The New Grand Paris

Herzog and deMeuron


Let me say to begin with that I am a big city creature. I grew up roaming the streets of a rather ramshackle Madrid, still creaking and straining to overcome the miseries and deficiencies of the Spanish Civil War. Kids of my age, after school, used to test our manhood by jumping up on the bumpers of electric trolleys as they rolled by and jumping off when policemen came in sight. A thrill was seeing an aluminum coin placed on the rails as the tram arrived to watch it flattened by the behemoth. I used to spend my weekly allowance in the local cinema, two blocks from home, for a double feature of mostly American films.

Then I saw the city grow and develop around me. Open, derelict spaces that used to provide fields of dreams to me and my buddies, where we pursued redskins and became French Foreign Legionnaires, were built over into blocks of flats. Sundays, after homework, I used to ride the trams and the subway on a single ticket all around the system, to test how far I could go. New quarters filled up with people from the provinces, new shops and workshops sprung up in the commercial bays under the residential flats. Our curiosity had infinite possibilities to find new experiences.

That is why I was so interested today in an exhibit at the Palace de Chaillot on the concept of a Grand Paris, a look into the future. President Sarkozy called on ten architectural firms to provide visions of how Paris may look fifty years from now. Bernard Delanoe, the Socialist Mayor of Paris, is a great proponent of a new vision for Paris.

The Paris we see now, the city of lights, is largely a creation of the 1870s. The wide, tree lined boulevards, with broad sidewalks, the uniform height of the buildings, crowned with grey rounded mansarded roofs, are the result of the 17 years of planning by the Prefet de Paris, Baron Haussmann from 1853 to 1870. Whole intricate quarters of tightly crowded buildings on dark, narrow, insalubrious streets were razed to create straight lines of intersecting arteries. One of the unstated objectives was to provide clear fields of fire for the troops when called upon to repress the all-too frequent rebellions and mutinies. Enormous opportunities for speculation opened up and enriched many. To his credit the Baron lived exclusively on his salary as civil servant and died almost impecunious.

A trove of pre-Haussmann photographs of Paris have been found and are just now being exhibited at the Louvre des Antiquaires. Many libertarians, then and now, deplored the Haussmann vision as authoritarian. But the result is the Paris that we know today, and that millions of people come from all over the world to admire, to be charmed by this Parisian “je-ne-sais-quoi” which is synthesized and bowdlerized into the bundles of aluminum Eiffel towers of all sizes offered by mostly African street vendors.

Classical Paris has a rounded, vaguely elliptical shape. It has always been delimited and encircled by successive concentric defensive walls, from Phillippe Auguste, to Charles V, Adolphe Thiers and nowadays the Périphérique, the circular freeway built in the 1960s. Anything beyond that has been considered “banlieue”, the suburbs. Sarkozy, when he was Minister of the Interior, had a very fractious relationship with the “banlieusards”, the inhabitants of the municipalities surrounding Paris, mostly from the French-speaking countries in Africa. France offered them French citizenship while they were living in their home territories, but became much less welcoming once they arrived over here.

A quiz question: name the largest African city (after Cairo). Clue: it is not in Africa. Paris is home to 20% of the population of France, and, according to EU statistics is the largest urban area in Europe, ahead of London. Both London and Madrid have however larger densities of population (over 5,000 inhabitants per km/square) than Paris (3,200).

The architects who have been thinking over how Paris can confront the challenges of the twenty first century mention the uneven building density of the city, and point to in-fill development. All of them recognize the need for faster communications as the core of any plan to weave the different quartiers together, by using monorails and a network of high-speed trains, in addition to expanded Metro and RER lines.

But what all of them emphasize is the needs of post-Kyoto development, i.e. reducing the carbon footprint of the city, by encouraging the use of low emission individual means of transport, the use of communal transportation systems, the interweaving of rural areas into the mixed use residential and industrial areas, the rational use and reuse of water and that heretofore forbidden word: skyscrapers. See the heading image.

In what direction is the city going to develop? One team points to the Seine valley, toward Rouen and the Havre; another shows how present population centers around Paris could be expanded into 20 satellite cities of 500,000 inhabitants each, linked by high efficiency transportation networks.

None of this is possible without the political will to legislate deregulation and even without the possible creation of a super-authority to write the rules that would apply to the future Grand Paris, and finding the means to finance the needed infrastructure. The dialogue, however, has started, the exhibition is well attended and schools are bringing young students to visit it and comment on it. Some of the architects have remarked that the tenor and language of the different supervising authorities, the Paris City Hall, the regional Ile-de-France administration and the French Government is beginning to converge.