A place of exchange and resources, small businesses play an essential role in urban development. A collective of geographers examines their renewal and adaptation strategies in the face of urban change in metropolises.
Considered as an economic activity and a social resource for the city and its inhabitants, small businesses remain under-documented by the social sciences. This collective work, directed by five geographers, constitutes a major contribution, thus repairing the lack of interest shown in these small local retail outlets, managed by independents. All the contributions, which take the reader to Toulouse, the Marais district, the inner suburbs of Paris exposed to urban renewal, within the wholesale trade of Chinese ready-to-wear clothing as well as Nice and Turin, provide access to an instructive analysis of the social dynamics that run through the sector. The diversity of the fields of investigation and the scale of the results presented produce an unprecedented knowledge of small popular businesses and the strategies deployed in a context of metropolitanization. Putting aside the discourse on its endless decline, the fifteen contributions brought together show the heterogeneity of an economic sector and the recompositions at work in the face of land pressure. The chapters that make up the book originate from two research programs – one on representations of ethnic commerce, the other on working-class suburban commerce – which gave rise to a conference on the role and place of commerce in urban change.
The commercial places of otherness: small and large globalization
Preceded by a preamble by sociologist Sharon Zukin, devoted to the strategies of municipalities and real estate developers to create a commercial apparatus designed to attract the “creative” class, the volume brings together three parts from which it is possible to reproduce some of the lessons.
Focusing on forms of commerce resulting from immigration, the first part provides a better understanding of the notion of “ethnic commerce”, which refers to a very diverse reality including community commerce (retail sale of specific products to members of a community from which the merchant comes), “exotic commerce” (intended for a population from which the merchant does not come) and more banal commerce. Field surveys, carried out in particular in the Parisian districts of Château-Rouge, Belleville, Ménilmontant and La Chapelle, highlight “the plasticity of the cultural identification” of points of sale (p. 54) and the stacking of references. In contrast to a fantasized communitarianism, the fusion of food standards can be observed in different ways across a commercial landscape that is less stable than it appears. Various studies also show to what extent these minority commercial centers constitute potential for the development of the subsistence economy. Through the portrait of Fatoumata, a childminder involved in selling handbags and grilled corn, Joanne le Bars highlights the conditions for acquiring entrepreneurial skills through local sociability and bonds of female solidarity.
The sector analyses also question the territory and reveal the variable nature of the representations associated with these activities. Stigmatized in some places, ethnic trade is experiencing a form of valorization a few kilometers from its original location. Rejected by residents of the Popincourt district, because it was considered incompatible with the neighborhood life of the middle and upper classes, the wholesale trade of Chinese ready-to-wear clothing moved to Aubervilliers, a town in the red suburbs that was looking for a new economic lease of life after the deindustrialization of some of its neighborhoods.
The small, popular suburban business, between repositioning and opening
The five chapters grouped together in the second part of the book are devoted to small businesses in working-class suburbs exposed to the phenomenon of metropolitanization. In Greater Paris and Greater Lyon, demolition, renovation and development projects have direct effects on independent businesses.
Two logics stand out. A downscaling, endangering the formerly established independents, is observed due to the precariousness of the inhabitants. New categories of commerce are emerging, some of which are aimed at immigrant customers (bazaars, fast food, telephones). In other working-class neighborhoods of Saint-Denis, Pantin or Aubervilliers, investigated by Matthieu Delage and Antoine Fleury, limited and fragile gentrification processes are at work, revealing a different commercial apparatus. The authors emphasize the disappointment expressed by some new retailers linked to the time lag between residential change and commercial change; their mid-range offer appears out of step with the habits of a working-class clientele.
This gap is also observed in the Ivry-Port district, studied by Mathilde Costil and Agnès Deboulet. The commercial reformulation carried out by the town hall and the design offices aims to create a more “qualitative” trade in place of shops considered obsolete. This discourse is justified by the arrival of new populations, from the middle classes, choosing to live in this deindustrialized district open to real estate transactions. The current commercial offer, however, meets the expectations of a majority population, more unstable on the professional level than the former working class. On the scale of a district, this chapter shows all the ambiguity of commercial requalification policies. A commercial standard and a merchant imaginary are promoted in partial disagreement with the expectations of a dominant population with constrained purchasing power.
In a large complex in Vaulx-en-Velin, the “minority commercial centrality”, studied by Nabil Zouari and Éric Charmes, is described as community-based by the private and public actors in charge of the metropolitanization project. Despite their planned demolition, the businesses, run by independents from North African and sub-Saharan immigrants, nevertheless convey a certain openness. The field survey shows that they radiate on a larger scale than that of the neighborhood and that they serve as both places of exchange and resources for a clientele experiencing socio-economic difficulties.
Urban change through commerce
Small businesses are not only a sign of social change, they are also one of its actors. This is the lesson of the last part of the book. Among the cases presented, that of the Parisian district of Marais testifies to the fact that commerce is the vector of a conquering financial globalization. By collecting a certain number of data, including those of the Parisian Urban Planning Workshop (APUR) and the real estate press, Anne-Cécile Mermet describes the commercial gentrification that this neighborhood has been experiencing since the 2000s. Several networks of globalized brands targeting a privileged clientele and belonging to powerful capital structures occupy the most coveted commercial units in the neighborhood (Sandro, The Kooples, Comptoir des cotonniers, Maje, etc.). This “franchising” movement (p. 228) has led to the disappearance of wholesale trade and the redeployment of small independent businesses in more affordable locations, on the outskirts of distinctive streets. The emergence of large commercial groups in the urban fabric constitutes a dynamic in which independent trade is included in the same way as the intervention of public authorities, also studied in this last part.
The dual questioning posed by the coordinators of the work – commerce as the manufacturer of the city, commerce manufactured by public and private authorities – allowed the structuring of the contributions in an editorial object that is both coherent and pleasant to browse. If we can regret that the consumer is almost absent from the book and that the reader does not enter the businesses mentioned, Small Business in the World City constitutes an important contribution to the social sciences of commerce – of which geography is certainly the most productive discipline. It explores a commercial segment that is as little known as it is heterogeneous and restores its strategies of adaptation and renewal in a changing urban and economic context. Against a dehumanized vision of the metropolis, small businesses are, as Sharon Zukin emphasizes, an actor in urban sociability and democratic vitality. Its scientific knowledge but also its support and development appear indispensable.