Contenu du sommaire : Varia

Public facility location : the revival of costs of urban growth, and the answer to the problem of urban ghettoes? From 70s to 90s, with the emergence of french urban ghettoes the analysis of urban crisis has changed. The analysis angle altered from cost to location of urban public facilities. Indeed, the experts of urban policy often advise the need of an equitable public facility location. First, we describe how public facility location models take into account equity. Second, we test, from a simulation, if ghettoes residents would be advantaged by equitable location of public facilities. Classification JEL : H 72, R 53, C 61.

Concentrated urbanization in space as a problem of development ? The growth of Montréal in the 19th century. Urbanization is frequently interpreted as an outcome of agglomeration economies and, following this logic, a high concentration around a single site of urbanization could reveal agglomeration economies which are particularly effective. In a very different literature, whose origin can be traced back to contributions which are now classical as HOSELITZ (1953), the same concentration of urbanization around a single site is indicative of development problems. Regional development, along with its well-intended activism, relies to some extent on this second interpretation. The paper presents a case study : the urbanization of Québec Province in the 19th century, mostly concentrated around the site of Montréal, whose interpretation has been largely based on a paradigm of urbanization with a continuum set of cities of various sizes. After a summary description of Montréal's growth and of urbanization in surrounding regions, there is a synthesis of the literature assessing the scope of this paradigm. The third part revisits the interpretation of Montreal's growth in the 19th century in light of new data on economic activity in the periphery and by taking into account the transportation technology available in the periphery. Given the analogy from a cost structure perspective between this technology and modern transportation over land, the last section concludes on the need of a richer interpretation of concentrated urbanization frequently observed in developing countries. Classification JEL : R12, N10, O18, R58.

Sustainable territorial development and voluntary participation : the « Parc naturel régional de la Corse » model The success of a sustainable is conditioned by a real implication of the stakeholders to the decision-making processes. The challenge is to explain the participation under the angle of the participative governance. Using an empiric example, the PNRC plan, this article intends to think over the reasons and the stakes bringing the PNRC and other actors to stress importance of the participation on the hand, and to define what we describe of sustainable territorial development. In order to achieve this objective, we use different concepts: governance, ethical and convention. Classification JEL : O18.

The determination of the number of delegates inside the inter-communities structures : an application of the BANZHAF power index. We investigate in this paper the representation of the cities inside the french local entities called E.P.C.I. (Etablissement Public de Coopération Intercommunale). In these entities, each city is represented by a given number of delegates. Our analysis focuses on E.PC.I.s from Basse-Normandie and is based upon the notion of voting power index (in the sense of Banzhaf), borrowed from cooperative game theory. Our calculations take into account the fact that some coalitions are more likely to occur than others. It turns out that the voting power of cities is often different from their relative size, as measured by their population. We finally propose an algorithm allowing the determination of the « optimal » number of delegates for each city. Classification JEL : D7.

Innovation and spatial spillovers: a knowledge production function approach
The knowledge production function, which has initially been suggested as a mean to measure of technological externalities, is extended here to the spatial dimension. After accounting for spatial autocorrelation, two interesting results are worth noting : 1) distance matters when it comes to measure the diffusion of knowledge ; 2) as suggested by Adam JAFFE (1989), technological externalities flow through R&D as well as patents. Classification JEL : C21, R12, O31.