Charles Bremner's Paris blog

Paris is beautiful, but small – so why not extend the City of Light 100 miles northwestward to the shores of the Channel? The startling idea is among ten options on hand today as President Sarkozy unveils his grand plans for expanding the compact French capital into a new metropolis.

In the teeth of recession and suspicion from the Socialists, who run the city and region, Mr Sarkozy is to lay out a vision for creating a green Greater Paris, linking the ancient city with its dense suburban sprawl. This, he hopes, could earn him a legacy as one of the capital’s builder kings like Napoleon III in the mid-19th century.

Mr Sarkozy is opening a display of ten projects by international architects – including Lord Rogers of Riverside – which imagine a Grand Paris in 2029, with people strolling among islands of eco-friendly edifices nestling in a leafy cityscape.

Metropolitan Paris should even reach out beyond the suburbs to the sea, following the Seine valley all the way to Le Havre, according to Anto-ine Grumbach, the leader of one of the project firms. The visions remain ideas, but Mr Sarkozy is expected to make a concrete announcement: the construction for up to €20 billion (£18 billion) of a new 140 kilometre (86 mile) automated underground railway that will loop around the capital, linking high-tech new towns and airports.

The new Métro has been proposed by Christian Blanc, a former Air France boss, who, as Minister for Greater Paris, has the job of shaping Mr Sarkozy’s dream of creating the world’s first “postKyoto” metropolis.

There has long been a consensus that the Île-de-France, the Paris region, is afflicted with a heavy handicap: the isolation of the jewel-like capital behind its moat-like ring road.

Unlike London, with its eight million people, Paris is home to two million, while at least six million more are scattered across dozens of neighbouring towns under separate councils plus county councils and the regional administration.

There is little coordination among the suburbs or banlieues, which Parisians imagine as a bleak outland.

Some, mainly on the west, are prosperous, like Neuilly, which Mr Sarkozy ran as Mayor for 19 years. Those on the north and east are the site of France’s worst urban blight. They were home to the 2005 ghetto riots.

The project by Lord Rogers’s team covers the railway arteries that create expanses of no man’s land as they carve their way into the small capital. Roland Castro, another big-name architect, has presented a plan for putting a New York-style Central Park at the heart of La Courneuve, a bleak northern banlieues.

Mr Sarkozy is, however, treading cautiously as he manoeuvres to keep the upper hand over a Socialist-led “Paris Métropole” scheme that is being promoted by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë and Jean-Paul Huchon, the regional president.

Mr Sarkozy has asked for more time to think about radical proposals from his own task force for scrapping the capital’s three neighbouring départe-ments, the Val-de-Marne, the Seine-Saint-Denis and the Hauts-de-Seine. They would be replaced by a single Greater Paris, like London.

The Socialists prefer a wider, looser, entity. Mr Delanoë is also aiming to put his own stamp on the capital by opening it – against the resistance of its prosperous and conservative inhabitants – to more creative modern architecture. A poll by le Parisien yesterday showed that residents of the region were strongly in favour of a Greater Paris, with more than 70 per cent believing that it would improve transport and boost the economy.

Criticism has come from foreign experts. Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-British architect, who was consulted initially on Mr Sarkozy’s project, said that it had been a mistake to call on so many firms for ideas. “If you want design through consensus you end up with a mediocre solution,” she said.

The British Architects’ Journal sniffed that the whole Grand Paris idea was pie in the sky at a time of recession and social upheaval.

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