Blue banana

The Blue Banana (French: banane bleue, also known as the European Megalopolis or the Manchester–Milan Axis) is a discontinuous corridor of urbanisation in Western Europe, with a population of around 111 million. The concept was developed in 1989 by RECLUS, a group of French geographers managed by Roger Brunet.

It stretches approximately from North West England across Greater London to the Benelux states and along the German Rhineland, Southern Germany, Alsace in France in the west and Switzerland to Northern Italy in the south.

The French geographer Roger Brunet, who wished to subdivide Europe into "active" and "passive" spaces, developed the concept of a West European "backbone" in 1989. He made reference to an urban corridor of industry and services stretching from northern England to northern Italy. Brunet did not see it as a new discovery, but as something easily predictable to anyone with "a little bit of intelligence and a feel for spatial properties."

He saw the Blue Banana as the development of historical precedents, e.g. known trade routes, or as the consequence of the accumulation of industrial capital. France, in his view, lost its links to the corridor as a result of its persecution of minorities (viz. the Huguenots) and excessive centralisation in Paris. In his analysis, Brunet artificiallyexcluded the French conurbations, which are particularly narrowly concentrated around Paris, in order to persuade French authorities of the necessity of greater integration of business into the centre of Europe.

Large population centres, e.g. Randstad, the Ruhr and Manchester, developed with the Industrial Revolution and further development would occur in areas that lay between these powerhouses.

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