| Summary: | Warehouses and distribution centers are key-places for production systems. They are dedicated to the management of increasingly global and complex commodity chains which characterize “hyper-industrial” economies (Veltz, 2000). They are established in metropolitan regions predominantly, like Paris. In this urban region, what are the exact places of these logistics implantations? What information does this geography depict about the logics of these establishment processes: between firms’ choices, urban projects and metropolitan fragmentation dynamics? This paper aims to reveal the territorial systems, between market, political and social regulations, which enable logistics activities to get places in metropolises. According to our statistical and cartographical approach, it appears that the building of warehouses entails to a peculiar suburbanization. It doesn’t strictly follow urban fragmentation processes. Like industrial places, logistics places are often “[fiscally] wealthy municipalities populated by poor [inhabitants].” Several territorial systems seem to be at work: global dilutions of warehouses in urban areas; local concentrations of warehouses in municipalities which could be described as “servant territories” or in municipalities which are implementing economic development strategies based on hosting logistics activities or in places developed by State agencies.Thus, the local governance logics which explain these logistics places histories seem to balance between relegation and domination (of public territorial agents by logistics private or public agents) logics and voluntary and local projects of logistics developments. Eventually, there seems to be a certain metropolitan indifference vis-à-vis these places managing commodity flows. In this way the regulation of these activities is left to local mechanisms, scarcely propitious for the construction of this question as political stakes, public issues.
|
|---|