Contenu du sommaire : Nœuds de Transport. Marchés immobiliers. Proximités subies

High-speed rail (HSR) serve cities via city-centre stations and sometimes via peripheral stations. We analyse the case of Reims which is an intermediate city located 150 km to the east of Paris and served in two stations (a central and a peripheral one) in 2007 by the East European High-Speed Line. This case allows us to avoid bias linked to the comparison of different cities. By two surveys conducted respectively in 2014 and in 2015 in the same city, we identify the location of firms around each type of station and their use of HSR and the reasons why they have chosen this location. While local companies are present in both cases, we find more external creations around the central station and more external relocations around the peripheral station. Companies also differ in terms of activities. Around the central station, high-level tertiary activities are more important, while in the peripheral station there is a strong specialization in offices for industry-related activities. We also show that office availability is an important location factor in both types of area, but other location factors including HSR are type-specific. For instance, the role of HSR is different in each area. Around the central station, it is rarely cited as the number-one location factor and can be considered as an additional factor, while it is almost always reported as the primary location factor around the peripheral station. Moreover, the use of HSR is more important for the firms located around the central station especially for the direction of multi-sites firms. They use it to go to the Parisian head office. Around the peripheral station, the HSR is less used. Different type of employees use it and for different reasons (visiting the suppliers, professional training in Paris, or Parisian business events).

Over the past 30 years in France, railway station development projects (RSDP) multiplied. Although research on local economic effects of transport infrastructures and land value capture raises the issue of analyzing urban programming around transport nodes, RSDP in particular, research on this question remain scarce. To clarify urban programming around this type of infrastructure, it requires to understand economic value created by these projects, and its distribution among the different stakeholders that intervene in its development. In this paper, we specify the relationships between urban programming and economic value created in RSDP, by focusing on the downstream phase of the project, i.e. its operational implementation. The transformation of the RSDP of Metz will be taken as an example. The analysis underlines recurrent difficulties concerning urban projects but also highlights the specificities resulting from railway context. This article has two contributions. First, while the literature mainly views transport nodes as an opportunity for value creation, we claim that they may also be a technical and economic constraint in the realization of the project. Second, we specify the importance of the downstream phase to understand economic value created in RSDP. In particular, we show that urban programming of the RSDP of Metz progressively modifies in the downstream phase as a result of exogenous shocks and in order to keep enough economic value for the planner.

After several decades of disconnection between rivers and cities, some cities are rediscovering the values of rivers, particularly for goods transportation. In this context, the paper aims to apprehend how projects of waterway goods transportation development, mentioned in European and national sustainable development policies, are territorialized. The local planning processes of  two river port projects on the Escaut river in the Valenciennes area are analyzed. Although both river port projects emerged in the early 2000's, only one was carried out. Why? Considering the concept of territorial planning system suggested by Moine (2006), we hypothesise that social representations of river ports and waterway transportation frame the city-port dialogue and the spatial planning shapes of their interface. Along the Escaut river edges, public authorities in charge of spatial planning consider the representation of waterway transportation as an economic development generator. As they have no competence regards to logistics and freight, local planning stakeholders rely on the local Industry and Trade Council to facilitate the dialogue with firms. Consequently, they have created a specific organization to build up the ports, in association with the local Industry and Trade Council. This organisation is able to design ports that fit well to the local economic activities : why and where to build a bulk handling port or a container terminal. However, this planning framework also strengthens the spatial disconnection between the city and its ports. Furthermore, the political conflicts taking place within the Valenciennes planning stakeholders influence the speed of the port projects implementation.

This article focuses on the use of interchange station in real estate of the Lille metropolitan area. Two interchange stations are particularly studied in the suburban area. The interchange stations involve at least two modes of public transport and also have urban and service functions. The contemporary evolution of urban planning tools in the Lille metropolitan area is described in the first part. The tools are less and less sectoral and combine housing and transport issues more closely. Their objective is to contain urban sprawl near interchange stations. The methodological elements are explained in a second part. These elements correspond to the coding of real estate ads for four years and a protocol of interviews with intermediaries in the real estate markets (real estate agencies, developers...). The methodology could be used again in sectors where public transport projects are planned. In the last part, the results show that the effects of spatial planning policy, although less sectoral than before, are linked to its appropriation by intermediaries in the real estate markets. Their speeches shape the interchange station for commercial purposes, sometimes in contradiction with the limitation of urban sprawl. The interchange stations are masked by the vocabulary of centrality. They are used to maintain an argument relating to the duality between automobile and public transport. They can promote urban sprawl. A public policy, shared before its implementation with intermediaries, could make it more effective in terms of habitat and mobility, in metropolitan area.

In 1993, six researchers founded the research group "Dynamics of proximity". Their first goal was to go beyond the consideration of space in economics as a simple residual explanatory variable (Rallet et Torre, 1995), which led them to elaborate the definition of proximity and to work on the link between proximity and space (Gilly et Torre, 2000). The authors of the "Dynamics of proximity" group insist on the fact that proximity is essentially neutral by nature and it is the meaning attributed by actors to their action that will lead them to value and seek proximity or, on the contrary, to refrain from it (Torre, 2009). For the time being, this approach has only been implemented for geographical proximity, organised proximity is not thought out as something that cannot be sought or valued by actors. Proximity, whether geographical or organised, is seen as a facilitator of coordination, which links actors together and not what separates them, which explains the difficulties of thinking about the negative effects of proximity, or even in considering them as suffered, particularly for organised proximity. The objective of this note is to take stock of the point in rethinking the conceptualization of organized proximity and, above all, its potential negative effects, which would lead to the definition of an organized proximity « suffered », the couterpart of suffered geographical proximity. A further research approach would consist in introducing the organized proximity experienced in dynamics models, which are currently one of the future research approaches of the "Proximity Dynamics" group (Torre et Talbot, 2018).