Growth Poles and Growth Centers in Regional Planning—A Review

This paper analyses the concepts of 'growth pole' and 'growth center'. Immense confusion surrounds these notions at present and they are used in many different ways in the literature. The present aim is to unravel some of the confusion, and to evaluate the usefulness of the concepts both in explanatory and narrative contexts. The role of the concepts is reviewed in relation to both geographic and economic space, and to such notions as polarization, and linkage effects.