The industrial district: A stage of a diffuse industrialization process—the case of Roanne

The industrial district is an important element of the theoretical debates concerning the appearance of original features of regional development in Europe. Issuing from Marshallion theory, this concept was ‘reinvented’ in the late 1970s in order to interpret a series of ‘regional success stories’ of industrial development that occurred in middle Italy. Thus, for some economists and geographers, the industrial district has become a new ‘standard’ of regional development, appearing as an autonomous integrated system, whose functions are based on the principle of ‘automation’. This system represents an optimal structure in terms of economic efficiency and resource allocation, and owns its proper mechanisms of reproduction related to specific territorial regulations. A crisis for such a system can only be related to exogenous factors. Rejecting this static vision of economic structures, which reintroduces the ‘growth/crisis’ divide in the analysis of economic development, it seems necessary to promote a more dynamic approach in terms of ‘change through continuity’. This approach was initially developed by some Italian authors who tried to analyze the original features of regional development in the Third Italy in terms of ‘industrialization without fracture’. This approach does not deny the existence of industrial districts, but refuses to accept that they are static: districts can evolve, change, develop . . . Thus, they appear as a particular stage of development in a diffuse industrialization process. Their evolution is no longer simply related to exogenous variables but also to endogenous ones; and this evolution does not necessarily lead to an implosion or a complete transformation of space but can also lead, through the continuity of the industrial district's mechanisms, to a post‐district organizational configuration.