Parking spaces have been replaced with cafe patios. Intersections that were mostly known for traffic jams are now playgrounds. Heavily trafficked boulevards have become bike lanes. New bookstores and galleries pop up everywhere, and extravagant sports and cultural facilities are rising in long-neglected neighborhoods, along with affordable housing and a massive expansion of public transit.
With 80 million tourists expected this year, as Paris hosts the Summer Olympics, returning visitors might notice how drastically the city has changed. Overall, car traffic has been halved since the 1990s, and the benefits are tangible: The air is cleaner, there is less noise, the streets are safer, and the Métro (the Paris subway) is so much better, with the city about to complete one of the most remarkably ambitious expansions of public transit in modern history.
In “Impossible City: Paris in the 21st Century,” the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper describes a beautiful bike ride along the Seine with his son. It’s close enough to the typical image of Paris we all hold — quaint and lovely — that it’s easy to forget that the ride would have been impossible a decade ago, when the banks of the Seine were notorious for loud traffic.
“Impossible City” is an early attempt to capture the emerging identity of the new Paris.
A vast majority of the metro area’s population now lives outside the Périphérique, the ring road separating the suburbs from the central core. Kuper explores the mostly immigrant, working-class banlieues (suburbs), and the book is full of warm but unsentimental depictions of these communities. He gets to know them intimately, for example, through his kids’ soccer games. Professional football might have been corrupted by oligarchs, but in everyday life, the sport retains the potential to bridge divisions of class, faith and ethnicity like few other cultural phenomena.
The main challenge for Paris, like most major cities now, is to make it more affordable. Housing costs in Paris have tripled in real terms since 2002. In the richest parts of the city, plutocrats are buying up homes as investments. Vacant homes now make up almost a fifth of the housing stock in the wealthiest arrondissements.
But Paris differs from New York or London in that it is actually doing something about what Kuper calls the “plutocratisation” of the city. “It sees London as both a role model and a warning,” he writes of the modern City of Light. “Paris is not, at heart, a city of merchants. It doesn’t want to build an economy on banking and finance.”
The number of social housing units has tripled in Paris since the 1990s, and they’re not all in the suburbs. In the 13th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, home to some of the most lively and culturally dynamic neighborhoods in Europe, a significant percentage of apartments are public housing, where families can live in a decent home for a fraction of market rates. Paris “didn’t want to become a city of millionaires, tourists and poor people, like San Francisco,” Kuper writes. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, says she wants 30 percent of all Parisian homes to be social housing by 2035, and another 10 percent increase in affordable housing (with rents at least 20 percent below market rates).
The Grand Paris project will double the existing Métro network, with 68 new stations. When it’s finished in a few years, 98 percent of the residents of metropolitan Paris will be living within a 10-minute walk of a Métro station. For many working-class residents in the outer suburbs, commuting time to central Paris will be cut in half.
Instead of joining the many Anglo expats in Paris whining about France’s high taxes, Kuper admires the generosity of the French system, writing, “No other country spends a bigger share of its national income looking after the population.”
The most ambitious investments are made in working-class suburbs, such as Seine-Saint-Denis, which has the highest concentration of poverty in France. This is where much of the permanent infrastructure for the Olympics has been built, and one city official told Kuper that the goal was to subsidize a massive expansion of urban Paris: “One month for the Games, then fifty years for living.” Some locals complain that the Olympics might gentrify the banlieues, but it’s hard to think of a more benign use of public money than to build schools, affordable apartments, and beautiful sports and culture facilities in working-class, majority-immigrant suburbs.
Paris, in Kuper’s account, is great not just because of its beauty but also because of its density, its diversity and its renewed commitment to investing in the whole city. As lovely as its old Haussmannian boulevards are, the city would be a bit boring if it consisted of nothing but chalk-white facades and bistros serving steak tartare. The point of living in 21st-century Paris is that you’re now as likely to hear Caribbean zouk, Algerian rap or Taiwanese Mandopop in the streets and bars as any old standard by Edith Piaf.
Instead of clinging to nostalgic ideas of Frenchness, Paris embraced its multicultural identity. Josephine Baker recently became the first Black woman inducted to the Panthéon. The Olympics are centered in the diverse suburbs of northern Paris. President Emmanuel Macron speaks good English, as do most young people in the city.
The very proximity of diverse human experiences in cities also seems to make their residents less prone to prejudice. In a chapter that occasionally resembles Joseph Mitchell’s classic “Joe Gould’s Secret,” Kuper befriends a homeless man in the neighborhood, a refugee from rural Guyana who turns out to be an autodidact intellectual, always ready to discourse on mathematics and Aztec theology. Throughout, the book is a reminder of the countless ways that urban life — and the delicate dance in which residents fill busy streets with a fabulous churn of human variety, what Jane Jacobs called the “sidewalk ballet” — remains one of the few efficient vaccines against bigotry and toxic nationalism.
Many years ago, I drove around Los Angeles, another bustling, polyglot, impossible city, with the Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold, who explained the two intertwined goals of his writing: to help residents “see the whole city” and to make Angelenos “a little bit less afraid of their own neighbors.”
What Gold did for L.A., Kuper does for Paris, in this persuasive defense of the very idea of the city.
Martin Gelin is a writer based in Paris and New York, and the author of a forthcoming book about soft power.
Paris in the 21st Century
PublicAffairs. 258 pp. $30
