| Summary: | The number and intensity of freight flows has increased over the last decades, in a context of fast integration of the world economy and deep transformation of production and distribution systems. In France, to cope with this new complexity, many logistics activities have been created across the country and have since concentrated in largest urban areas. Within them, new locations become increasingly suburban, in order to take advantage of the availability of large parcels where land prices are cheaper. But the suburbanization dynamic doesn’t follow a stable and predictable path. What interpretation is to be given to this heterogeneity: is it the same phenomenon just with a time lag of one or several decades or does it involve different location strategies? A fine analysis of suburbanization paths, based on building permits data, is carried out in this paper. It provides some elements necessary to the understanding of suburbanization dynamics. It shows that the most frequent suburbanization pattern is characterized by an initial sprawl followed by the emergence of a few suburban poles. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis put forward by recent works of an increasing importance of agglomeration economies in the fields of logistics and distribution.
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