“Development Corridors and Urban Development Strategies” and “Slum Improvement Strategies and Social Inclusion,” Presentations by Mona Serageldin, 11th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, São Paulo, Brazil, 2004

[Excerpt: “Development Corridors and Urban Development Strategies,” pages 1, 2, 4-5.]

1.0 Positioning Cities in the Increasingly Complex and Competitive Global Economy
“Europe took an early lead in exploring the urban configuration that would result from unification and economic restructuring. The French National Planning Agency produced, in the late eighties, a landmark study ranking cities according to indicators of strength in the high-tech and high-value added sectors. The resultant diagram delineated the major economic regions and growth nodes in Western Europe. The main transportation corridors linking the larger centers, act as the backbone of the system, structuring networks of interlinked cities and channeling development along their alignment.

1.1 Structuring Development Corridors
Throughout the decade of the 90’s, globalization reshaped patterns of production, leading to the emergence of interlinked clusters of entrepreneurial businesses working through strategic alliances. Looking at Montpellier, France and the region around the technopole as an example shows that each economic cluster has its own pattern of spatial interconnections and dispersion based on functional, physical and virtual links. Technological innovation and fierce international competition are constantly reshaping these patterns, adding and eliminating whole categories of businesses and redirecting the flows of private investment to new and more advantageous locations.”

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2.0 Coping with unprecedented mobility and large migratory flows
“Attempting to slow the growth of the metropolitan areas in order to divert population and activities to lagging regions is ill advised. Such policies have met with little success at a very high cost to the nation. Their wisdom is to be questioned at a time when unprecedented mobility has multiplied the capacity of the larger centers to contribute to the development of by-passed regions and economically distressed areas. Commuting from surrounding villages and towns, migration from rural areas and small provincial towns, lifts people out of poverty and contributes to channeling large flows of remittances to these lagging regions.”