Contenu du sommaire : Centres et périphéries urbaines

Before 1975 the crisis affecting central areas was part of a wider "urban crisis" characterised by the growth of new central business quarters and by the development of large peripheral residential estates. Since then the existence of a "social crisis", a much greater diversification of the sources of capital invested in urban . centres and the disappearance of a clearly defined set of location factors have accorded the city's image a new and influential role. In the eyes of both residents and urban planners or investors, it is this image which will entrance the value of residential areas and potential sites for investment.

The present paper attempts to analyse the process and the content of some recent prospective studies and planning projects. concerning the Great Lyon area. The author examines more precisely the new way which has been adopted in the treatment of relationships between the central city an its suburbs and farther its regional peripheral circum-areas. He insists on the potential consequences and risks of an unequal and selective development which is strongly supported by recent proposals.

ABSTRACT Although thenewtown of l'Isle d'Abeau was conceived in 1968, twenty years later its development still remains of interest. However, the proposed scale of the project has been reduced and, above all, the aims of the new town are now different : they are less related to urban form and more to economic growth. The town's development concerns the future of the whole metropolitan region of Lyon.

When zoning is more or less carried out, and when it superposes itself upon an inherited communal division, outstanding connections of this new space become transverse. Therefore, part and position of suburban parishes do not depend,as much as before, on relationships with the inner city. In middle size towns, such as Roanne, the interdépendance and the competition tend to a balance. So it is within a great urban centre, St-Etienne for instance, but one's discerns also the evolvment to a wide and "polycentric"

For the last ten years there has no longer been just one but several lines of thinking concerning the urban development of the Grenoble agglomeration. A large numvber of the peripheral communes have formulated their own strategies, distinct from that of the city's central commune, which itself has increasingly moved away from the broad outlines given in the structure plan. A close link exists between the strategies of the suburban communes and their urbanistic, social, political and, above all, fiscal chracteristics.

The analysis of intra-regional telephone flows reveals the relative weakness of the links between the east and west of Rhône-Alpes region. A retrospective study shows that the of the links between the various towns of the region and Paris has been strenghhened