Le développement technopolitain en France. Quels enseignements pour l'attractivité des territoires ?

This contribution intends to discuss the economic importance of science parks and their influence on spatial attractiveness. It provides a discussion about the structuring of science parks in France, insists on the underlying structural diversity of French ?technopoles?, and argues for a two-stages development. The first one consists in favouring the supply of physical infrastructures at the disposal of external firms to be attracted within the parks; the second is based on a more qualitative understanding of science-industry relationships and on a more qualitative sustaining of distinctive characteristics of local components, be local firms or local scientific infrastructure. Whereas the first results from time to time in excessive (destructive) competition among the different technopoles, the second enriched the reflexion about public policy requirements to sustain local growth. Learning from economic geography modelling stresses some characteristics that appear critical to ensure local growth, namely initial conditions, internal-external relationships, and the internal productive interactions.