the question of how best to apprehend and act on these territorial inequalities vis-à-vis the diverse dynamics and the plurality of the scales of action underlying them?

Measuring the development trajectories of cities and territories involves a variety of indicators, often based on a socioeconomic understanding, for example, drawing on the income growth rate or variations in GDP per capita. This limited perspective, already the subject of much debate and scholarship, struggles to clearly grasp the reality of life in a given territory. A diversity of actions (individual and collective), systems and interventions impact all the components of people’s daily lives, for instance, their access to education, health and the infrastructures that support them. The spatial scales of measurement can also be brought into the debate: a “large” scale of analysis (e.g. national or regional) leads to the erasure of local situations which differ profoundly from one context to another.

As such, the multiplicity of factors that contribute to the identification of fragility, disengagement or, on the contrary, “rising” development, covers a whole series of concrete, individual and collective situations as well as the public actions that oversee the territorial regulation of these contexts. The purpose of these territorial regulations by local/public authorities is thus central to understanding the role played by planning and territorial development. Brought together as a cumulative process (development leads to development), these measures make it possible to grasp the much-debated issue of territorial inequalities. We can try to describe and understand its origins, its rejections, its justifications and, of course, its treatments. This last point remains, in part, a task for the collective action that constitutes the development of the space.

In an attempt to shed some light on these issues, the book compares retrospective and multiscalar diagnostic elements with analyses of actions taken in Europe and France to try to curb these disparities. Thus, by taking up factual elements, mobilizing empirical works, but also by bringing together several scientific literatures (geography economics, spatial planning spatial planning and urban planning, urban sociology and political science), the book seeks to update the ultimately “classic” but still lively and fundamental discussion of territorial inequalities at the subnational (local) level. However, we will not deal with international inequalities, that is, between different countries and regions of the world that have been widely documented, particularly in economics. Rather, while 55% of income inequality measured between individuals remains tied to national systems, the remaining 45% is still due to subnational systems. Inequality between territories remains very high, despite the financial resources allocated to social redistribution and territorial rebalancing as part of various development policies.

The dialogue between the authors of the book plays out on several levels. The concepts, measures and elements of objectification intersect with historical analyses of territorial inequalities and public policies. The whole book is apprehended from the European “macro-regional” scale to the sub-municipal scale of the priority neighborhoods of the city policy in France.

On this basis, the book was conceived as a series of four intersecting viewpoints. Thomas Piketty, a leading author, has provided the Foreword. Over the last 10 years, his work on income inequality has had a profound impact on scientific and political circles worldwide. At once personal and laudatory, Piketty offers a synthesis of the questions asked and the knowledge presented throughout this collective work. The authors’ thorough and detailed analyses grapple with one of the essential questions for our nations: namely, how are we to reconcile decentralization, equity, local autonomy and equal opportunity? Faced with these challenges, Piketty concludes his chapter by proposing new perspectives in terms of local taxation, calling for new forms of spatial solidarity which are more locally based and more ambitious than those at present.

Chapters 1 and 2, written respectively by Magali Talandier and Laurent Davezies, open this book by proposing a comprehensive account of inequalities at several scales and over time. On the basis of these two intersecting analyses, Talandier investigates the mechanisms of wealth circulation that have reshaped subnational inequalities over the past 30 years, while Davezies details the complexity of inequality indicators, along with impacts (including bias) they can have on so-called integration policies, especially at the EU level.

These inequalities are then discussed in terms of economic specialization, social concentration and territorial interdependencies, with regard to several fracture lines which contribute to the global narrative on inequality. In Chapter 3, Philippe Estèbe and Xavier Desjardins propose a historical rereading of these great French geographical oppositions which accompany the action in the image of Paris and the French desert, or, more recently, the opposition between metropolises and France periurban France. Éric Charmes, in Chapter 4, extends this reflection by taking a more detailed look at peripheral France, the so-called Gilets jaunes, suburbs often perceived as being neglected or outright ignored by development and urban planning policies.

Following these chapters on diagnosis and multiscalar analyses of territorial inequalities, Frédéric Santamaria (Chapter 5) and Josselin Tallec (Chapter 6) propose a discussion of public planning policies, the former looking at Europe and the latter focusing on the French case. Santamaria offers a thorough reading of cohesion policies, their main objective being to reduce inequalities between regions. Tallec, introducing the issue of medium-sized cities, presents a comprehensive overview of French policies on the reduction of inequalities since the advent of land and urban planning as a public policy measure following the Second World War.

