The Governance of Urban Logistics Infrastructures Facing the Local Impact of Logistic Revolution

This contribution aims testing a theoretical framework to study the role of urban governance processes in regulating the retail structure change in urban economies due to the logistic revolution. After the second world war some important urban area were provided with big agri-food wholesale market infrastructure to organize the accessibility of food, its quality, and the economic transaction among wholesalers and retailers. Logistics development has promoted a change in the supply chain organization, sustaining the opportunity for some grocery retailers to build their proper infrastructure network for the perishable food distribution in competition with wholesale markets. The rising of supermarkets in Europe affected the retailing structure favoring a concentration process to the detriment to small retailers that in some cases experienced a dramatically shrank in urban areas during the 1990s. As other urban infrastructures, they can be considered as the results of political, social and economic forces compromises. Understanding the way urban governments buffer the impact of perishable food logistic on their urban economic structure ask for considering two features of these infrastructures: their long-standing presence in the urban fabric and their political dimension. A path dependence theoretical approach and a neo-institutional framework are developed to tracing the change of infrastructural policies in two case studies, Milan and Paris. Archive work, policy analysis, interviews to key informants allowed to grasp the role of the institutional configuration, and of its change during time, in triggering the social mechanism that drive the public action related to the two infrastructures considered.