New technologies and transformation of regional structures in Europe: The role of the milieu

Abstract

The past few years have witnessed substantial progress in the study of regional structural changes. The debate on regional disparities has been dominated by the snowbelt/sunbelt problematic, the core to periphery redistribution of economic activities, and the crisis of old industrial areas. Since the beginning of the 1970s, the emergence of new spaces of production as a result of high–technology industries, the rise and decline of regions and metropolitan areas, the urban–rural shift, the profound change in migration pattern, the increasing obsolescence of production structures in the old industrial regions, and the new geography of innovation, have represented the main features of the current processes of transformation of spatial structures in the European Economic Community. These divides have recently received intensive research attention, but the traditional literature is structured around the opposition between the convergence hypothesis and the divergence hypothesis. The main purpose of this paper is to study the reversal spatial trends in the EEC's regions. and to propose an alternative approach based on the concept of innovative milieu .The paper is organized around three issues. Regarding the first issue, we propose an extensive review of the literature on the nature of reversal spatial trends in Europe and discuss the various theoretical explanations. Due to the impact of new technologies on spatial Structures, we examine in the second issue locational patterns of high–technology activities. Finally, the difficulties in proposing an overall explanation of the reversal trend, which is more complex than the movement from the rich and industrialized regions towards peripheral and rural areas, lead us to develop the notion of innovative milieu. From this point of view, the spatial reversal may be understood as an endogenous dynamics, generated by the milieu, i.e., a complex territorial system of formal and informal networks, made up of economic and technological interdependencies, capable of initiating synergetic and innovative processes.