Grand Paris-Moscow: Tracing Models of Global City Development (original) (raw)
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Paris as historical and globalised city
Paris as globalised and historical city - General introduction for a class
Paris is a nodal point where the remains of the past (art works, landmarks, traditions of many kinds) and current forces of the international economy merge and struggle with each other. All metropolitan areas in the world (including Paris) are currently being rebuilt in a similar pattern. Under what conditions can the « City of Lights » become a global city and at the same time keep its historical identity, essential to its soul and to its tourist economy ? How did the city build successive identities in the past according to economic and social needs ?
At the center of a media and political debate, the Grand Paris topic is blurred by the quantity of news and opinions which are continuously spread, made misted in the complex interaction between the stakes of public interest and divergent wills – essentially political – of the numerous actors. This paper proposes studying the construction process of the Grand Paris as an applicative example of the strategic spatial planning methods, decisive in the determining bend taken by the management of the Paris region development. It implies, to well measure the scope of the subject, taking into account the urban area of Paris, as it is the capital-region, has a singular status in the national context. It justifies the interest to integrate this question into a wider reflection, which accounts for the intricacy of the administrative levels involved in the management of territorial planning as well as the confuse distribution of assignments. This institutional complexity, which appears as an important source of conflicts and slowness in terms of public policies, allows explaining the multiplicity of actors, interests and procedures which articulates the construction of the Grand Paris. Planned at the moment of its launch in 2008 by the government, as an attempt of redefining the priority guidelines of the urban area, with the clear objective of replacing the French capital to the rank of world-cities, the metropolitan project carried by the Grand Paris appears as a major change in the planning practices of the Paris region. The analysis of the successive planning procedures which took place reflects indeed the evolution of the various applied theories of planning. If the traditional model inspired the first regional Master Plans which were developed by the State, it is the collaborative model that the Region, which afterward got back the planning assignments at the regional scale, tried to implement within the framework of the SDRIF revision, approved in 2013. It is thus in confrontation with these procedures that the Grand Paris project has been launched. The study of its strategic dimension is based on the analysis of the actors' configuration, the contents and the committed perimeters of action. This approach allows to shed light on the stakes manifested on this occasion between the various administrative levels – sometimes grouped in communities of interest – in the claiming of their legitimacy to govern and to plan the territories of the urban area; and on the consequences of the confrontation – materialized in particular by the conflict between the State and the Region on the transport project – between the different stakeholders. This contextual analysis leads to question the strategic character of the results achieved until now, often concluded at the end of compromise agreements; as well as the evolution of the planning process subjected to the pressures of the politico-institutional system and to its variations. This process has in one hand the merit to reveal the complexity of the actors set and the superimposed territorial realities, and in the other hand, to permit the construction of a debate zone between the diverse stakeholders (experts, politicians and civil society). This one should even so be clarified to create a legitimate arena of discussion which establishes the constructive bases of the strategic project of the Parisian metropolis.
In 1998 the international public was presented with the completed Bibliothèque Nationale de France, culmination of the Grands Projets of François Mitterrand. These projects, comprising not only a number of individual buildings but also the urban design of significant portions of peripheral Paris, are attributed to the will of Mitterrand himself, much in the way that the last great reorganization of Paris carries the name of Haussmann (however originally envisioned and presided over by Napoleon III). Compelled by creation of a symbolism monumental both at the scale of the individual building and at that of the city, the projects were motivated almost entirely by the French president. Although conceived and executed under a system of democratic governance, they entailed a decisive implementation on Mitterrand's part that often meant circumventing typical legislative procedures or political compromises that might have threatened to obstruct their progress. And thus appropriately, the Grands Projets will indeed remain a legacy, imbued with great possibilities of authoritative vision but tainted by the disquieting presence of authoritarian rule.
The Negotiated Urbanism of Grand Paris Express
Metropolitics, 2013
In the fragmented context of Paris's metropolitan and regional politics, the Grand Pari(s) design consultation and subsequent public process demonstrate that the Grand Paris Express project, a major new orbital metro line, can become a form of emergent governance and negotiated planning. Although the Grand Pari(s) design consultation can be interpreted as a strategy through which the state regained control of the metropolitan narrative, this does not signal a return to the centralized planning of the 1960s. Instead, it makes apparent new political strategies required to operate in the fragmented, pluralist context of a complex metropolis.
