Paris

By Christian Lefèvre

Alongside New York and London, Paris is one of the world’s earliest megacities. Its growth and character have been fashioned by a distinctive mix of policies that separate it from other long-time megacities as well as the fast-growing urban centres of the Global South.

Christian Lefèvre examines the social and economic forces that have shaped Paris and which have made it the city it is today. He charts the impact of global trends, such as the shift from industry to service and information sectors, as well as regional factors, especially those arising from Paris’s unique system of governance. The book examines the central role the national government has played in policies affecting the city and explores how the shift towards political decentralization and localism has contributed to a system increasingly incapable of taking collective action. This tension is shown to have impacted the city’s provision of services, particularly housing, and promoted inequalities within the city and its region. Paris’s unrivalled national dominance is also examined alongside its weaker position as a global city.

The book is an authoritative analysis of the evolution of modern Paris and the challenges that face its governance and future development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781788215183

Christian Lefèvre

Christian Lefèvre is Professor at Ecole d'Urbanisme de Paris, Universite Paris-Est. He is a member of the executive committee of the European Urban Research Association (EURA) and has been a consultant for the OECD, European Commission, UN-Habitat and the city of Paris. He is coauthor of Struggling Giants: City-Region Governance in London, New York, Paris and Tokyo (2012).

Book preview

Paris

Megacities

Series Editor: H. V. Savitch

As drivers of economic growth, demographic change and consumption, hyper-conurbations offer unique opportunities to their hinterlands and national economies, as well as huge challenges of governance, planning and provisioning. Each book in this series examines the political and economic development of a specific megacity and explores how and why they have evolved and how policy decisions, couched in geopolitics, have shaped their outcomes. The series covers both paradigmatic mature megacities of the developed world, as well as the fast-growing emerging megacities of South and East Asia, and Latin America.

Published

Paris

Christian Lefèvre

Paris

Christian Lefèvre

© Christian Lefèvre 2022

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2022 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

The Core

Bath Lane

Newcastle Helix

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE4 5TF

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-78821-140-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-78821-141-3 (paperback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

Preface and acknowledgments

Abbreviations and acronyms

Introduction

1Paris and Île-de-France

2Social, economic and spatial history of the Île-de-France metropolis

3Political history of Île-de-France, 1789–2001

4The economy of Île-de-France: from national capital to global metropolis

5Problems and challenges

6The policies

7A blocked system of governance

Conclusion

References

List of illustrations

Index

Preface and acknowledgements

On 16 March 2020 the French national government imposed a national lockdown that lasted for several weeks in an attempt to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the seven days around that date more than 1.2 million people in the Île-de-France left the largest French metropolis for the countryside. A year on, as I write this preface, the pandemic persists, and the duration of the measures imposed to contain the health crisis have had a devastating effect on the economy and society of the region.

It is too soon to offer an interpretation of the recent changes incurred by the pandemic, simply because it is uncertain whether the transformations it has entailed will be structural (having a durable effect on the structures of the regional economy and society) or merely temporary. It is worth pointing out here some of the major changes caused by the pandemic, however, without taking a position on their medium- or long-term impact on the Paris region.

First of all, the urban economy has suffered serious damage. Although no data are yet available for the 2020 regional economy, it is very likely that they will mirror the downward trend experienced at the national level, with an 8.3 per cent decrease in French gross domestic product (GDP). Considering the high degree of internationalization in the Île-de-France economy, it is very likely that the economic impact will be higher in the region than in the rest of France (Institut Paris Région 2020b).

For instance, as tourism, and notably foreign tourism, constitutes a significant source of revenue for the region, the closure of borders and the decline of air traffic have decimated the sector. The most recent data suggest a 72 per cent drop in revenue for the tourist industry in Île-de-France. Symbolically, the Louvre – the most visited museum in the world – welcomed only 2.7 million visitors in 2020, as opposed to almost 10 million in 2019. Moreover, whereas 75 per cent of the visitors are usually from abroad, they accounted for only 25 per cent in 2020. The aeronautics industry, one of the leading sectors of the regional economy, was similarly affected. With a 70 per cent decrease in air traffic in 2020, this sector has been seriously hit. Not only has the crisis precipitated significant lay-offs at the major airlines such as Air France, it has also impacted the rest of the sector, with the cancellation of contracts for suppliers such as Airbus, one of the two major passenger aircraft manufacturers in the world.