Lastly, Sylvie Fol and Leïla Frouillou (Chapter 7) build on this to offer us an extremely rich synthesis of international scientific works that deal with the issue of urban segregation. This includes the underlying theoretical frameworks, the causes, the debates on the methods of measurement as well as public policies aimed at these processes of segregation.

It goes without saying that the territorialized approach to inequalities is part of the broader work of the human and social sciences on this difficult issue. It naturally calls for political choices seeking to avert such inequalities. The originality of this approach lies, however, in its identification of the role played by cities and territories in the origins of these inequalities, the processes of their deployment and their treatment. From this perspective, land and urban planning faces several challenges. In particular, it is a matter of examining the possible contribution that this interdisciplinary approach could make to the analysis of the different registers of justification of inequalities (think in particular of the idea of “flow” which is by no means automatic). Another point would be to promote awareness of the interdependencies and affinities existing between cities and territories in order to get out of an exclusively categorical logic of intervention (e.g. the idea of devices exclusively dedicated to small cities). A territorialized public action that takes inequalities seriously as the expression of difficulties inscribed in existing relationships within territorial systems is at the heart of the debate. In the end, it is still the incessant question of the “right scale” (social and spatial) and the interdependencies of action that reappears. At the risk of being hijacked (think of the idea of “peripheral France” and “territorial fractures”), planning cannot free itself from these questions which, like any form of collective action, are resolutely democratic in character.

1Metropolization and Territorial Inequalities

Magali TALANDIER

Pacte, Université Grenoble Alpes, France

1.1. Introduction

Economic, political, social and environmental crises impact territories – defined here as systems of places, relations and actors – in different ways in terms of space and time. It is possible for these multiple impacts to be experienced, anticipated and overcome differently from one territory to another. The structural and cyclical effects combine with specific and local factors to determine the trajectories of territorial development. Consequently, territories are continually reforming. These processes partly explain the evolution of territorial disparities, which are also being reconfigured over time. For the past 30 years, metropolization has characterized the spatial fact. This process of concentration of population, economic activities and added value in the major urban areas of the world constitutes the spatial facet of the globalization of flows. Paradoxically enough, the excessive growth of trade has led to a growing concentration of certain activities in space. The division of labor between “developed” and “developing” countries has led the former to specialize and support a so-called knowledge economy and the latter to develop a low-cost manufacturing industry. Today, this account is outdated and more complex in practice, as it is possible to observe metropolization on a global scale. Developing countries have been improving their research and engineering sectors and other high value-added services, for the most part in large cities. As for established industrial countries (like France), they are discovering, perhaps a little too late, the importance of maintaining a certain industrial sovereignty1.

New economic geography models (Krugman 1991) have made it possible to explain the components of this urban concentration by analyzing the logics of the location of activities, but also those of skilled labor. Concentration factors (economies of scale, network effects, labor market dynamism, etc.) generate a cumulative spiral process in favor of the largest centers. A quick analysis of these mechanisms would suggest that territorial inequalities have regularly increased – that is, cities have developed faster and to the detriment of other areas, including what some call “Peripheral France” (Guilluy 2014). However, the figures are not so definitive. There has been a growth in jobs, population and income in many French territories that have not been “metropolitanized”. This discrepancy between rhetoric, theory and observations is due to the fact that the city is both a source of centripetal and centrifugal flows: the city attracts young graduates, students, executives and some of the creative professions, but pushes away other demographics and jobs. Moreover, cities generate flows of wealth that metropolitans spend in other territories. This invisible circulation of wealth (Davezies 2008) contributes to the reduction of territorial inequalities.

In order to trace the long history of these dynamics, this chapter has been organized into three sections. First, we will conduct a historical analysis of the issue of territorial inequalities in France from the industrial revolution to the present day. We will then show how territorial income inequalities have evolved over the last 30 years, namely, in the context of metropolization. Finally, we will conclude by shedding light on the mechanisms behind the spatial circulation of wealth.

