PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

248
European space that has since become ingrained in the minds of many researchers and
decision-makers. They conceived of European space as being dominated by an economic
backbone reaching from London across the channel through the Benelux countries,
Northern France, Switzerland and Southern Germany to Northern Italy. This economic
backbone (dorsale), also variously defined as the heart of Europe, became known as the
Blue Banana (figure 6.3). 23
Blue Banana maps sometimes recognize other important
agglomerations in Europe, but they all they very clearly divide European space into a
core and several peripheries (finisterres), which are often shaded in dark. Ironically, the
catchy Blue Banana image was used by the French spatial analysts precisely in order to
point out the need to develop alternative, more polycentric structures. This desire to
indicate such core-periphery connections, and to indicate a hierarchy of linkages, is
clearly visible in some of the less publicized Banana representations (see figure 6.4).
Nevertheless, the main effect was rather antithetical to the supposed aim of promoting
polycentricity: cities outside the dorsale seemed suddenly doomed as losers simply
because of their location. The Blue Banana became the main metaphor for an
economically divided Europe. The image has proven very difficult to undo, in part
because there is some empirical truth to it. (The highest GDP per capita income regions,
for example, do indeed fall within the banana.)
23 What made the Banana blue? I assume that this was the color used in the original maps produced by
Brunet et al in their 1989 DATAR study, but I was unable to find the original, colored maps to confirm this
with certainty.