THE ECONOMIC crisis provides the perfect opportunity to move ahead with public works projects, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday when he opened an exhibition of scale models for Le Grand Paris, the greater Paris region of 2030.
“Big projects are the answer to the crisis, and France will recover only if she has big projects,” Mr Sarkozy said in a speech delivered in the architecture museum in the Trocadéro complex opposite the Eiffel Tower. “If yet again our country . . . renounces investing because there’s a crisis, we’ll come out of it weakened.”
Mr Sarkozy emphasised public transport, in the hopes of relieving the isolation of the immigrant suburbs beyond Le Périphérique(the ring road). Work will begin in 2012 – the year of the next presidential election – on €35 billion worth of new metro lines. A draft law will be presented in October.
The transport system is essential to enable new “economic poles” to emerge in the suburbs. Mr Sarkozy wants the 130km (80-mile) system to be “automatic, fast . . . and elevated wherever possible”.
Christian de Portzamparc, one of 10 famous architects who began reflecting on the future of the region nine months ago, wants to superimpose an elevated metro, 35km (22 miles) in circumference, above the Périphérique. It would link with bus and metro routes fanning out into the suburbs.
Mr Sarkozy said the system’s “design, ergonomics and technology” must be “exemplary” so that it becomes “a global showcase of our expertise in transport”.
The French president also said the Channel port of Le Havre would become the seaport of Paris, as proposed by architect Antoine Grumbach. A new high-speed train line will put Le Havre within an hour of Paris.
“All big metropolises have a port,” said Grumbach. He often quotes Napoleon Bonaparte, who called Paris, Rouen and Le Havre “a single city with the Seine as their main street”.
By easing planning regulations, Mr Sarkozy hopes to build 70,000 housing units a year, double the number built at present. He said the plan would create one million jobs over 20 years.
Mr Sarkozy did not choose between the projects submitted by six French and four foreign architectural firms, all of whom will continue to contemplate the future of greater Paris.
They include Richard Rogers, who designed the Pompidou Centre, and Frank Gehry, who proposes what looks like a tinfoil Christmas decoration to cap the unsightly Tour Montparnasse
Dutch architect Winy Maas coined the Frenglish word mocheness(shabbiness) to describe the present state of the Paris suburbs.
All projects share a commitment to an ecological future and many of the models give the impression that vegetation would take over the French capital. Ugly old tower blocks may be disguised with jungle-like balconies and roof gardens.
With highly developed public transport, architects hope to ban cars in Paris proper and reduce the width of highways in the suburbs. Glass skyscrapers would spring up in the new urban centres beyond the Périphérique, some with the elevated metro line piercing through them.
Mr Sarkozy chose to postpone the thorny issue of the governance of the future greater Paris, a delicate issue in the run-up to June’s European elections.
Bertrand Delanoë, the socialist mayor of Paris, has created a study group called Paris Métropole to rival the process launched by Mr Sarkozy last year.
Commentators are comparing Mr Sarkozy to Baron Haussmann, who created Paris’s grand boulevards in the 19th century.
The exhibition can be visited until November 22nd. See www.citechaillot.fr. The architects’ projects can be viewed on www.legrandparis.culture.gouv.fr