1.2. T200 years of territorial inequalities

Metropolization questions the links, but also the possible fractures between centers and their peripheries. Unfortunately, in order to trace the long history of these interterritorial relationships between cities and the countryside, the departmental or regional data on income are not sufficient. On the other hand, we have exhaustive demographic data from national censuses on the scale of the 35,000 municipalities2. This database offers an exceptional geographical framework for analyzing the links between the settlement, geography and economic changes. Cartographic analysis of demographic dynamics reveals major changes, from the 19th century to the present day, in the ways people live. In the agrarian model, dating back to the beginning of the 19th century, people lived as close as possible to the land, the essential resource. In the current cognitive model, the places of production, life and consumption have become totally disconnected. Thus, economic developments are accompanied by a differentiated spatial distribution of the population and their respective incomes. The evolution of this relationship between population and productive forces over a long period of time informs us about the evolution of territorial inequalities.

1.2.1. The development of the French metropolitan area

From 1806 to 2017, the population of France grew from 29.6 to 67 million inhabitants. However, this demographic growth was not regular throughout the period, nor was it homogeneous from one area to another. Thus, the number and type of municipalities that gained or lost inhabitants varied over time. For example, after the revolutionary period, the First French Empire (1805–1814) was a period of low population growth. The numerous wars and defeats, including the French campaign of 1814, meant that the demographic balance was only slightly positive. On the other hand, the following years of the Restoration (1814–1830), the July Monarchy (1830–1848) and the Second Republic (1848–1852) were marked by a demographic growth that was both sustained and spatially diffused. The entire country benefited from this upsurge since nearly three quarters of French municipalities recorded a growth in population. It was only in very small municipalities (with fewer than 250 inhabitants) that the population was on a slight decline. The population remained relatively well distributed spatially in 1851 with nearly two-thirds (61%) of the French population residing in a rural municipality (i.e. a municipality with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants), and only 8% of the population living in a municipality with more than 20,000 inhabitants. This period of equidensity in terms of settlement resulted in low territorial inequalities. The following century was marked by industrialization and its spatial corollary, namely rural exodus. During this period, more than three quarters of the French municipalities experienced a loss of population. A more detailed analysis shows that, overall, it is the municipalities with less than 2,000 inhabitants that experienced a population loss as their inhabitants moved to towns and cities (which benefited in turn). Thus, the threshold of 2,000 agglomerated inhabitants, which makes it possible to distinguish rural municipalities in France from urban units, has a strong influence as to how rural areas are perceived (Talandier 2007)3. If this threshold, chosen arbitrarily, had been 5,000 inhabitants, for example, the rural municipalities would never have recorded a population decrease, thus modifying the representations of these areas. If this were the case, it is possible that a good number of public works and public policies would have been different.

The period between 1911 and 1921, marked by the First World War, saw a sharp decline in France’s population, affecting nearly 90% of the municipalities. Yet, in this context of demographic decline, medium-sized cities (with populations ranging from 20,000 to 100,000) were gaining inhabitants. Population growth resumed in the years 1920–1930 and the urban concentration of people and wealth continues to this day. The Second World War lead to a new decrease in population, this time in the medium-sized cities, albeit without really disrupting the process of urbanization.

From 1946 onwards, a period of exceptional demographic (and economic) growth began. However, this only benefited one-third of the municipalities – namely, those located in the industrial regions of the north and the east, as well as Île-de-France. In the 1950s, spatial inequalities were at their peak, dividing France in two: industrial and modern France, which was the center for the new productive dynamics of the country, and agrarian France, which had not yet experienced the same kind of development.

This trend was reversed in 1968, the year that officially marked the end of the rural exodus which had been taking place for a century. The population of municipalities with less than 2,000 inhabitants reached its utmost minimum in that year (14.7 million inhabitants). From then onwards, even if the country’s rate of population growth slows, it now benefits the majority of rural and urban municipalities. Over the last 30 years, three quarters of the municpalities have recorded an increase in population, marking a return to the trends observed at the beginning of the 19th century.

However, this phenomenon of demographic rebalancing is not without consequences. While it systematically reduces spatial inequalities in income between the municipalities, it has also resulted in rapid periurbanization, a reduction in agricultural land and an increase in motorized vehicle use. Nevertheless, it is this reduction in population that allows some isolated rural areas to also experience demographic and economic renewal after decades of decline. Residential mobility from the city to the countryside contributes to the reduction of territorial inequalities, without diminishing the demographic and economic dynamism of cities.

