Changes in the intra-metropolitan location of producer services in Ile-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 o f CBDs. However, it has been suggested that advances in information technologies could lead to the erosion o f the CBD's economic base, rendering face-to-face contacts obsolete and enabling producer services to suburbanize. Although a considerable amount o f empirical work has been done on the suburbanization o f 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 Ile-de-France region between 1978 and 1997. Our findings confirm that producer services did indeed suburbanize during the study period. Nevertheless, this suburbanization was multicentric, rather than scattered, suggesting that face-to-face contacts remain an important factor in the location of such services.