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Cet article propose d’appréhender l’impact des évènements politiques et économiques des années 1990 sur les dynamiques démographiques des villes centre-est européennes, selon une définition harmonisée de la ville sur le temps long en Europe. Il s’agit d’identifier les évolutions exceptionnelles qu’ont pu connaître certaines villes depuis 1961, notamment avec la chute du Mur de Berlin en 1989, qui signale un changement de paradigme de développement urbain en Europe centrale et orientale.L’article met en évidence une dynamique à double vitesse des villes situées sur la façade occidentale et orientale de l’Europe du Centre-Est. Il semblerait que le degré de développement urbain de ces villes soit lié non pas tant à leur taille qu’à la proximité de pays plus avancés, comme l’Allemagne, l’Autriche et l’Italie. Ces observations s’inscrivent dans le cadre de la théorie de la diffusion des innovations au sein des systèmes complexes et souligne l’importance de la proximité géographique, plutôt que de la taille des villes en termes de dynamiques urbaines. This paper examines the impact of the political and economic events of the 1990s on the demographic dynamics of Central-Eastern European cities, according to a harmonized definition of the city over time in Europe. The goal is to identify the exceptional changes that certain cities have undergone since 1961, particularly with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which signaled a paradigm shift in urban development in Central and Eastern Europe.The paper highlights a dual dynamic of cities located on the western and eastern fronts of Central-Eastern Europe. It seems that the degree of urban development of these cities is related not so much to their size as to their proximity to more advanced countries, such as Germany, Austria and Italy. These observations are in line with the theory of diffusion of innovations within complex systems and underline the importance of geographical proximity, rather than city size, in terms of urban dynamics. Este artículo tiene como objetivo comprender el impacto de los hechos políticos y económicos acontecidos en la década de 1990 en las dinámicas demográficas de las ciudades de Europa central-oriental, a partir de una definición de ciudad homogeneizada en tal continente en el largo plazo. Se identifican las importantes evoluciones que ciertas ciudades han evidenciado desde 1961, particularmente desde la caída del Muro de Berlín en 1989, que marca un cambio de paradigma en el desarrollo urbano de Europa central y oriental.El artículo evidencia el desarrollo de una dinámica de doble velocidad de las ciudades localizadas en la parte occidental y oriental de Europa central-oriental. Se observaría que el grado de desarrollo urbano de estas ciudades no está tan vinculado a su tamaño, sino más bien con la proximidad a países avanzados, como Alemania, Austria e Italia. Tales observaciones, se circunscriben en la teoría de la difusión de innovaciones, en el contexto de sistemas complejos y subraya la importancia de la proximidad geográfica, sobre el tamaño de las ciudades en términos de dinámicas urbanas.

For the first time the systems of cities in seven countries or regions among the largest in the world (China, India, Brazil, Europe, the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the United States and South Africa) are made comparable through the building of spatio-temporal standardised statistical databases. We first explain the concept of a generic evolutionary urban unit ("city") and its necessary adaptations to the information provided by each national statistical system. Second, the hierarchical structure and the urban growth process are compared at macro-scale for the seven countries with reference to Zipf's and Gibrat's model: in agreement with an evolutionary theory of urban systems, large similarities shape the hierarchical structure and growth processes in BRICS countries as well as in Europe and United States, despite their positions at different stages in the urban transition that explain some structural peculiarities. Third, the individual trajectories of some 10,000 cities are mapped at micro-scale following a cluster analysis of their evolution over the last fifty years. A few common principles extracted from the evolutionary theory of urban systems can explain the diversity of these trajectories, including a specific pattern in their geographical repartition in the Chinese case. We conclude that the observations at macro-level when summarized as stylised facts can help in designing simulation models of urban systems whereas the urban trajectories identified at micro-level are consistent enough for constituting the basis of plausible future population projections., 14 pages, 9 figures; Pumain, Denise, et al. "Multilevel comparison of large urban systems." Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography (2015)