In this paper we examine the recent developments in the Greek system of urban centres, in order to assess the validity of the view that trends of deconcentration have been in operation during the last decade. Estimation of the rank — size distribution functions for all the postwar census years shows that concentration trends were prevalent until the early 1980s. During the last decade, however, stabilisation or even deconcentration trends have appeared with the faster development of smaller cities. This finding should not be taken as an indication of a trend reversal towards more balanced spatial development, as further analysis shows that the faster growing smaller cities are largely satellite cities of the metropolitan centres of Athens and Thessaloniki. Based on the results of regression analysis, we conclude with a discussion on the factors contributing to differential urban growth performance and the policy implications of these findings for metropolitan regions and balanced growth in Greece.

This whole process of harmonizing RES integration reveals the necessity of local community participation in planning: as managers and activators of territorial resources but also as sources for a "territorial" information system (territorial capital) through geo-visualization (Labussiere et Nadaï, 2014;Yingjie et al., 2015).The production, management and processing of territorial information for this system can be guaranteed through an interactive methodological chain (Lopez-Uroz, 2012). Participatory methods, with the use of public participation GIS-PPGIS & 3D representations in the fields of geo-informatics, can create an interactive environment for this purpose by activating the actors. In the context of these processes, the implementation of 3D-PPGIS methods functions as a common "language" of communication between researchers, residents and organisations, enhances dialogue and consensus between partners thus contributing to the co-production of territorial information, the spatialisation of resource functions and components of the resources a. b. c.

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