Adeline Heitz (p)

Florence Toilier

The recent growth of logistics activities including warehousing has increased their importance in metropolitan areas (Bowen 2008). Logistics activities are sprawling outwards and warehouses are leaving dense areas and relocating in peripheral ones. Logistics sprawl is the subject of a growing volume of research (Cidell 2010; Dablanc, Rakotonarivo 2010, Dablanc, Ross 2012; Dablanc and al. 2013; Raimbault 2014; Woudsma and al. 2015; Heitz and Dablanc, 2015; Sakai and al. 2016; De Oliveira and al. 2016; Aljohania and al. 2016; Dablanc and al. 2017). This suburban logistics amplifies negative externalities linked with transport operations and raises new issues for public action in charge of urban planning (Masson and Petiot, 2013).
In the case of the Paris metropolitan area, some authors (Dablanc, Raimbault, 2015) underline the impact of the lack of planning and public regulation of the development of suburban logistics between 1980 and 2000, contributing to logistics sprawl. The introduction of sustainable objectives in urban planning documents in the 2000s, pushed public authorities to fight urban sprawl and promote the "compact city" (Reigner and al. 2013). Like urban sprawl, logistics sprawl is part of this metropolitan expansion (Heitz, Dablanc, 2015). The recent public awareness of the contribution of freight and logistics to urban sprawl has triggered an effort to integrate the mobility of goods in regional and urban planning. Public action focuses on the "last mile" a public policy to compensate logistics sprawl. Through the integration of "urban logistics" within traditional policy frameworks (Taniguchi, Thompson, & Yamada, 1999; Dablanc, 2007; Allen, Thorne, & Browne, 2007) public authorities intend to optimize the transport of goods in the city through regulation and the development of a logistics real estate and property market specific to metropolitan city centers, in addition to the regular logistics real estate market, which is mainly located in the peripheral areas. Urban logistics appear as a new leverage for logistics development in metro areas that focuses on city centers, rather than margins. The concept of "Logistics Metropolis" (Dablanc, Frémont, 2015) reflects the rise of urban governance for logistics in the Paris metropolitan area.

Nicolas Raimbault (p)

Florence Toilier

In current post-industrial metropolises, the logistics industry is one of the few sectors experiencing blue-collar jobs growth, concerning both warehousing and deliveries (Bonacich & Wilson, 2008). Moreover, in the context of the fall of manufacturing jobs, logistics blue-collar workers are now dominant within the blue-collar social group in urban regions.
Against this background, the goal of this presentation is to explore the territorial consequences of this sectorial shift within working classes in the case of the Greater Paris Region. Does it lead to the emergence of new blue-collar workplaces and residential places with different urban, socio-economic characteristics compared to the industrial era? Our main hypothesis is that the territorial rupture consists mostly in the emergence of new workplaces for blue-collar workers while residential places remain quite stable. These new workplaces strongly differ from historical industrial ones: on the one hand, warehouses are further and further away in outer suburbia and often ignored by trade unions and leftwing parties and, on the other hand, delivery drivers are working in city-centers, where they are almost invisible. This changing landscape of blue-collar places certainly contributes to the growing political invisibly of blue-collar workers.
The demonstration will be based most of all on spatial analysis of employment data localized at workplaces and residential places. The results will also be crossed with qualitative research about the working conditions in warehouses (Gaborieau, 2016) and about the governance of logistics territories (Raimbault, 2014). This way, some research perspectives about the current place of blue-collar workers in postindustrial global cities will be presented.