The Ile-de-France region’s action in favour of industry
Practical notebook no.16 : (Re)developing productive activities in metropolitan regions
Thierry Petit, noviembre 2024
The Ile-de-France Region has expressed its commitment to reindustrialisation through a proactive policy, making it the guiding principle behind its economic development initiatives. This commitment took on a new dimension following the successive crises linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. These events highlighted the fragility of European economies in terms of supply. The challenges of ecological transition and decarbonisation are also central to the choice of this priority.
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The latest Regional Economic Development and Innovation Strategies (SRDEII) reflect this commitment, in particular the ‘Impact 2028’ strategy, which targets six sectors: Digital, Data and Creative Industries; Ecoconstruction, Sustainable and Intelligent Cities, Green and Decarbonised Energies; Aeronautics-Space-Defence, Sustainable and Intelligent Mobility (including automotive); Health and Care; Luxury and Cosmetics; Agriculture, Food and Nutrition. There are also six areas of intervention (strategic technologies): Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC); Quantum; Materials and clean techs; Hydrogen; Bioproduction, biotechnologies; Health technologies.
The SRDEII is broken down into a number of actions aimed at both improving the business environment and supporting the players responsible for implementing them. It takes the form of direct measures to support businesses. The recent announcement of a €400 million plan for the low-carbon reindustrialisation of the Paris Region is just one example of the action taken by the regional strategy in the industrial sector.
Acting on the business environment
The Region supports upstream research through the identification of nine Major Research and Innovation Domains (DIM), which enables the funding of research teams of excellence in these fields. These teams have been allocated €20 million in 2022. It also supports innovation and the structuring of industries by backing competitiveness clusters and helping to fund their collaborative research projects: Nextmove (mobility of the future), Astech (aeronautics, space and defence), Medicen (healthcare), Systematic (deep tech), Cap Digital (digital technology, sustainable cities), Cosmetic Valley (cosmetics and perfumery) and Finance Innovation.
In addition, the France 2030 ‘Sésame filières’ scheme, with funding of €2.5 million in 2023, aims to consolidate the structuring of strategic industries and develop scientific and technological platforms.
As part of its prerogatives, the Region is also taking action in the field of training in line with the needs of businesses, in particular by providing support and encouraging the development of the Campus des métiers et des qualifications (CMQ). In addition to the seven campuses already up and running, including one dedicated to the industry of the future, two new campuses were accredited at the end of 2023, including one focusing on sustainable energy. Four other campuses are currently in the project phase. All the strategies for developing the network of incubators and accelerators have contributed indirectly to strengthening support for productive activities before they are discontinued at the end of 2023.
The Region is also taking action on the land issue by making 27,000 hectares of economic land available under the SDRIF-E, including 1,550 hectares of available land. Of these 1,550 hectares available, 550 hectares, 40% of which are brownfield sites, are available within two years and can be identified via the Smart Implantation website.
To this end, it has set up two powerful land management tools. The first, Epfif, is tasked with acquiring and managing land on behalf of the local authority, then selling it to developers selected on the basis of the quality of their project, without adding value or remuneration, in order to help control prices. It also aims to recycle brownfield sites by drawing on the government’s Brownfield Fund. The second (SEM ÎIDF Investissements et territoires) was created in July 2020 on the initiative of the Île-de-France Region, Banque des territoires, the Paris IDF Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Caisse d’Épargne Île-de-France and Crédit Mutuel Arkéa. IDF Investissements et territoires is a semi-public property company specialising in property investment in the region. Working alongside other public and private players in the commercial property sector, it supports high-impact projects that create jobs, create value and enhance the attractiveness of the region. Since its creation, it has invested €140 million in 86,000 square metres of real estate with its partners, half of which has been invested in industrial projects.
Finally, the regional economic development agency, Choose Paris Region, promotes the international location of manufacturing activities in the Paris Region to complement existing ecosystems.
Direct support for businesses
As part of the plan for the decarbonised reindustrialisation of the Paris Region, a €250 million regional sovereign wealth fund will be set up to finance companies’ equity capital, in particular the pre-industrialisation of industrial start-ups (€65 million) and the decarbonisation of Paris Region’s industrial SMEs/ETIs (€150 million), while €35 million will be dedicated to an Île-de-France Invess fund for the social economy. This fund complements existing individual aid schemes, which are mainly aimed at regional industrial SMEs. This aid is distributed via calls for expressions of interest aimed at industry, such as the AMI ‘Accompagnement à la modernisation et à la transition écologique des PME et ETI industrielles’, which is aimed at manufacturers with at least one production site in the Paris Region, with an allocation of €20 million. The long-standing PM’up scheme, for its part, has provided funding for a large number of SMEs in the Paris Region (nearly 70 companies in 2023 for almost €14m) in various areas such as innovation, export support, strategic development, etc. and is proposing a new version in 2024 in the form of a ‘Jeunes Pousses industrielles’ grant to finance the first production line of the winners.
Productive activities with multiple faces and uses of buildings
Industry can no longer be represented by the image of a factory with a big, smoking chimney. Production activities cannot be reduced to a huge site covering dozens of hectares. These are the tip of the iceberg, and are as much a marker for the region as they are for people’s minds.
The reality is that over 98% of industrial activities in the Paris Region are made up of establishments with fewer than 200 employees, 79% of which have fewer than ten employees. Craft activities, which make up the second largest group of productive activities, by definition only include businesses with fewer than ten employees. The great diversity of productive activities is matched by a disparity in the ways in which premises, spaces and scales are occupied.
In dense urban areas, they can be located in car park basements (see factsheet 39, pp. 155-158), on the ground floor of buildings or in backyards (for craft activities, for example), in industrial and craft hotels on upper floors, whether they were designed in the 1970s, like Mozinor in Montreuil, or more recently as part of innovative private property developments. The same is true of the artisanal and industrial courtyards that still exist in Paris and its inner suburbs, as well as those that are currently being built under the impetus of private and public programmes.
Many of these spaces also exist in dense urban areas, in a mixed environment, proving both that they meet the needs of businesses and that their form allows for relative cohabitation. The fact that players in the commercial property sector are rehabilitating or recreating this type of business space in the heart of conurbations only confirms this, whether in the form of small-scale and industrial yards or high-rise sites (some with access ramps for heavy goods vehicles). Alongside these urban forms, which are less well known to the general public, there are specialised sites for productive activities, which, in the eyes of the general public, represent the archetype of today’s industrial location. These include business parks, more specific areas such as chemical platforms, industrial port areas and large industrial sites. Added to this diversity are the profound changes that have affected and continue to affect industry and productive activities in general. For example, it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a tertiary site and an industrial site, because the nature of productive activity has changed so much, particularly for activities with a high technological content. We are now seeing the emergence of new forms of real estate that are similar to offices, while retaining the functions of productive spaces, such as techno-industrial sites or ‘techtiary’ real estate, as the Établissement public d’aménagement Paris-Saclay calls it.