Arriver, rester, partir : pour une approche dynamique du rapport des commerçants indépendants au territoire

The biographical and professional trajectories of independent shopkeepers have been marked by important diversification since the end of the 20th century. At the same time, retail has taken on an increasing role in the development policies of urban centers. By crossing these commercial and territorial trajectories, we can better understand how independent shopkeepers, and through them their businesses, contribute to urban change processes. Based on two field studies in Noisy-le-Sec and Montreuil, two cities located east of Paris, this article proposes to analyze how the biographical and professional trajectories of shopkeepers influence the way they conceive their role towards the territory and the place that the latter occupies in shaping and adapting their commercial strategy. To study how they describe their installation allows us to identify three main ways by which they take the territory into account: as a generic spatial characteristic, as a resource to be mobilized or as a potential to be exploited. These may evolve as their activity develops itself and, more specifically, there may be discrepancies between the temporality and spatiality of urban change and that of the commercial strategy developed by the shopkeepers in a given territory.