Céline Boiteux-Orain

Changes in Spatial and Sectoral Patterns of Employment in Ile-de-France, 1978-97

This paper investigates the spatial distribution of employment in the region of Ile-de-France in 1978 and 1997. Exploratory spatial data analysis is used to identify employment centres and a sectoral analysis of the central business district (CBD) and sub-centres is performed. The results highlight a process of suburbanisation of employment in Ile-de-France between 1978 and 1997. A more polarised space emerges in 1997 than in 1978, with several employment centres specialised in different activities. Moreover, even if the spatial influence of the CBD declines over the study period, the CBD maintains its economic leadership by concentrating a large variety of high-order producer services.

Changes in the intra-metropolitan location of producer services in Ile-de-France (1978-1997) : do information technologies promote a more dispersed spatial pattern ?

Because of their intensive need for face-to-face contacts, producer services have, historically, been found at the core of the central business district (CBD). However, it has been suggested that advances in information technologies could lead to the erosion of the CBDs economic base, rendering face-to-face contacts obsolete and enabling producer services to suburbanize. Although a considerable amount of empirical work has been done on the suburbanization of these activities in North America, the same is not true of France. In this paper, we adopt an original methodology to study the role played by face-to-face contacts in the spatial distribution of producer services in the Île-de-France region between 1978 and 1997. Our findings confirm that producer services did indeed suburbanize during the study period. Nonetheless, this suburbanization was multicentric, rather than scattered, suggesting that face-to-face contacts remain an important factor in the location of such services.