The urban location: asset or constraint/drawbacks for urban agriculture logistics ? Study case in Paris

The strong development of urban agriculture in recent years raises many questions about the viability and sustainability of these projects. One of the issues underlying this sustainability is the distribution of food produced in the inner city. This article seeks to understand the extent to which urban location allows for the structuring sustainable logistical organizations, for example by limiting the number of journeys or by strengthening relational proximity. Interviews with 20 parisian producers allow to characterize their production and commercial models and thus to identify the constraints that weigh on their logistical organizations. The results highlight the current logistics issues short food urban chains face and illustrate strong ambiguities regarding urban location. Although offering a dense commercial fabric, a concentration of customers and thus a promiscuity between harvest and consumption, the urban location : 1. does not systematically lead to neither an organised proximity, nor to a co-visibility between producers and consumers as expected. Therefore, productive systems, structured to operate on a just-intime basis (ultra-short chains and ultra-fresh products), are forced to adapt oneself by adding logistics tasks (storage, food processing to limit food waste and delivery); 2. Proposes parcels with configurations and subdivisions limiting direct sale and generating transport where it was not expected. In that context, commercial intermediaries, from short or long supply chains, are the most relevant to enhance and carry the products, in line with the freshness and for a quick consumption. To avoid that the logistic remains an adjustment variable to minimise the market connexion time, action-levers enhancing close ties with the commercial fabric are identified : the rise of distribution channels adapted to productive capacities, the support for implementation in public open sites or the emergence of low-carbon transport organisations.