State policy designating counterweight provincial metropolises to balance the dominance of Paris
Founded the French aménagement du territoire apparatus and the doctrine of metropolitan rebalancing
In 1963 the French state created DATAR (Délégation à l'aménagement du territoire et à l'action régionale) as the agency for national territorial planning. Building on the Hautreux–Rochefort report of 1963 on the French urban hierarchy, DATAR designated, from 1964, eight métropoles d'équilibre — Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing, Nancy-Metz, Strasbourg, Lyon-Grenoble-Saint-Étienne, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes-Saint-Nazaire. These provincial cities were to be reinforced with infrastructure, public investment and higher-order functions so that they could act as regional counterweights to Paris and structure more autonomous regional development across the national territory.
The policy founded the French apparatus of aménagement du territoire and made the rebalancing of an over-dominant capital an explicit goal of state spatial planning. The eight counterweight metropolises and DATAR's coordinating role established institutions and a doctrine of polycentric national development that ran on through later schemes such as the SNADT and the regional SRADDT planning lineage.