Commerce électronique et localisation urbaine des activités commerciales

The aim of the article is to study the impact of electronic commerce on the urban organization of commercial activities. Despite of the weak level of the present development of e-commerce, significant transformations are expected. Generally confined to on line sales, electronic commerce is here defined more widely as the process of partial digitalization of commercial functions. Any business activity can be analyzed as a hybrid set of physical infrastructures and virtual functions. This hybridization will have an impact on the localization of business activities in the cities, in particular on the center-periphery equilibrium which has characterized the spatial distribution of commercial activities within European cities for last 30 years. Four key variables are supposed to determine the evolution of the urban structure of commercial activities: the relative importance of on line sales in retail commerce, externalities of consumption, social externalities of commerce, transport costs of products and people. Finally, three prospective scenarios are proposed. Classification JEL : D12, L81, L86, R12