Economy of Paris - Spatial Organisation of The Paris Economy

Spatial Organisation of The Paris Economy

As of the 1999 census, there were 5,089,179 persons employed in the Paris aire urbaine (or "metropolitan area"). At the same 1999 census, 4,949,306 people living in the Paris aire urbaine had a job. The almost 140,000 people difference between these two figures comes from an outflow of about 60,000 people living inside the aire urbaine who work outside of it, and an inflow of about 200,000 people living outside of the aire urbaine who come to work inside it every day. Thus, out of the 5,089,179 people employed in the Paris aire urbaine in 1999, only about 200,000 people (3.9% of the total) lived outside of it, which is not surprising since the boundaries of the aires urbaines are based on commuting patterns.

Well into the middle of the 20th century, the majority of jobs in the aire urbaine were concentrated in the city of Paris proper. However, after the Second World War the economic activity relocated to the suburbs, and the city has been steadily losing jobs to the benefit of the suburbs, in particular the Hauts-de-Seine (92) département, home of the new La Défense business district, to the west of the city proper. Today, the city of Paris is not properly speaking the economic centre of the aire urbaine since most of the offices are in fact located in the western half of the city proper and in the central portion of the Hauts-de-Seine département, forming a triangle between the Opéra, La Défense and the Val de Seine district. Hauts-de-Seine has become a sort of extension of central Paris, with 873,775 persons employed there in the end of 2005, more than half as many as in the city of Paris proper (1,653,551 persons employed in the city of Paris in the end of 2005).

As a consequence workers do not just commute from the suburbs to work in the city of Paris, but also come from the city of Paris to work in the suburbs. Of the 5,416,643 persons employed in the Paris Region in the end of 2005, only 1,653,551 (30.5%) worked inside the city of Paris proper, while 3,763,092 (69.5%) worked in the suburbs. However, once adding Hauts-de-Seine, the previous figures show that City of Paris and Hauts-de-Seine together still harboured 46.7% of all persons employed in the Paris Region in the end of 2005, which should help to put into perspective the phenomenon of job relocation to the suburbs: it was as much a relocation to the suburbs as an extension of central Paris beyond the administrative borders of the city.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the French government created several villes nouvelles ("new towns") on the outer ring of the Paris suburbs in order to multi-polarise the economy of the city. Economically speaking, those villes nouvelles have been a relative success since many companies are still moving into those areas today. However, they didn't completely fulfil their role of multi-polarisation: economic activities still remain in a large measure concentrated in the central core (City of Paris and Hauts-de-Seine) of the aire urbaine, as the above employment figures show.