Second, the pandemic-induced recession has had a tremendous impact on national and regional society with a sharp increase in unemployment. The region has been hit hard, with an 8.6 per cent increase in total unemployment in 2020 against only 4.8 per cent at the national level – and all this in spite of the considerable support put in place by the national government and local authorities. In addition, the crisis has significantly exacerbated the pre-existing high social and territorial inequalities. The areas where the poorest populations are located, where unemployment was already higher and conditions of employment were bad have been hardest hit by the pandemic.

Finally, one of the most visible impacts of the pandemic has been on urban mobility. Public transport has been seriously hit, not only because metro and bus lines were almost closed during the first lockdown, in March 2020, but also because commuters have deserted what they considered dangerous modes of travel, reflecting the higher risk of contagion from using public transport. In addition, the increase in home working has automatically reduced the number of commuters. In the region’s peripheries travel has shifted to the car, but in Paris and its adjacent municipalities the use of soft modes of all kinds, though mainly bicycles, has boomed.

Of course, only time will show how all these changes affect the future of the Île-de-France metropolis, as with most other big cities in the world. It is also too soon to tell whether the current health crisis will force the regional players to think of an alternative mode of economic development, which has been called for by some of the regional organizations (IAU 2021).

First of all I would like to thank my research lab, LATTS (Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires, Sociétés) for its academic and financial support. I am also deeply indebted to my friend Pierre Mansat, who was deputy mayor of Paris and special advisor of the Paris’s mayor in charge of territorial cooperation between 2001 and 2019. And of course, all my thanks to the many colleagues, researchers, officials in the various institutions and organizations dealing with the Paris and Île-de-France metropolitan area without whom I could not have achieved the writing of this book. Finally, I want to express my warmest wishes to Professor Hank Savitch, editor of the Megacities series with whom I have collaborated for many years around the world.

Christian Lefèvre

Paris, March 2021

Abbreviations and acronyms

Introduction

The subject of this book is the Paris-Île-de-France region. Its first objective is to provide a relatively full account of the social, economic, political and spatial history of this area up to the present day, with a more precise description of the recent period, broadly since the year 2000. Its second goal is to look critically at the actions of the main protagonists, particularly the public actors, taking into account certain salient features of the history of this region and of the relations between the stakeholders. In this respect, the book takes the view that, despite the recent phenomena of globalization and decentralization, which have impacted and continue to affect Île-de-France and which in many ways contribute to the problems and challenges that this territory faces, the historical factors are crucial to an understanding of the present situation.

From this perspective, it is important to bear in mind several points that have had a long-term structural effect on the economic, social and political development of the region, both in the emergence and perception of the problems and challenges it faces, and in the behaviours and actions of the actors responsible for recognizing and resolving them. There are at least four such points to emphasize.

The first is the historical dominance that Paris and, more recently, Île-de-France have exercised over the rest of the country. This dominance takes many forms. It is demographic, in so far as Paris is by far France’s most populous city and Île-de-France its most populous region. Unlike the countries that surround it, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain, France’s urban hierarchy is overwhelmingly dominated by Paris and its conurbation. The other big metropolitan regions, whether Lille, Lyon or Marseille, have populations of barely 2 million compared with six times this number in Île-de-France. The difference between London and Birmingham or Manchester, between Madrid and Barcelona, between Rome and Milan or Naples, and between Berlin and Hamburg or Frankfurt is markedly smaller. Second, this dominance is also economic, with an extremely high concentration of economic and research sectors in Île-de-France. The same is true in terms of culture, since Paris and, to a lesser degree, its region are home to the biggest museums, opera houses, exhibition spaces, conferences, sports facilities and other large infrastructures. Finally, Paris has been the political and administrative capital of France for several centuries. In this capacity, it enjoys a political and symbolic status to which no other city can aspire. This status, as we shall see, is a product of history and in particular of the process of state construction. It gives it a role apart, above France’s other cities and population centres. At the national level, it has no rivals.

The second point concerns the role of the state in the construction and development of its capital and the surrounding region. France is well known internationally for its centralized political and administrative system, which in many ways invites comparison with so-called developmental states such as Japan and South Korea. Although France is not the only centralized state in Europe – countries such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are also centralized – it differs from them in having a powerful technical and administrative apparatus despite the process of decentralization, what is generally called the Napoleonic model. This is particularly true of Île-de-France, because of its political and economic importance. As a result, the history of Paris is intimately connected with the history of the state, since central government is – as we shall see – omnipresent and very often in control of its development.

