Abstract
This paper reviews the role of producer services in the scientific debate on metropolisation processes and discusses the different types of agglomeration economies. Based on the critical appraisal of sectoral based approaches, it develops a more functional case study of the geography of producer services in the Paris metropolitan region to test the form and nature of economic specialization. The results confirm the multipolar-monocentric pattern which seems to be a common feature in many European cities. The paper concludes on the importance of a functional and hierarchical division of labor in the Paris city-region.
Highlights
Functional and hierarchical criteria seem to be more important factors in an understanding of contemporary intra-metropolitan transformations
4 Considering that producer services are crucial to the understanding of contemporary spatial and economic changes occurring in metropolitan regions, this paper further develops the study of the functional division of labour hypothesis by addressing some of the methodological difficulties encountered in research so far
They acknowledge the relocation of some advanced services in the peripheries of metropolitan areas, both the COMET and the POLYNET research projects insist on the concentration of most information-intensive activities in traditional cores
Summary
From the “death of cities” to CBD reinforcement: theoretical and methodological issues. A recent study on the telephone calls of firms in the Paris region confirms the international gateway role of Paris and La Défense within the entire Paris city-region (Halbert, 2004b) This tends to confirm the geographical organisation described by Bourdeau-Lepage and Huriot (2005) in French urban areas as the multipolar – monocentric pattern: business services do tend to deconcentrate in secondary peripheral poles (multipolarity), most high-order services remain in what constitutes one economic centre (monocentricity). Business services, banking and insurance industries and transport and telecommunications activities that I use as an approximation for the producer services category according to a sectoral definition (which I will criticise later in this paper) tend to strongly develop in two places which benefit more or less from the deconcentration trend: first, in the central and South part of the Hauts-de-Seine département (La Défense, Boulogne-Billancourt) close to the traditional Parisian CBD; second, in more peripheral poles on the outskirts of the agglomeration such as the Roissy airport and the five New Towns.
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