In Paris, where progressive city leaders spent the last decade pushing residents to travel by bike and Metro rather than private car, the city has launched plans to convert abandoned parking facilities and gas stations into distribution warehouses. Paris has also become more open to developing once-polluted brownfields.

So since 2013, Paris has been developing “logistics hotels”—smaller mixed-use developments used for delivery logistics, located in residential neighborhoods 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 center: The “hotel” is actually a 484,000-square-foot mixed-use development, with three stories of floorspace for the entry, organization, and exit of parcels. But it also hosts a data center, 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.

The hotel is an example of the city’s innovative approach to the urban planning of logistics in the era of e-commerce, says Laetitia Dablanc, who studies logistics at the Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris. (Dablanc’s professorial chair is endowed by Sogaris.) It also makes the concept of an urban distribution center more palatable to residents. It offers them services, but also quick access for rail, delivery vans, and cargo-cycles charged with moving packages the last mile. (The center’s rail link is not yet running.)"

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