Paris faces the test this week of launching the Olympic Games safely and affordably at a time of war, political polarization and social unrest. It is not a done deal. Heavy-handed security barriers and COVID-19 style QR codes are already infuriating residents and tourists trying to navigate a River Seine that has been cleaned at great expense.
However, the real challenge would begin once the athletes have packed up and gone home. The world’s greatest city (okay, top five) must complete its gold-medal transformation into something greater: A megalopolis that binds the hipsters, financiers and flaneurs of historic, densely populated Paris to the sprawling regional economy where many Olympic events would actually take place.
This would be a more inclusive kind of change from the one Paris has gone through over the past few years. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s crusade to pedestrianize, modernize and demotorize swathes of the city has seen road congestion fall and air quality improve, but has also made her a divisive figure and irritated commuters who do not make up her core voter base. There is certainly a thrill in strolling along the banks of the Seine or down car-free Rivoli Street — provided one can block out the roared insults from cyclists who seem to think traffic lights are just there for decoration.
Illustration: Mountain People
However, there have also been missteps, like the embrace of electric scooters that ended up banned last year.
Gentrification and tourism have also made the city pricier and more exclusive, even as social unrest and bouts of violence have risen. A post-Brexit influx of bankers and tech types has boosted Paris’ soft power, its start-up scene and its attraction for Airbnb speculators — though that bubble has burst somewhat. The cool crowd has migrated eastward to Belleville, away from the unhip Champs Elysees. The newly reopened Samaritaine store has become a symbol of Paris’s doubling-down on luxury; Bernard Arnault’s LVMH is sponsoring the Olympics and also chipped in to help repair Notre-Dame after a 2019 fire.
From income to accessing services, the gap has grown between Paris’ 2 million inhabitants and the 10 million who live in the region.
“The center is gentrifying, while the periphery is getting poorer,” urbanism expert Laurent Chalard said.
I have seen this first-hand, having lived on both sides of the peripherique ring road that did away with the city walls, but not the psychological barriers of living intra or extra muros. As a father of two “inside the walls,” I can enjoy the fruits of what really is a 15-minute city: That is how long it takes me to walk to my kids’ daycare, my local park, my doctor and my metro stop. However, many essential workers live way beyond that radius, priced out by a city that does not build enough housing. The walls have gone, but segregation remains: A 2019 study found the income gap between the richest and poorest of the Paris region — those earning 4,500 euros a month (US$4,874) and below 900 euros — was the biggest in France.
Of course, Europe remains more equal — and with longer life expectancy — than the US. Cities are always going to be places where rich and poor live cheek-by-jowl. Gleaming Olympics venues are transforming some areas of Paris, such as the suburb Saint Ouen. Still, better social and economic cohesion would be good at a time of polarized politics. It might address some of the resentment that fueled last year’s rioting and looting in outlying towns like Kylian Mbappe’s childhood home of Bondy, where shops and businesses perceived by locals as unaffordable were targeted. Carless Parisians would also benefit from smarter integration: Paris depends upon workers coming from outside of the city for more than half of its labor force (according to pre-COVID-19 pandemic figures), and last year’s garbage collectors’ strike also showed how dependent it was on incinerator choke points beyond the peripherique.
A more cohesive Greater Paris needs to rewire the region, as imagined by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy in the wake of 2005 urban rioting and the failure to win the 2012 Olympics (which went to London). It has already started with the “Grand Paris Express,” a plan to create four new circular metro lines across 200km of tracks to connect the suburbs. It is a project that has none of the glamor of Baron Haussmann’s iconic reshaping of Paris in the 19th century, which gave us landmarks like the Opera Garnier, and the wide and airy boulevards that bear his name. However, it is just as vital if you consider that students would be able to reach their school in half an hour rather than an hour, or that jobs and housing might be redistributed more evenly.
“A rebalancing is underway... It’s a big lever for change,” geographer Daniel Behar said.
Transport links cannot do everything, of course. The bigger step toward more joined-up thinking and policy across Greater Paris would be political integration, unifying decisionmaking for the whole region. That might help more housing projects get off the ground, and reduce the likelihood of turf wars between the capital and other local authorities. It would also be very difficult to achieve.
Still, we might be just a few years away from a more efficient regional engine responsible for 30 percent of France’s economic output. In the meantime, though, Paris needs to navigate the Olympics and choppy political waters. It is maybe apt that the city’s motto — fluctuat nec mergitur— could be roughly translated as: “Buffeted by the waves, but not sinking.” Yet.
Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist writing about the future of money and the future of Europe. Previously, he was a reporter for Reuters and Forbes. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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