This paper aims to present some thoughts and acts on the importance of socially inclusive urban contexts with regard to the sustainable city of tomorrow. It will showcase innovative alliances between decision-makers, professionals, artists, educators and the civil society in their effort to address the 21st century’s challenges in environmental and socio-economic terms. The paper will briefly narrate the experience gathered between 2008 and 2013 in the Bureau for architectural, urban and landscape research (BRAUP) of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. I will particularly focus on two research programs: what is internationally known as the "Greater Paris consultation" (2008-2010) and its subsequent research- action program "The 24h-hour-non-stop-metropolis" (La grande ville 24h chrono, 2013)1.
Paris Gentrification The concept of creative city is a popular idea that lingers in the discussions among the urban policy-makers as well as the researchers. Ideally, the concept is twofold ; academic and literature explain the pertinence of creativity in planning of cities with emphasis on the innovation strategies, while the other side practically implements the plans set up the creative schemes. In the real sense, there is little to no link between these two levels of the creative city concept which is rather extemporized. Most early cities experienced the challenge of gaps between hypothetical cities and the practical implementation of the plans. It all comes down to the conversion of conceptual intuitions into an intricate operative methodology that is suitable for local practice. This paper walks us through the gentrification of Paris, which is one of the earliest cities founded on the concept of creative city theory. It analyzes the theory on three levels in relation to the city of Paris: (a) the positioning of Paris's present creative spaces and the communities within that region in the context of the social and economic structures, urban chronicles, as well as the prevalent frameworks of governance along with the analytical systems; (b) an evaluation of the three-dimensional, public, symbolic, and cultural qualities of creative production and consumption; (c) identification of the effective options for policy interposition. Gentrification refers to the reorganization of a city to suit the taste and needs of the middle class of the economy (Ditton, 2016). The gentrification of Paris has been in place for centuries. However, the city was swept by the most recent wave of gentrification in the 1970s. The succeeding five decades have seen it transform into a city that is barely recognizable. Previously, the cities that had once been considered the turfs of the working class citizens as well
Paris Everywhere? The Challenge of Eurocentrism in Global Urban History
Urban history is becoming increasingly global. Recent trends in historiography, such as transnational and global history, have inspired scholars of urban history who show a renewed interest in questions of comparison and connections. This year's conference held by the European Association for Urban History in Helsinki offers seven sessions that carry the adjectives "transnational" and "global" in their titles. Another example of the global character of urban history can be found in current media portrayals of the urban past that strive to include cities all around the world. The Guardian's The Story of Cities series reflects this tendency. So far the series offers, among other articles, contributions on such diverse places as Barcelona, Beijing, Benin, St. Petersburg, and Potosí. The encyclopedic method of adding histories of different cities is also used in academic literature and can be considered
Antipode
This article examines the architectural exhibition associated with the large-scale Grand Paris urban development project initiated in 2007 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Through a close examination of the exhibition, I argue that imaginative representation is crucial to urban transformation, here acting to justify and naturalize neoliberal reforms. While the ten international teams of architects tasked with imagining twenty-first century Paris presented sometimes radical scenarios, the architectural proposals are also used by the state to secure a sense of regional coherence, to reaffirm the imperative of economic growth, and to deny broad sociospatial conflict. The futural aspect of speculative regional development is redoubled in the prospective architectural visions, thus solidifying the dominance of a marketized mode of urbanization. While this cooption of architectural designs emerges from the unique circumstances of contemporary Paris, it also speaks to the broader promise and limits of imaginative urbanism and large-scale architectural intervention.
The iconic project: architecture, cities, and capitalist globalization
Planning Perspectives, 2017
present-day boulevard périphérique. At a time in which scholarly and planning interest for the Grand Paris and for those parts of the French metropolis situated out of its municipal administrative limits is strong, such a choice sounds like a statement on the continuing importance of the core of the metropolis and on the cultural relevance of its transformations for present and future urban change. The authors propose in fact to see the urban form of nineteenth-century Paris as a potential ‘model’ for contemporary urbanization thanks to a number of comparative advantages in terms of density, resiliency, connectivity, accessibility, ‘legibility’, sustainability, intensity, attractiveness, and diversity. Even if one accepts the conclusions proposed by the book – which should not be taken for granted – it is not entirely clear in which sense the Haussmannian city could serve as a model for future urban design schemes. If there is one aspect of the modern history of Paris that clearly e...