The metropolization of medium-sized cities: Globalization imperative or response to territorial development needs?The case of Morocco

The objective of this book is to study the extent to which the metropolisation process presents a solution for improving the competitiveness of medium-sized cities. In order to meet the positioning desired by these cities, their development and actions cannot be envisaged exclusively on the scale of a single urban area. A process of functional polycentric metropolisation is necessary for the construction of a metropolitan trajectory for these cities. This process calls for a territory with a metropolitan vocation to be seen as a territorial system with superior functions that allow it to specialise within a network of cities with a continental or regional minimum. The implementation of these options, as applied to Moroccan cities, will have to be assessed in the light of the necessary consideration of the Moroccan originality in terms of morphological polycentricity, which presents cities in pairs. This observation invites the territorial actors to situate themselves in relation to this specificity and make it evolve towards a polycentricity with perspectives based on functional complementarities.