After the Second World War, France developed an economic planning system based on a wide industrial public sector and financial and regulatory instruments targeted at private firms. This reflected the leading role of the state in the economy and in society. The policy of aménagement du territoire (regional development planning) emerged in the early 1950s to support regional economic development, to balance the dominance of Paris and to develop backward regions. The economic planning system and the policy of aménagement du territoire each gave rise to specific government institutions which were responsible to the head of government—the Commissariat Général au Plan (CGP) (general planning office), established in 1946, and the Délégation à l'Aménagement du Territoire et à l'Action régionale (DATAR— interministerial regional and territorial development agency) established in 1963. Aménagement du territoire was devised to balance the impact of the First Plan, which was expected to create sharp regional inequalities, since it focused on the geographically concentrated key industry sectors. It soon became closely integrated with economic planning. Major development plans responded to the needs of the big industries of that time, like the steel and chemical industries. The investment budget of the state was broken down on a regional basis. Regions had been mapped in the late 1950s to match the requirements of the economic plan and to enable the planning and implementation of regional policies (de Lanversin et al., 1989; de Montricher, 1995).

The French concepts of ‘planning’ and ‘development’ are based on this experience. They do not denote the identical meanings attributed to them in the UK and the USA. This may cause confusion. ‘Planning’ encompasses a series of actions and means combined to achieve given objectives over a fixed period of time. These objectives are defined on the basis of specific forecasts. It covers primarily the planning of economic, social and cultural development. The aménagement du territoire, an expression that can hardly be translated into English, has developed as a central government policy which aims to correct economic imbalances in the country through policies relating to the location of business activities and the provision of infrastructures. It is primarily a strategy applied to the spatial dimension of economic development.