Medium-Sized Cities and the Dynamics of Creative Services

This paper examines the development of “creative” services (research, information, art etc.), located in medium-sized areas. Insofar as urban dynamics lead to extend the advanced services outside metropolises, particular attention is given to issues concerning the definition of “medium-sized cities”, and their significance regarding urban systems; the approach in terms of creativity and metropolization clarifies the incidence of their economic contexts and their structuring role within spatial frameworks. The findings presented in this paper are based on the experiment of French cities. They precise the meanings and the limits of the urban size effect, which can play in favour of medium-sized areas growth, and to their detriment as well.