Niedergang, Erneuerung und intraregionale Entwicklung in einem altindustriellen Raum: das Beispiel der Region Nord-Pas-de-Calais

Abstract

The Nord-Pas-de-Calais Region has been one of the most important industrial areas of France in the last one and a half centuries. The economic power of the region rested for a long time on the dynamic development of coal mining, iron and steel production and the textile industry. In the last decades the Nord-Pas-de-Calais Region experienced -like other old industrial regions in Western Europe- a series of crises of its key industries that led to a crisis of the whole region. On the other hand, signs if a regional revitalisation are noticable. The article focuses on the intraregional level and analyses the development of intraregional disparities that result from the parallel processes of decline and renewal. New growth is predominently concentrated in the Lille agglomeration. The Lille agglomeration is more and more becoming the regional metropolis with a dominant position in the spatial system. Adjacent rural areas profit from spill over-effects of the agglomeration. This, for instance, explains the growth of the subregion (zone d'emploi) Flandre-Lys. An axis of development is emerging between Lille and Calais. Arras seems to be becoming a new growth pole and could be the end point of another axis of development originating in Lille. New economic growth in the Pays Minier is limitied to the central cities of Valenciennes and Douai and to the fringes of the area. The former coal mining districts themselves show few signs of a revitalisation and are still dominated by derelict land. No alternative to a further development of the existing industrial basis is discernible in the Dunkerque area. The eastern parts of the region seem to be detached from the regional renewal. They possess neither the necessary prerequesites for exogenous impulses nor the potential for endogenous development. It seems that the region does not follow one common path of development, but that a threefold pattern of development is emerging: a revitalisation based on the expansion of the tertiary sector in the Lille area and -to a certain degree- in Arras; "re-industrialisation" in the form of a modernisation of existing enterprises in the coastal regions and in parts of the Pays Minier and a decline without signs of a revitalisation on the eastern parts of the region.