FRANCE:Nicolas Sarkozy is intent on wresting plans for Paris's future from mayor Bertrand Delanoë, writes Lara Marlowe.
PROTOCOL REQUIRED that Nicolas Sarkozy call by the Hôtel de Ville, the Paris town hall, on the day of his inauguration. "There can be no national ambition without an ambition for Paris," the new president declared. Sarkozy has since repeatedly spoken of the need to realise le Grand Paris, greater Paris. "We'll talk about it after the [ March 16th] municipal elections," he promised in January.
Sarkozy's insistence on the need to "revitalise" Paris may sound like waffle to untrained ears. But it is at the same time an indictment of the socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, and a declaration of war; Sarkozy, the "omnipresident", intends to wrest plans for the capital's future from Delanoë.
Delanoë says Paris has for too long sent its poor, dead and rubbish to housing projects, cemeteries and dumps in the suburbs. Pierre Mansat, the deputy mayor in charge of relations with towns in the surrounding Ile-de-France region, invented the term Paris métropole, which is favoured by Delanoë.
"Greater Paris sounds domineering," Mansat explained in an interview. "They should pack it up."
Since his election in 2001, Delanoë has undertaken 80 co-operative projects with the suburbs and in 2006 founded a Conférence Métropolitaine to bring together representatives of towns from the Ile-de-France.
As far as Sarkozy is concerned, Delanoë's writ stops at the Boulevard Périphérique ring road. "The duties of the mayor of Paris are defined in legal texts," Eric Garandeau, Sarkozy's advisor for culture and communication, observes curtly. "The mayor of Paris is mayor on his own territory . . . If you want to introduce a new governance . . . you have to go the legal route; you have to modify the present framework of local institutions. By definition, it becomes national politics."
The borders of Paris, 20 arrondissements encircled since 1973 by the ring road, were drawn up in 1860 by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann. Paris proper is Lilliputian: 105sq km, compared to 889 for Berlin and 1,579 for London.
Its population of two million is a fraction of the six million who live in the petite couronne, as Paris and the surrounding departments of Hauts de Seine, Seine Saint-Denis and Val de Marne are known.
Action is urgently needed, says Mansat, the deputy mayor. "The red lights are flashing."
Uneven economic development between the rich west and poor north and east, inadequate public transport beyond the ring road, lack of co-ordination on housing, pollution and other issues, are hampering the dynamism of the French capital, he explains.
At present, all agree that the ring road is an absurd border for the city, and that a more appropriate form of governance must be found. But there is profound disagreement on the objectives of the project.
Now the battle for greater Paris is shaping up as a rehearsal for the 2012 presidential election. After his triumphal re-election on March 16th, Delanoë is considered a front-runner to lead the Socialist Party and challenge Sarkozy.
Last week, Sarkozy opened fired by appointing Christian Blanc, a former president of Air France and the Paris transport system, as secretary of state with responsibility for development of the Paris region, a post that did not exist before.
Earlier this month, the ministry of culture launched a worldwide competition to select 10 architects to propose a plan for greater Paris by the end of this year. "We are going to define the project first, before we talk about the [ administrative and political] structure," says Garandeau, Sarkozy's cultural advisor.
Mansat, the deputy mayor and the originator of the conférence métropolitaine, believes his and Delanoë's initiatives over the past seven years jolted the formerly indifferent political class into action. "For 30 years, left- and right-wing governments took little interest in the Ile-de-France. They said, 'Paris is rich, so we can take money from her to develop the provinces'. This weakened Paris. The naming of a secretary of state for the capital region is a Copernican revolution," Mansat says.
A century and a half after Baron Haussmann razed much of Paris, created the grands boulevards and the modern apartment building, history is repeating itself. As recounted in Alistair Horne's wonderful book Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City, Haussmann's priorities were to clear the congestion of Paris, create affordable housing, give the city grandeur and architectural unity and to "lance the festering abscesses" that bred crime, riot and revolution. The latter have moved from the old city to the suburbs, but the priorities are exactly the same.
And as in Haussmann's time, the costs will be astronomical.
The Élysée is allergic to Delanoë's strident calls for a more equal distribution of wealth across the Paris region. This would involve billions of euro being raised by a tax levied on employers.
"The coffers are empty," Sarkozy famously declared in January.
"We hope the coffers won't be empty for 20, 30 or 40 years," says an Élysée source. "We are thinking a lot about partnerships between the private and public sectors. Obviously, public infrastructure plays an important role in economic development. So we can have systems that make it possible for these infrastructures to be self-financing."
Delanoë has pioneered just such privately financed systems in his Paris-Plage and Velib projects. But the question of future institutions - and the comparative power of the Élysée and Paris town hall over them - remain unanswered. The right-wing senator Philippe Dallier advocates annexing the three departments of the petite couronne, but left and right alike reject the simplicity of his solution. "It's a 19th-century solution for a 21st-century question," sniffs Mansat.
Delanoë's Paris métropole would be a flexible federation of six million residents, taking in half the Ile-de-France region.
Sarkozy has not stated a preference for the governance of the future capital, but he warns, "I will not let this project get bogged down. I will not allow anyone to block it."