Changes in the Intrametropolitan Location of Producer Services in Île-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 CBD's 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.