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The Llobregat Delta, in the immediate proximity of the greater Barcelona city area, consitutes a strategic enclave for metropolitan development. This flat, not overly-developed area is situated at the meeting point of two natural axes of activity, the coast and the Llobregat River basin. The Barcelona airport is located here, along with the site of the future extension of the port and also a large number of the basic networks of various means of transportation. In this article is described the planning process which has been followed in this zone, under the stimulus of the Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Environment, which holds title to most of the infrastructures here. With the object in mind of transforming the Delta into a logistic platform on a European level, planning has taken into account the roles to be played by each of the territorial Bureaus: the Généralité of Catalonia, as the entity responsible for town and country development; and the Mayors and the Regional Council, which have historically been opposed to isolated sector-based activities and destruction of the environment. The Infrastructure Plan for the Llobregat Delta, which is both concerted and global, is organizing the development of the Port along with the consolidation of a zone of logistic activities, the detour of the river into its final segment, the future extension of the airport, new highway and train access routes into the area, the development of the coastal areas, conservation of natural resources, a water purification station, an incinerating plant, and so on. This project is being concretized into a proposition for a contract among several government offices, and will include programming over time the various actions to be taken and the financial compromises necessary.

"Center-Periphery," "East- West," and "Right Bank-Left Bank" are three well-established ideas concerning Paris (in fact, the entire Ile-de-France) and the so-called Parisian territorial imbalance. They crop up all the time, whether it is a question of building new transportation infrastructures or the new "Very Big Library," and one might say that they form a kind of ideological "background" for city planners (of urban transportation, but also for elected officials and, to a certain extent, for Parisians as well). These ideas, which are not new, either in the history of the subway or in that of the city itself, frequently appeal to a certain feeling of "social justice," of which the transportation system ought to be aware, or else of a certain vision of Paris, a territory which turns out to be heterogenous on several levels, and especially that of equality with respect to access to transportation (and, in consequence, to various urban functions: employment, leisure, etc.). This article questions the validity of these ideas, in the particular case of rail transportation in Paris intra-muros, and demonstrates, by means of a territorial analysis of the performance of the Parisian train system, that the perception of the above-mentioned imbalance changes both in nature and in intensity according to the territorial scale (arrondissement or neighborhood), which has been chosen as focal point.

The criticisms brought against public consultation procedures for large infrastructure projects in France have lead to a debate on the objectives of transportation policies, the rationality of how they are evaluated, and the setting up of concertation procedures. In view of the question raised by a worn-out, sector based referential, the State has responded with a renewal of planning dialectics. On the one hand, the strategic coherence of transport policies has been reconsidered; on the other, procedures for choice and concertation have been made more democratic. The government circular dated 15 December 1992 reorganized the handling of projects so as to ensure a social legitimatization for decision-making at each step of the process. This circular completed the definition of a new normative matrix for public action in the realm of transportation by adding a more democratic and pluralistic aspect; this was necessary for the functions of concertation and apprenticeship in planning. However, recent application of this process has been faulted with having shifted to the plan- ning-stage debate those flaws which had already been criticized in public inquiries: in action, this procedure tends to reproduce existing practicies rather than to renew them. Nevertheless, the good point here may be to have brought out into the open the contradiction which results when attempting to find a common definition for the territory of a project which is acceptable to all the protagonists.