Contenu du sommaire : Géopolitique du Grand Paris

Since 2010, the Grand Paris project has been a gigantic construction site comprising a new 200 km metro and the Paris-Saclay science and technology cluster. But it's also the focus of geopolitical rivalries between the players – the French state, the Ile-de-France region, the city of Paris, the seven departments, many mayors, and environmental activists – over two important issues. First, planning policy: should we limit the number of cars in cities? Should we continue to use up agricultural land? Should we expand the Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG)? Should we accept gentrification? Should we reduce the number of social housing units? Should we densify the inner suburbs in response to the housing crisis? And then there is the question of regional governance. Central government continues to play an important role but has failed to push through any real reform. The Metropole du Grand Paris, founded in 2016, has no weight in important decisions and investments. The regional council has been trying to regain its powers but without success. The departments and the City of Paris are effectively defending the status quo. Down the line, mayors remain the masters of the game.

In the Île-de-France region, the decentralization of 1982-1983 initially led to an increase in the powers of the mayors, with the region only gaining responsibility for transport policy 17 years later. The years 2000-2020 saw the triumph of metropolization with the Grand Paris Express metro project, but not the emergence of a strong metropolitan power. The Metropole du Grand Paris, which was created in 2016 after numerous legislative changes, is a weak player because all the other political players were against it: the Île-de-France region, the City of Paris, the seven other departments and almost all the mayors. They were all defending their own interests and positions of power. Emmanuel Macron seems to have given up on reforming the administration of Grand Paris, while the maneuvers of one party or another are piling up (attempt to merge Yvelines and Hauts-de-Seine, merging the city and department of Paris, candidacy of a close friend of the region's president to run the metropolis, etc.).

The “blue suburb” is the local geopolitical system that was set up in the 1980s by the right-wing in Hauts-de-Seine, with the aim of securing political control over this strategic territory of Grand Paris and the financial windfall from the La Défense business district. It is based on two levels of power: the department and a set of cities. This collective system now appears to be running out of steam and is threatened in the context of metropolitan integration, as the Metropole du Grand Paris has deprived mayors of a number of important skills and financial resources. The very existence of the department is pending. This article aims to analyze the resilience of the blue suburb in Grand Paris, through the various geopolitical strategies developed by the elected officials to ensure the sustainability of the system. It also examines the political and economic weakness of the Metropole du Grand Paris.

The Grand Paris is not an invention of the 21st century. Its history dates back more than two centuries. The conditions of its political emergence are ancient. They date back to the creation of the department of Paris, renamed the Department of the Seine during the French Revolution. The desire to encircle this “capital territory” with a large rural zone, the Seine banlieue and the Seine-et-Oise, testifies to the distrust of public authorities towards the radicalism of the Parisian “working and dangerous classes”. Driven by industrial revolutions, the urban growth of the Grand Paris is exceptional. It gives birth to working-class, food-producing and residential suburbs. For more than 170 years, this metropolis, the richest and densest in Europe, becomes in France the epicenter of economic development, the deployment of large networks and the polarization of wealth. It is also the place of partisan divides and social segregations. This exceptionalism will be at the origin of major territorial and geopolitical reforms that this article puts into perspective.

The Grand Paris Express was the centerpiece of the Grand Paris project, launched in 2007 by then-President Nicolas Sarkozy to strengthen Paris' position in the competition between global cities. This new 200-km-metro serving the suburbs of Paris was the subject of a fierce dispute between the French government and the Île-de-France region, over both the route and the question of whether the project should be managed by Île-de-France Mobilités (controlled by the region) or by a state-controlled public agency, Société du Grand Paris. The Region and the government finally reached agreement in 2010, after the latter agreed to co-finance other regional transport projects. Construction is several years behind schedule, but the main drift is financial. The cost of the project has risen from 20.5 to 35 billion euros in just a few years, and its financing method seems fragile, as it relies heavily on the construction of offices around the new stations.

Airports are one of the key transport facilities in major cities. Paris-CDG, with its hub function, is by far the busiest in the country. Over the last decade, it has had a turbulent history. With plans to extend the airport and increase traffic, the public authorities' desire to bring it closer to the centre of Paris with the CDG Express, and the planned privatisation of its operator (groupe ADP), it has been at the forefront of the news in the metropolitan area. These three ambitions have served as a reminder of the extent to which the airport issue goes beyond the scale of local authorities and almost systematically calls into question the role of the State in relation to major issues: ecological transition, national sovereignty, regional competitiveness, etc. While the Covid-19 crisis may have served as a pretext for certain political choices, it has not clarified the State's position on what it expects from the country's leading hub in the future.

The place of the car in the city in the Paris region is at the heart of strong and virulent debates. They are linked to political conflicts and to the multi-level planning and regulation of mobilities but also to the variegated geography of automobile dependency. The aim of this article is to explore the spatial dimension of the conflicts related to car in the Paris city-region. After an overview of the players involved in road governance and transport planning in the Paris Region, three case studies are examined: the closure of the banks of the Seine in Paris to car traffic, the debates on the requalification of the boulevard périphérique, and the recent implementation of the Low Emission Zone within the metropolitan area. These case studies draw a geopolitics of the automobile characterized by a highly politicized debate, a lack of consensus between the scale of governments (national, regional, inter-municipal and communal) and a spatial fragmentation of public policies on the car issue.

