Etablissements publics de cooperation intercommunale et développement local en Basse-Normandie

We investigate in this paper local development at the level of the french local entities called EPCI (Etablissement Public de Coopération Intercommunale), which gather different city councils of the French region Basse-Normandie. Sets of socio-economic and fiscal variables allow us to characterize with data analysis methods these EPCI. We show that the development of these entities since 1990 may be divided up thanks to a hierarchical classification into rural EPCI versus urban EPCI with, in the case of the Basse-Normandie Region, the specific class of touristic EPCI. In addition we show that the distance from the main urban poles is a disadvantage for the development of a large part of the south rural areas of the Manche Department and some contiguous EPCI from the southwest of the Orne Department. The growth at a sub regional level appears mainly driven by urbanisation and its induced effects that redistribute the growth in the rural neighbourhood.