As artists and young people find themselves priced out, or
surrounded by chain stores, Paris plans a hip new future
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/14/paris_just_wants_to_be_brooklyn_a_radical_reinvention_aims_to_fix_the_city_of_light/
By Henry Grabarm, September 14, 2013
Something isn’t right in Paris. From the bar-tabacs to the bookstores, a malaise has settled on the city like a winter fog.
True,
uneasiness is a Parisian character trait, whether expressed through
stubbed-out cigarettes or pried-up cobblestones. Pessimism is surging in
France as well. Only 16 percent of the French youth feel their future
is bright, the lowest rate in the European Union.
But the central
source of trepidation in Paris is, well, Paris. The vibrancy that made
the City of Light the preferred destination for exiled and expatriate
artists and intellectuals has dimmed. Parisian teens dream of Brooklyn,
not the other way around. Between 2011 and 2012, the city dropped from
sixth to 10th on a list of cities ranked by foreign investment, far
behind its one-time rival London. Though Paris remains the world’s
preeminent tourist destination, with 29 million annual visitors, many
young people would rather head to Barcelona or Berlin. The cost of real
estate is more than $1,000 per square foot, higher than in Manhattan.
The housing crisis has hampered the city’s ability to attract and retain
the young, the creative, and the middle class. And despite the dulling
effects of wealth on the center – empty pied-à-terres, hordes of
tourists, an invasion of chain stores on the Champs-Elysées – the
surrounding banlieues remain hubs of crime, unemployment and poverty.
Paris,
critics say, has been constrained by a “culture of preservation,”
enshrined as a museum to itself. (Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça
change, and for the worse.) Economists have advised the capital to
encourage residential skyscrapers, but this is a thorny issue. The
close-cropped Paris skyline, with domes and spires poking through like
spring shoots, remains a key to the city’s charm and identity. Outside
of India and the Philippines, Paris is the world’s densest city.
The
French are well aware of all this, and their master plan has a
different theory for a Parisian renaissance: It’s not that Paris needs
more buildings, it’s that buildings need more Paris.
The city’s
frontiers are changing. The brief political autonomy of old “Paris,” a
city of 2.2 million nestled within a metro area of 12 million, is
ending. In its place, in 2016, will emerge the “Métropole du Grand
Paris,” an agglomeration of 124 towns and 6.5 million people, a powerful
planning authority that will help the city compete with London, New
York and Hong Kong.
Between
now and 2030, the region will build over 120 miles of new Métro lines
and 72 stations. It aims to add 70,000 new units of housing each year in
addition to fostering other development objectives. Altogether, the
projects are grouped under the umbrella of “Grand Paris,” or greater
Paris.
The last time Paris expanded was in 1860, when Napoleon III
annexed all of its surrounding suburbs. The city more than doubled in
size, and its internal government was rearranged to include 20
“arrondissements.” At that time, the new districts were largely rural.
Montmartre was still a sleepy village, and in “The Count of
Monte Cristo,” written some 10 years earlier, Edmund Dantès could be
said to have purchased a country house in Auteuil, which would become a
highly urbanized district of Paris by the early 20th century.
The current situation could not be more different. Paris extra muros is
not suburban in any American sense. Bordering cities like
Levallios-Perret, pop. 63,000, which sits along the city’s northeast
boundary, are denser than the city as a whole. Politically speaking,
those banlieues that formerly made up the working-class “red
belt” — the stronghold of the French left – are also now home to large
communities of first- and second-generation immigrants. And while the
city walls have long since been torn down, the concrete belt of the
Péripherique remains one of the firmest urban boundaries in the world.
The
decision of the French National Assembly, this July, to create the
political entity of “Grand Paris,” though, should not be seen as a
long-awaited shift in the balance of power to the suburbs, as was the
case when Toronto’s political boundaries were expanded. Some of the
fiercest opposition to “Grand Paris” has come from the townships of the
“Petite Couronne,” the ring outside the city, whose collaborative
governance of “intercommunalités” will be dissolved in favor of a
vaguely defined system of territories. Each territory, minimum
population 300,000, will be subordinate to a greater council, split
25/75 between representatives from Paris proper and the surrounding
area. How the latter entity will determine the budget of Grand Paris,
let alone questions of planning and culture, is still unclear. Elections
are not expected to take place until 2020.
Not surprisingly, this
political solution has been criticized from all sides. Patrick
Braouezec, the president of an agglomeration of suburban cities,
denounced the decision as a “parliamentary putsch.” Others see a system
designed to gentrify the suburbs and push the poor still further from
the center. From the pro-development side, some resent the current
proposal as a watered-down version of that first proposed by President
Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007.
But political restructuring is only one
element of “Grand Paris.” The 35-billion-euro transportation scheme is
liable to have more influence still. The numbers are impressive: 120
miles of track and 72 new stations, mostly underground, active 24 hours a
day. Four new express lines, which will expand the Paris Métro to 18
routes, plus extensions to the existing lines 11 and 14. Can you even
imagine such a thing being built in the United States? All in all, it’s
estimated to have an economic impact of 73 billion euros.
Planners
hope such a network, by finally extending Métro service through the
banlieue, will help bridge the city-periphery divide. While the Métro
network in Paris is as tangled as a bowl of spaghetti, beyond the
borders of the city it reverts to a familiar hub-and-spoke model. As a
result, as in cities the world over, it is much easier to go from a
suburb to the center than to the suburb next door. In a region where the
workforce is highly dependent on mass transit, this structure has
limited development outside Paris proper.
The last huge regional
transit expansion, of the commuter rail or RER in the 1970s, had
remarkable effects. In the 25 years after the RER reached Noisy-le-Grand
in 1977, the population of that suburban city jumped 240 percent; the
number of jobs 390 percent. The price of real estate increased as well.
Could
the Métro stimulate a similar economic renaissance in the new Métropole
du Grand Paris and diffuse the sky-high demand for housing in Paris intra muros? It’s a sign of local excitement about the project that Le Monde is
already reporting on real estate speculation around future Métro
station sites. There isn’t any just yet. But then again, completion of
the project is still 17 years away.
