ABSTRACT
The most well known and the most tenacious, despite all the devastating criticism of their “theoretical adequacy” and “ideological-racist assumptions,” are the modernization theories. This chapter provides an historical review of the context within which the growth pole approach emerged as a response to the dissatisfaction with traditional spatial theories and a review of the main features of Francois Perroux’s theory, in order to show the extraordinary similarity of its basic tenets with those of modernization theories. It analyses some of the major new theories of regional development and planning in the Third World that appeared as a response to the failure of the older center-down paradigm of modernization theories at the national level and that of growth pole theory at the subnational level. There are according to Walt Rostow five stages of growth: “the traditional society,” “the transition or precondition stage,” “the take-off,” “the drive to maturity,” and “the stage of high mass consumption.”
