Can Distressed Urban Areas Become Growth Poles?

The subject of deprived areas has aroused new interest during the last decade with the accentuation of the phenomena of social and spatial fragmentation in cities and metropoles. These systems of urban polarisation, with the expansion of “living together” in communities and ghettos, including the ghettos of the wealthy and “gated communities”, together with the phenomenon of urban sprawl, have shown clearly that we are in a new period of metropolitan organisation. The transformation of these metropoles is far from over and has not yet enabled the concepts required to describe it accurately and robustly to be created. Thus the contradictions hitherto used between, for instance, the centre and the periphery, the city and the countryside, the urban and the rural, the internal and the external, have become less and less clear-cut. Well-established paradigms are being outflanked on all sides, while new ones are finding it difficult to make their intellectual ends meet.