Is quality central? Perceived quality of office building in Parisian metropole

The objective of this article is to analyze the spatial structure of the perceived quality for the Parisian office buildings stock. Using a detailed grid that describes a building, a panel of market participants was questioned in order to reveal their quality judgments on each elements of the grid. On that basis, we elaborated a global quality score that can be applied to real buildings. This score can be split between a location quality sub-score and a building sub-score. In the literature, the notion of Central Business District (CBD) points out a central place in the city, where the prices are maximal. In this article, we want to question the notion of centrality under the prism of the perceived quality, for the Parisian office buildings stock. We consider two urban morphology paradigms: the monocentric and the polycentric hypotheses. The first one assumes that it exists a central place around which the city develops. The second one considers several centers of attractiveness within a city. The questions we address are the following. Is the global perceived quality score monocentric or polycentric? In the first case, can we consider the CBD as the place of the maximal quality? Regarding the components of the global score, we expect a monocentric spatial structure for the location quality sub-score. As for the building quality sub-score, the maximal quality might be reached for the first ring of the Parisian metropolis, in relation with the ‘Grand Paris' urban project. In a first step we will describe our theoretical and methodological background for measuring the quality of buildings, then we will describe our sample of datas and finally we will ask the centrality of Paris CBD.