Abstract
In the last few years, the issue of the location of logistics activities emerged in the literature, in Europe and in the United States, especially from the perspective of logistics spatial dynamics as logistics sprawl. These issues of spatial dynamics question urban policies, because they underline the lack of interest in freight in the planning process. Indeed, one of the major issues in planning logistics facilities is the lack of a good understanding of the logistics sector: it is difficult to guide public action in the absence of detailed and precise data. The great heterogeneity of logistics facilities is often underestimated by public policies. The visibility of some sectors in public policies or academic literature, as parcel industry or e-commerce, hides other sides of logistics as an industry sector. With this paper we underline differences in the location of facilities, which translates into a difficult implementation of public policies to regulate logistics sprawl in the case of the Paris region. This paper studies precisely the location of the warehouses and terminals, and their place in the spatial organization of logistics facilities in the Paris Region. In particular, we compare the location of mass retail and wholesale trade facilities, logistics provider’s facilities and parcel’s industry facilities.
Highlights
Developing “smart cities” by using new technologies and services in the areas of transport, energy and ICT to reach high level of urban sustainable development relies on a great amount of data and information
Each group is determined by a specific profile that we describe and which contains logistics facilities classified by type
In this article we have documented the significant increase in the number of research works on the location of logistics facilities
Summary
Developing “smart cities” by using new technologies and services in the areas of transport, energy and ICT to reach high level of urban sustainable development relies on a great amount of data and information (e.g. in the Europe 2020 strategy). In the field of urban freight, logistics and transportation of goods, basic data such as freight flows or the location of the logistics facilities are not always identified. In the last few years, academic research works have emphasized the relationship between freight flows and urban regions, highlighting new geographies of freight. Heitz et al European Transport Research Review These two opposites, but concomitant, spatial dynamics have led us to take an interest in the factors that determine the location of logistics activities. These spatial issues question urban policies and underline a partial knowledge of the logistics sectors. The visibility of specific sectors, such as parcel industry or e-commerce, hides other sides of the logistics sector and could lead to a misrepresentation of what services are provided and how to plan for the location of their services
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