The third point relates to France’s political culture, whereby the conduct of public affairs is almost exclusively a matter for the public authorities. This means that central and local government have primary responsibility for the enactment and management, development and implementation of public policies, and are perceived as the only legitimate entities in this role. Other actors, whether from the business sector or civil society, contribute at the discretion of the public authorities, at least as far as is apparent. Under these circumstances – and this is developed in Chapters 1 and 3 – it is central government that decides who can legitimately take part in the conduct of public affairs and on what conditions. As a result, over the centuries a neocorporatist system has developed in which the economic sector and civil society are stakeholders in governance through specific structures, established by the state, and therefore possess a monopoly in the representation of the interests they embody. This is notably the case for the chambers of commerce and industry, which in France are public institutions funded out of taxation, and legally represent the world of business. In this capacity, they are the privileged interlocutors of the public authorities. This system just briefly described certainly holds true for Île-de-France, as we shall see.

Finally, the relationships between all the actors, whether public or private, bear the stamp of often profound ideological divergences that have developed gradually over time. These differences have led to the sharp divisions that sustain the persistent conflicts that can be seen in perceptions of Île-de-France’s problems and challenges and of the policies needed to tackle them. I outline their historical development in Chapter 2 and their current expression in the final two chapters. This situation raises a recurrent question about the governance of big metropolitan regions: the question of the construction of the collective actor (Lefèvre 2020).

Taken together, all these factors largely explain an aspect of Île-de-France that distinguishes it from most of the world’s other big metropolitan regions in their relationship to globalization. Île-de-France seems to be following a trajectory that is slightly different, in particular from that of its big rivals, such as London or New York, in terms of perceptions and of how to respond to the current phase in the development of capitalism. Although issues of competitiveness and attractiveness are obviously present in the debate, they do not dominate it, and the problems of social and territorial inequalities, now combined with environmental questions, are at least equally salient. If this is the case, it is because – as we shall see in Chapters 5, 6 and 7 – they emanate from different coalitions of actors, of relatively equal strength, which draw their legitimacy and their resources from the history of the region.

This book consists of seven chapters. The first chapter gives a survey of the geographical, economic, social and cultural places of Île-de-France at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. It clarifies the geographical area that is discussed throughout the book, briefly presents the international dimension of this region and gives an overview of its system of governance, focusing on the presentation of the main players (the state, local governments and economic actors).

The second and third chapters examine the history of Paris and of Île-de-France. Chapter 2 looks at the spatial, demographic, economic and social aspects of the development of Île-de-France since the emergence of Paris at the beginning of our era. It is divided into three main periods: before the French Revolution of 1789; from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the Second World War; and the contemporary period. It describes the development and rise of this region, the factors that have contributed to its position among the modern world’s premier regions. It also places special emphasis on the structural factors that will help to better understand and explain the problems and issues that Île-de-France faces at the present time.

Chapter 3 deals with the political dimension of the history of Paris and Île-de-France. It covers the same period as Chapter 2 up to 2001, when the region and the municipality of Paris were controlled by the left. It shows the importance of the state and of centralization in the development of Île-de-France, emphasizing the tensions that have existed between the national and local levels from the start. This makes it easier to understand both the importance of the decentralization that began in the early 1980s and the obstacles that this process has faced, and thereby to obtain a perspective on its impact.

Chapter 4 gives an overview of the economic transformations of Île-de-France. It shows the dominance of the region over the whole country as well as the emergence of a global metropolis. Focusing on the last two decades, it stresses the major aspects that make the Paris region unique with its own particular economic strengths and weaknesses.

The last three chapters cover the contemporary period, starting in 2000. Chapters 5 and 6 tackle the main problems affecting Île-de-France. Whereas Chapter 5 concentrates on identifying these problems, defining their scale and analysing them both quantitatively and qualitatively, Chapter 6 describes the main policies implemented in trying to resolve them. Problems and policies are then presented in terms of the tensions between two priorities: on the one side, making Île-de-France more competitive and attractive; on the other, countering social and territorial inequalities. Chapter 6 also emphasizes the limitations