Rachel Guillain

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.

Agglomeration and Dispersion of Economic Activities in and around Paris: An Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis:

The agglomeration patterns of twenty-six manufacturing and service sectors in and around Paris in 1999 are analysed. The method used measures the intensity of spatial agglomeration and identifies the location patterns of economic sectors. First the locational Gini coefficient and Morans I statistics of global spatial autocorrelation are computed. These provide different but complementary information about the spatial agglomeration of the sectors under study. Then exploratory spatial data analysis tools are applied. Moran scatterplots and local indicators of spatial association statistics reveal great diversity in location patterns across sectors.

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.

Employment Density in Ile-de-France: Evidence from Local Regressions

In recent decades, cities have experienced a particularly intense phase of urban sprawl. Urban growth has been characterized by the spatial concentration of population in urban areas and the concomitant extension of those urban areas (Nechyba and Walsh 2004). Urban sprawl has also been accompanied by major reorganizations of urban areas with regard to the location choices of households and firms. More specifically, most cities in developed countries have experienced several waves of suburbanization of economic activities: “an economic definition of suburbanization is a reduction in the fraction of a metropolitan area’s population or employment that is located in the central city (corresponding to increased activity in surrounding suburbs)” (Mills 1999). Suburbanization of economic activities has an impact on urban structure: cities are not exclusively organized with a Central Business District (CBD) around which land values, employment, and population densities decrease with distance. On the contrary, they are more and more characterized by a polycentric organization: employment is concentrated in several centers within urban areas. Strategic activities (headquarters and high-order producer services) play a major role in this process by locating themselves selectively in these various centers. The development of peripheral employment centers – where a significant proportion of these activities are located, reproducing the functions of the CBD – is accordingly viewed as the decline of the CBD (Stanback 1991).