Contenu du sommaire

The 26th International Geographical Congress has been held in Sydney in August 1988. More than 1 300 geographers, coming from sixty different countries were in Sydney. Before the main session, a lot of pre-congress symposia have been organized in various australian cities and in New Zealand. During the main session 650 communications have been heard. After the meeting, severals excursions took places in Australia, in New Zealand and in Papua-New Guinea. Vote for chairmen of commissions and study groups, for the President and the General Secretary of the I.G.U. and for the seven positions of Vice-Presidents of the I.G.U. Excutive were held during the General Assembly of the I. G. U. The next Regional Conference will be in Beijing in August 1990 and the 27th International Geographical Congress in Washington in August 1992.

The Geography of Industrial Change : The Business Incubator Phenomenon. — The phenomenon of business incubators is a recent one and is closely related to the unemployment crisis. This article presents the different arguments supporting the idea, and then goes on to show the characteristics and various types of incubators. Start-up and operation mechanisms are designed to optimize the success of new businesses. Its has many uses, some significant examples of which are provided in this study along with a general assessment of the situation in France and abroad. Lastly, the perspectives and limits of the phenomenon are analyzed from the point of view of regional and local development.

Troyes, an old one-line industry town, whose groth began in the XIXth century thanks to the knitting industry, remained for a long time the capital of the important branch in the textile industry but, for about ten years now it has undergone a sharp industrial set-back, speaking in terms of jobs as well as products. This deep crisis in the local economy threatens the social and urban organisation formerly required by the one-line industry. Has Troyes done with industrial era by now and is it heading for a new stage in its long history ?

The dynamic of small and medium-sized firms in Switzer-land. The strong dependance of Switzerland on the foreign market has compelled this country to tackle almost continously the high quality international competition. Since small and medium-sized firms have not been spared by this requirement, they occupy nowadays a privileged place in Western Europe, but not without being constantly thrown back into question, especially towards the 1992 Project's deadline.

For two centuries, urbanization was the dominant tendency all over the World. During the 1970s, a sharp transformation seemed to have occured : people began to speak of counterurbanization. Patterns of evolution are more complex in the 1980s. Metropolises are still attractive for activities of control and direction. It is a consequence of the new geography of telecommunications, air travel and enterprises. Middle-sized cities are often more vulnerable than big ones.