Paris is set to change dramatically in the next 20 years. Michelle Mannion reports on how the government’s focus is shifting to the suburbs
What comes into your head when you think about Paris? Hearts and flowers, invariably. Pride and protectionism, more than likely. But it’s an image the French capital is keen to shake.
Denis Tersen is chief executive of the Paris Region Economic Development Agency (PREDA), a government body set up to attract foreign investors to the area and help them relocate. “I think there are two clichés about the Paris region,” he says. “The first is that we are romantic. In fact, that’s not a cliché, we are romantic! The second is that we are inward-looking.”
But there’s nothing inward-looking about the government’s ambitious plan, Le Grand Paris (Greater Paris) – in fact, it’s very much looking outwards, at the wider spread of the city. Paris is undoubtedly an economic powerhouse, but it’s one that’s packed into a small area that is finding it harder to contain its inhabitants.
Paris city is just under 100 sq km, three times less than inner London, for a population of only slightly less – 2.2 million inhabitants, compared with about three million in inner London. Tersen says: “There is a kind of wall surrounding the city of Paris [the Boulevard Périphérique ring road] that separates it from all the suburbs. It’s not good for the economic development of the region.”
The Grand Paris scheme, announced by President Nicolas Sarkozy a year ago, aims to address this. The plan is to create a new, eco-friendly metropolis by 2030 that breaches the boundaries of the city to take in the region as a whole, in a manner akin to Greater London. It’s a wise move – the Paris region covers about 12,000 sq km, is home to 11.5 million inhabitants and accounts for almost a third of France’s GDP. But it has traditionally suffered from the city/suburb divide, with some places on the outskirts notoriously downtrodden.
The project has been hailed as the greatest transformation of Paris since Baron Haussmann created the city’s wide boulevards under the watchful eye of Napoleon. It encompasses two main elements. First, ten architectural teams around the world – one led by Richard Rogers, another by Jean Nouvel – were invited to present their visions of the Paris of the future. Ideas put forward ranged from Manhattan-style high-rise neighbourhoods to vast green spaces and extending the city to Le Havre port. Christian de Portzamparc even suggested building a “Ringway” light railway above the Périphérique.
All very ingenious, although no one vision will be implemented – the intention was more to spark ideas. More tangible is the second part of the plan, to transform the suburbs via a new transport system. Eight “clusters” of business expertise have been identified in the area surrounding the city. These include La Défense, the financial district to the west; Plateau de Saclay, the science and technology hub to the south; and the area around Charles de Gaulle airport in the north, dedicated to travel, logistics and freight.
Each cluster is to receive heavy investment and will be connected to the others by 130km of metro line that will circle Paris, with a branch crossing the city. “The clusters also have to be connected to the world,” Tersen says, and so they will be linked to Orly airport as well as Charles de Gaulle, along with Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est rail stations to provide TGV and Eurostar access to the UK and northern and eastern Europe. “So it will be easier to go from, say, Saclay to CDG or to the centre of Paris, where you have a lot of major universities, and the central and local governments,” Tersen explains.
The metro will have 40 stops and run 24 hours, and will be automatic. “There are a lot of advantages to being automatic,” he says. “It’s more modern and comfortable, it’s a faster way of travelling, and you don’t have strikes.” It will cost €21 billion (out of a total €35 billion to be ploughed into improving the city’s transport infrastructure), which Tersen says will be partly funded by the government and partly through the increase in value of the land surrounding the network. “The idea is to start the metro project in 2011 – they will have special clauses to go as fast as possible, or even faster than possible, to ensure that in 20 years the metro will be there,” he says.
In La Défense, an area familiar to many business travellers, work has begun on transforming its distinctive skyline. Some 13 building projects, a mixture of new-builds and redevelopments, are planned or under way. These include Carpe Diem, a 162-metre-high structure housing 47,000 sqm of office space, due to be completed by 2012, and Hermitage Plaza, two mixed-use skyscrapers designed by Norman Foster and due to be completed in 2016. There are also plans for a 343-room four-star hotel – adding to the Sofitel, Hilton, Marriott Renaissance and Pullman properties already in the area – although negotiations are ongoing.
Looking further ahead, in the next ten to 15 years the intention is to extend the area La Défense covers from 160 hectares to 500 hectares, with further office space, hotels, apartments and schools.
Olivier Machault, assistant general administrative and financial manager of EPAD, the development agency for La Défense, is enthused by the opportunities the new transport system will bring. “In 20 years you’ll be able to put your luggage in a station at La Défense and pick it up in Tokyo or Singapore,” he says. There are also hopes that UK travellers will be able to go direct to the financial district from London with Eurostar.
In Saclay, a tranquil, green spot about an hour’s drive south of the centre, plans are similarly afoot – the government has committed €1.5 billion to turning it into France’s own Silicon Valley. It’s hard to imagine at the moment – as Guillaume Pasquier, head of the Paris-Saclay government agency, admits, “when you arrive here in a bus you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere” – but high-density living and working areas are in the pipeline. At the same time, efforts will be made to preserve as much green space as possible. “We don’t want urban sprawl,” Pasquier says.
Saclay is already home to universities and innovative research centres such as Soleil, which uses synchrotron light radiation to aid advances in medicine, chemistry and geophysics. “Several big firms are already planning to relocate parts of their research and development to the cluster,” Pasquier adds.
The plans are incredibly ambitious, and in the present economic climate may be hard to picture. And with the traditional tensions that exist between national and local governments in France, you can expect a few disagreements over boundaries and budgets. But if they come to fruition, when you visit Paris on business in years to come, you may only see the Eiffel Tower as a spot on the horizon.
For more on PREDA visit paris-region.com
