Services publics – Services privés : des logiques de fermeture semblables entraînant un délaissement des territoires ?. L’exemple des agences bancaires du Crédit Agricole, des collèges, postes, maternités et gendarmeries en région SUD de 2007 à 2017

In France, the shrinkage of public services has been aggravated by budgetary austerity policies since 2000. Bank branches have also experienced a decline, linked to changes in customer practices due to the emergence of online banking and economic imperatives. While this shrinkage of public services has been well studied, this is not the case for bank branches or other private services, especially in a comparative logic. Therefore, in this study, we begin by describing the closures of service points in the Sud region of France between 2007 and 2017 for several types of public services (secondary school, gendarmerie post, maternity hospital, post office) and of Crédit Agricole bank branches, taken as an example of a private service. Then we try to understand their logics, examining the role of demography and of the spatial distribution of the services. Finally, the impact of the closures of the different types of services on accessibility has been measured with a geographical information system, to see if the closures in the private and public sectors impact the same territories. The results strongly qualify the claims regarding a 'territorial abandon', demonstrating that the spatial logic of closures differs depending on the services (in particular on whether or not they have mandatory spatial access constraints: here gendarmeries and post offices can be contrasted with schools, maternity hospitals and Crédit Agricole) and the scales (the smallest spatial units are not the ones systematically impacted by closures, especially at the inter-municipal level). The impacts of the closures of the various services on accessibility remain low and do not add up locally.