Modéliser la suburbanisation. Succès et limites de la microéconomie urbaine

History of population and employment suburbanization, mainly in the United States, suggests three characteristics of the phenomenon. 1/ Suburbanization results in urban sprawl in such a way that population and employment increase more rapidly in the periphery than in the center. 2/ Suburbanization leads to the emergence of new activity centers in the periphery and gives rise to multicentric urban structures. 3/ Suburbanization differenciates the economic contents and functions of these activity centers and brings a new organization of urban centres. In this framework, suburbanization takes different forms depending of periods and regions. The emergence of centers and the transformation from monocentric to multicentric spaces have been modelled by microeconomics of cities. This paper seeks to establish in what extent these models can explain the preceeding characteristics of suburbanization, how far they can integrate the historical sequence of suburbanization and the regional differenciation of the process, and how they could explain the recent suburbanization of high-order services. Classification JEL : D, R1, R3.