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RESEARCH PRODUCT

On poles and centers: Cities in the French style

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International audience; The “multicentric city” is an oversimplified view of the contemporary city. The term “center” covers a multi-faceted reality. A center is not only a concentration of activities. It also means domination,power, creation and interaction. Consequently, the “secondary centers” do not necessarily replicate the main center and they are clearly differentiated. We define the “pole” as a concentration ofactivities, whatever their nature, and the “center” as a concentration of high-order and strategic activities, so that the so-called multicentric cities may be both multipolar and monocentric. This suggests what we call the Multipolar-Monocentric hypothesis.The paper sets out theoretical foundations of the pole-center distinction, and shows that the Multipolar-Monocentric hypothesis is supported by the spatial pattern and the specialization of employment clusters in a sample of large French cities.