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The Géographie Universelle of the Vidalians holds pride of place in the history of French geographical scholarship between the two world wars. However, other Géographies Universelles were compiled during that period and now seem to be largely forgotten. The most significant of these was published by Quillet in the 1920s. Using a variety of sources, including documents in the Collection Perpillou-Demangeon (in the Bibliothèque Mazarine), this article examines the team of authors established by Vidal de La Blache and whose writing was seen through to completion by Lucien Gallois. Attention is focused on the priortraining of these geographers, and their degree of field knowledge of the regions about which they wrote. A similar exercise, undertaken for the network of a dozen authors who contributed to the 4-volume Quillet project, reveals a varied team, comprising some authors who held doctorates and taught in institutions of higher education, and others whose careers were in secondary education. This essay casts light on a forgotten section of the geographical community whose significance resided in informing school pupils, businessmen and members of the general public who would have found Vidal's great project too detailed and erudite. It also identifies the role of publishers in shaping and diffusing geographical knowledge.

Located in the Spanish Basque, Pasajes is a multifunctional modest harbour (4 to 5 millions tons a year) that remains vital to the economy of the region. Privileged by a promising economic situation, this port structure is seeing an increase in traffics and is trying to expand according to renewed ambitions; as a consequence, the site's limits and constraints has become a burning issue. There is a cramped winding channel that limits the access and, moreover, Pasajes is corseted by an urban environment which makes every vague desire of expanding the docks or building new road infrastructure impossible. To obviate the risk of a harbour thrombosis (and consequently a slow potential crumbling - with benefits for real competitors such as Bilbao, Bayonne and Bordeaux), the plan for building a deep-water harbour has been elaborated.

The St Lucia case study is a contribution to the re-reading of the territorial strategies of the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, at local and national levels. It shows ambivalence between the will of Afrikaners to segregate themselves, the proclamation of national parks, and the reality of a majority of poor black people trying to exist politically. In light of the new constraining environmental laws, we see the development of environmental conflicts where Afrikaners are battling to preserve their free access to the sea while poor Blacks are illegally occupying a State forest.

Based on the case studies of two South African metropolitan areas (Johannesburg and Ekhuruleni in the Gauteng Province), this paper reflects on the relation between globalisation and local urban policies. We argue that in South Africa's metropolisation process (finalised in 2000) globalisation has been used in the political and urban planners discourse to justify a neo-liberal urban policy, for one, and to reinforce the role of the central state, for the other. This strategy is partly hidden by a general insistence on local democracy, " good governance " and participation. It thus allows the state to concentrate on public and private investments in some part of the cities (the shop window), and to manage poverty in some others (the back shop). The demonstration is based on an analysis of the general urban policy, as well as of local examples of problematic public participation in deprived areas. This does not imply that there is no hope and progress in South African large urban settlements, but that the risk of developing new socio-spatial gaps is high.