Shrinking cities
Résumé
Brexit in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the rise of extreme-right populist parties in France or more recently in Germany: these recent events have the common feature of being widely portrayed as the political consequences of the decline of old industrialized regions in Western countries. The question of the emergence of a “two-tier society”—characterized on the one hand by a tendency to concentrate the hopes of national economic prosperity in large metropolitan centers and, on the other, by growing territorial marginalization, “peripheralization”, or even irremediable decline—is now entering the public debate.