Paris is classy, so it calls the distribution centers “logistics hotels”—les hôtels logistiques.
In France’s capital, as in other affluent cities around the globe, cheap or free “instant deliveries” from companies like Amazon, DPD, and Deliveroo have exploded in the last decade. French consumers make roughly 400 million internet purchases each year worth some $734 billion, and all of them have to be delivered.
Some 95 percent of Parisians ordered a non-food item online in 2017, according to one survey. The same research found that express or instant delivery isn’t as popular in the City of Lights as in, say, Manhattan, but more than one in two online shoppers in both cities want their stuff shipped right to their doorsteps. (Europeans are much more willing to pick up their purchases at a central location, like a locker.) Which presents quite a problem for the companies charged with getting it there.
So since 2013, Paris has been developing “logistics hotels”—smaller mixed-use developments used for delivery logistics, located in residential neighbourhoods instead of the industrial urban fringe. The most unique “hotel,” called Chapelle International, opened in April 2018, on top of an abandoned railway in the trendy 18th arrondissement in the city’s northern section. Don’t call it a distribution centre: The “hotel” is actually a 484,000-square-foot mixed-use development, with three stories of floorspace for the entry, organisation, and exit of parcels. But it also hosts a data centre, offices, sports facilities like tennis courts, and an urban farm. The project was developed by French firm Sogaris, which is owned by the city of Paris but operated as a private company.