1.2.2. Processes of population concentration and deconcentration

Figure 1.1 shows the spatial movements of population concentration and deconcentration within the French territory since 1806. In both 1806 and 1821 (the red and purple curves in Figure 1.1 that almost merge), nearly a quarter (23%) of the population was distributed over 50% of the surface area of French municipalities; conversely, three quarters of the population was distributed over 50% of the same area. Between these two dates, the concentration rate (Gini coefficient) decreased very slightly, indicating that the population remained very diffuse, or even bordering on deconcentrated. Yet, from 1821 onwards, this rate increased slightly until the middle of the 19th century, then accelerated rapidly after 1851. From this date, migration movements from the countryside to towns and cities continued for more than a century, albeit at different rates depending on the period. The annual rate of spatial concentration remained relatively sustained and more or less stable until 1936. Thus, on the eve of the Second World War, 75% of the population was concentrated in 30% of the French municipalities. From 1936 to 1954, the concentration slowed down considerably, and the geographical distribution even stabilized. In 1954, three quarters of the population lived on 25% of the surface area of the municipalities. The second half of the 20th century marked a new turning point in the spatial distribution of the French population. The effects of extremely rapid urbanization can be observed between 1954 and 1968, wherein the rate of urban concentration increased like never before, at twice the rate of the period of rural exodus. It was in 1968, not today, that spatial concentration reached its peak, with more than three quarters of the population spread over just 15% of the surface area of the municipalities. From then on, the trend has gradually reversed: a slow movement of demographic deconcentration observed at first to the benefit of the peripheries of the cities, then extended to the more remote rural areas. The most recent available findings (for 2017) confirm the trend. Strikingly, there has been an acceleration in the decrease in the Gini coefficient, which measures the spatial concentration of the population. In 2017, the spatial concentration of the population even returned to a level prior to that of 1968! Although these decreases in population size appear to be relatively minimal at the national scale, they have a significant impact on low-density areas. These migration reversals and patterns of minor urban deconcentration contribute to the growth of inter-territorial income flows, which we will return to in the third section of this chapter.

Figure 1.1.Concentration curves from 1806 to 2017 (source: author’s calculations based on population census, INSEE). Note for the reader: in 1921, 75% of the population was concentrated in 30% of the national territory

Figure 1.2.Spatial concentration of the population in French municipalities in 1851, 1954, 1968 and 2010 (source: author’s calculations based on population census, INSEE)

Figure 1.2 utilizes the model proposed by Lévy (2013), but over several years of observation. Note that 50% of the French population resides in the municipalities mapped in dark blue; this rises to 75% if we include the municipalities that are in light blue. Evidently, in 2010, three quarters of the French population resided in less than 15% of the national surface area, divided between the heart of Île-de-France, the Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing conurbation and the Rhône Valley, as well as all the major cities and their immediate surroundings. If we look at the same spatial construction carried out with the 1851 data, we observe an equipartition of the population over the entire territory. France is predominantly “blue” indicating that 75% of the population is spread over a large part of the territory. Some regions already appear to be less populated, such as the countryside in the north and northeast, or some villages in the extreme southwest or the Provençal countryside. But overall, the demographic model is indeed that of an equidensity of population. A century later, France was transformed. In 1954, the metropolises were clearly identifiable, even if less extensive than today, and the rural areas (especially in the center of France) were populated. The 1968 map represents the period of maximum concentration, whereas the main difference with the 2010 map is the lesser demographic and spatial expansion of the major metropolises toward their immediate periphery.

These demographic trends reflect differentiated socioeconomic realities that impact territorial inequalities. In the following, we will attempt to summarize the major trends.

1.2.3. The spatiotemporal model and territorial inequalities

Figure 1.3 presents the different major socioeconomic phases that have shaped the spatial organization of France. For each phase, we have specified the economic model and the dominant cultural form, the associated spatial figure and the state of the territorial inequalities. We identify, in a fairly traditional way, the agrarian model, then the industrial model and a third “cognitive” model in connection with the rise of the knowledge economy and metropolization. The fourth model, called the collaborative model, is more future oriented. Each model is not a cycle in its own right, but rather a layer that adds to and transforms the previous ones. Between each period, we have transition phases. The first is linked to the industrial revolution and the rural exodus that accompanied and resulted from it. The second is due to the rise of tertiary and cognitive activities that condition urban growth. Finally, the ecological and digital transition appears to be the current transition to a new economic, cultural and territorial model.