The Ile-de-France region is experiencing a crisis in housing supply and demand, which is reflected in rising real estate prices and a sharp slowdown in the pace of construction. Faced with this crisis, the players involved in housing policy no longer know how to work together and are caught up in their own contradictions: Residents want housing but reject densification; companies propose a few token projects, such as eco-districts, but are unable to really change their model; mayors simultaneously want housing, green spaces and controlled prices while selling public land at a high price. Cumbersome procedures mean that it takes years for the general guidelines of the regional master plan to be incorporated into local planning documents. The urban planning dynamic, which affects different areas differently, from the gateway to Paris to the outskirts of the conurbation, is perceived as brutal because it is happening too fast and has not been preceded by a genuine democratic debate.

The Grand Paris Express is a large-scale development project, involving not only the construction of a new metro network, but also 68 future station districts, which are expected to concentrate the housing production effort for years to come in the Paris region. It's a project on an unprecedented scale, and this article analyzes the programming in terms of housing by different decision-making levels. It appears that the majority of new housing built or planned in these neighborhoods will be private home-ownership units, benefiting from unprecedented accessibility in suburbs that are often poorly connected to the rest of the metropolis. The proportion of social housing planned is locally variable and imprecise. What's more, some mayors are using ANRU projects to accelerate social change in future station districts. The new station districts appear to be a gentrification policy that is not being countered by the Metropole du Grand Paris.

Patrick Braouezec, former Communist Party mayor of Saint-Denis, looks back on the development of Plaine-Saint-Denis, which he sees as largely positive. More than the sociological development of the town, which is partly a consequence of this development initiative, he explains the loss of the mayor's office and the agglomeration municipality to the Socialist Party with the Communist Party's decision to withdraw into itself and abandon dialog with all local players, other political currents, associations, and businesses. He emphasizes the role of working-class neighborhoods, the only areas that really act as a social elevator, especially for the immigrant population. Finally, he criticizes the functioning of the Metropole du Grand Paris, which he describes as ungovernable as it systematically seeks consensus and advocates a metropolis on the scale of the Île-de-France region, based on cooperation between the region and some twenty large inter-municipal bodies, reflecting the polycentricity of the metropolitan area.

Stéphane Troussel, President of the Seine-Saint-Denis department (Socialist Party), explains that his role is above all to draw the French government's attention to the area's situation and ensure that it catches up in providing sufficient public services there. These difficulties are partly due to the role played by Seine-Saint-Denis in receiving migrants. Despite all the demagogic rhetoric about controlling immigration, this role will continue, and we must organize it by sharing the burden with the other departments in the Île-de-France region. He argues for a reform of the metropolis of Paris, extended to the size of the region and organized on the basis of the eight departments. He explains the high abstention rate (50-70% in many working-class suburban municipalities) both by the rhetoric of elected officials, who hide behind formalities and turn their backs on politics, and by the characteristics of the region (high proportion of young people and people with a migrant background).

In the 2010s, the Paris region experienced three major conflicts surrounding major development projects, with very different outcomes. The SNCF was planning a major redevelopment of the Gare du Nord train station, to accommodate rapidly growing traffic, at the cost of building over 40,000 m2 of retail and office space. The project sparked an outcry from neighborhood associations and leading architects. The Paris city council, initially in favor, eventually withdrew its support. But it was the project's runaway costs and the delays accumulated by the Ceetrus group that finally got the better of the project. North of Paris, the EuropaCity project, by the same group, failed to withstand the opposition of some local elected representatives and environmentalists who refused to allow the artificialization of farmland and who had succeeded in making it a symbol of outdated urban planning, and lost the support of the government, anxious to put an environment-friendly shine on its image. South of Paris, on the other hand, development of the Paris-Saclay science cluster was able to proceed, despite opposition from the same environmentalists.

Interview with Pierre Veltz, economist, former director of the Mission du Grand Paris and former president of Paris-Saclay, sees the way in which the Grand Paris Express project was developed by then-Minister Christian Blanc as its own private project. He decided against cooperating with the Île-de-France region, preferring instead to enter into a dialog with the mayors. He takes stock of the development of the Paris-Saclay “Science and Technology Cluster” and defends the decision to build a new metro line, line 18, to connect the site. The concerns of ecologists about the future urbanization of the Saclay plateau appear to him to be completely unfounded, as the agricultural land is strongly protected. For him, the Metropole du Grand Paris (MGP) is “an union of immobility” that allows each mayor to keep control of their own house. The solution is to transfer the powers of the MGP to the Île-de-France region, with some twenty large inter-municipal cities with a population of between 4 and 500,000 as an intermediate level.