The agrarian economy is accompanied by a traditional cultural form, a population that is still largely rural and a relative weakness of territorial inequalities. The industrial economy is associated with modern society. In terms of territorial development, the regional figure dominates, in the sense that only the industrial regions have been developed. Territorial inequalities are extremely marked, with a north/south divide through the national territory, as described by Philippe Estèbe and Xavier Desjardins in Chapter 3. On the other hand, we have been operating in the metropolitan model for the past 30 years, which is characterized by centripetal productive forces that favor the large metropolises and centrifugal forces linked to residential mobility and tourist mobility of populations.

These dynamics largely explain the revival of certain rural areas and metropolitan suburbs since the 1990s. The economy of the metropolises is complex, multiple in terms of the skills mobilized, the economic sectors concerned and the spaces occupied. While the knowledge economy is necessary, it is not sufficient to ensure the development of metropolises, and more broadly of metropolitan systems, which include the metropolis itself, but also its hinterland (Talandier 2016).

Figure 1.3.Spatial and economic models and territorial transitions (source: author’s own diagram)

Finally, this metropolization is not just an economic process. It defies urbanists and for some sociologists, it can be considered as a new cultural form – that is, that of hypermodernity4. Ascher (1995, 2001) has shown how the knowledge economy is linked to a more mobile, interconnected and individualistic society (Ascher 2005). The author evokes the processes of metapolization, in which the increasing flexibility of individuals and their space-time reshapes our various ways of life and generates new inequalities. In this model, it is the relationship between “centers” and peripheries that dominate the question of territorial inequalities. This inequality depends on the scale of analysis. Inequality decreases between sub-national territories, but increases at the sub-metropolitan and sub-municipal levels. The rest of this chapter details these mechanisms in detail.

1.3. Metropolization: 30 years of changing territorial inequalities

1.3.1. Methodology and databases

Since the mid-1980s, observation of territorial inequalities has been based on incomes declared to taxes by households. The data indicates the overall amount of income declared by households in their place of residence and at the community level. The income data are standardized in constant-price euros. We have a reconstructed tax base from 1984 to 2018 for all French municipalities5. However, we are required, following a change in the tax base in 2006, to distinguish between developments before and after that date.

As far as the scale of analysis is concerned, we prefer the latest INSEE catchment area (see Box 1.1).

In the statistical processing and tables, we will distinguish the five sizes of catchment areas: for example, in Paris, areas with more than 700,000 inhabitants, those with 200,000 to 700,000 inhabitants, those with 50,000 to 200,000 inhabitants, those with less than 50,000 inhabitants and municipalities outside the catchment area. We introduce, for each stratum of catchment areas, the notions of center, suburbs and periurban ring. This allows us to shed light on center-periphery dynamics according to the size of the catchment area. For a better graphic visibility, we have rearranged the centers and their suburbs for the cartographic analysis.

Box 1.1.Defining catchment areas of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques, INSEE. Source: Insee – 2020)

The urban area is a group of municipalities (as a single unit and without any enclaves) that consists of a population and employment center and a periurban ring of municipalities, called “periurban” in this text, in which at least 15% of the working population work in the center.

The most populous municipalities with more than 50% of the population of the catchment area are central municipalities. The other municipalities in the catchment area are called the suburbs.

The definition of the largest catchment areas of cities is consistent with the definition of cities and “catchment areas” used by Eurostat and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to analyze the functioning of cities. The zoning facilitates international comparisons and makes it possible to visualize the influence of large foreign cities in France. Seven of the catchment areas have a foreign city at their center: Basel, Charleroi, Geneva, Lausanne, Luxembourg, Monaco and Saarbrucken.

The areas are then classified according to the total number of inhabitants in the area. We distinguish between the Paris catchment area, and those of:

more than 700,000 inhabitants;

between 200,000 and 700,000 inhabitants;

between 50,000 and 200,000 inhabitants;

less than 50,000 inhabitants.

Finally, a group of municipalities remains outside the catchment areas.

1.3.2. The majority of French household income is concentrated in suburban rings

In 2018, 42.6% of all income reported to taxes was held by outer suburban households (for 43.6% of the population), 28% by households in the municipalities centers, 23.6% by the suburbs and, finally, 5.7% by municipalities outside the catchment area. The Paris catchment area alone accounts for 25% of income for 20% of the population. The city of Paris accounts for 6.6% of French income (for 3.4% of the population). These figures show the extent to which suburban households (and spaces) are absolutely critical in France today, whether from a demographic, economic or political point of view.