One of the world's major tourist destinations and a prime example of 19th and 20th-century city-planning, Paris has recently announced 21st-century ambitions, writes David Tresiliana In a famous essay the German writer Walter Benjamin once described Paris as the "capital of the 19th century," thereby slighting other possible claimants of the title, among them London. Benjamin's point was that the French capital represented the pinnacle of modernity at the time, not only in the styles of life available to residents and visitors, but also in the nature of the urban landscape, the city's broad thoroughfares and grand commercial buildings all constructed according to the latest designs and in the most up-to-date materials. Today, Benjamin's vision of Paris as a self- consciously modern city has been replaced by one that tends to make a virtue of the city's past, with post-war urban-planning having transformed the French capital into an historic centre with the appeal of an open-air museum surrounded by a sprawling and often ugly periphery. Identifiably modern architecture has been pushed out of the city centre, notably to the business district of La Défense, by zoning laws designed to keep roof lines as they were in the late 19th century. Aside from a few high-profile experiments, not all of them successful, the emphasis in Paris itself has been less on innovation than on the conservation of the existing cityscape. A further problem, endlessly discussed but never really dealt with, is the fact that the city is still tiny when compared to other cities of comparable importance. Paris is confined within boundaries established in the second half of the 19th century -- the famous system of 20 arrondissements, or self-governing districts, arranged in a spiral leading out from the centre -- with the result that it has a very high population density and notorious traffic problems. Property prices are high even in the former quartiers populaires in eastern Paris, today largely gentrified, and the city possesses few green spaces aside from those on its western and southeastern borders. Beyond the Périphérique, the ring-road that runs along the 19th-century boundaries, lie the banlieues, the famous surburbs, rich to the west, poorer to the east, which are not connected to Paris proper. This lack of connection and the fragmentation of the Paris agglomeration as a whole have meant that while those living in the eastern suburbs typically have to travel into the centre where the major transport hubs lie they may feel little connection to it. This may have contributed, or so it has been argued, to social problems in the suburbs that came to a head in the riots that attracted world attention in 2005. However, all this may be about to change, at least if French president Nicolas Sarkozy gets his way. In a tradition dating back at least to Pompidou in the early 1970s, French presidents have been keen to leave their mark on Paris. Pompidou took the decision to raze the Beaubourg district in the city centre and erect a modern arts complex, the Pompidou Centre, on the site, and Mitterand inaugurated a public-works programme that gave Paris much new infrastructure, including a new national library and opera house. Not to be outdone, Sarkozy unveiled what could turn out to include his ambitions for the city last month at the opening of an exhibition, "Le Grand Pari(s)," designed to show Paris as it might be in the year 2030. (A pari is a bet in French, making the title of the exhibition something like "the great wager".) In a an exercise begun last year, ten international teams of architects, city-planners, and economists were approached to give their visions of the future French capital, including some of the profession's big names. Richard Rogers, architect of Pompidou's Beaubourg (with the Italian architect Renzo Piano) was included, as were many French architects who have already made an impact on Paris, among them Jean Nouvel, perhaps best known for his Institut du monde arabe and the more recent Musée du Quai Branly, and Christian de Portzamparc, architect of the Cité de la musique, an arts complex on the site of the former city abattoirs at La Villette in the north of the city. The brief was twofold. First, the teams were asked to imagine what kind of changes would need to be introduced in order to achieve a "post-Kyoto Paris" that consumed less energy and would be on track to meet the targets for greenhouse-gas emissions set at Kyoto in 1997. Second, they were asked to imagine what kind of transformations would be necessary to treat the city's present problems and to make Paris into a 21st-century city. The results, on show at the Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine in Paris until November 2009, contain some startling visions of Paris's future shape as well as many more obviously sensible ideas. A visit to the exhibition, free to enter and part of a larger public consultation, makes for an unusually stimulating day out. Some common themes emerge from the proposals on show, perhaps the most important being the idea of making do with what is already there. As François de Mazières, director of the Cité de l'architecture, writes in the notes accompanying the exhibition, the days when, 40 or 50 years ago, governments could simply create new towns to solve existing problems, or impose solutions by fiat on sometimes reluctant local authorities, have now long gone. With the disappointing experience of such new towns now in the past -- Paris has several such satellite towns, founded in the 1960s, none of which has really taken off -- the authorities today are less likely to want to start from scratch by developing new urban centres, and all the teams have taken the existing shape of Greater Paris as more or less given. However, they have not accepted the existing division between the city and its suburbs or the current shape of the metropolitan area, and all have imagined new forms of connection between the two, if not the obliteration of existing boundaries. Such themes are well illustrated by the Rogers submission, the first encountered on visiting the show. Here, the idea is to link the centre of the city to the surrounding suburbs through five "armatures," or large transport links, some of which at least would apparently be covered over and landscaped as "green corridors". Instead of being replaced by new towns, the existing suburbs would be made denser and mixed-use development encouraged. In another theme that surfaces in one way or another in all the proposals, a new transport network would be developed cutting through suburban areas in order to reduce traffic through the centre. Yet, Rogers's proposals for the extension of Paris into its existing suburbs, erasing the boundary between the two, pale in comparison with some of the other ideas on show. For the team led by architect Antoine Grumbach, the idea is to extend Paris to the sea along the Seine valley to Le Havre, making it a sort of vastly extended version of London (linked to the sea via the Thames estuary) and apparently taking up a vision attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, for whom "Paris Rouen Le Havre [were] a single city, with the Seine serving as the main thoroughfare." This project, the notes to Grumbach's presentation read, "calls for a different conception of mobility, combining river, rail and road. The priority is to 'place the capital' one hour from Le Havre with a new [high- speed] train line and to develop river traffic between the two cities." However it is imagined, the question of how to give the extended space of Greater Paris a single identity is one that exercises many of the teams, with suggestions ranging from the insertion of prestigious building projects into the existing fabric -- the Atelier Castro Denissof Casi team imagine revitalising the dull industrial suburb of Gennevilliers to the north of Paris by planting something like the Sydney Opera House in it -- to glamourizing existing connecting points, with the team led by Jean Nouvel imagining hauts lieux, or "high points," characterised by clusters of landmark skyscrapers. All of this would involve abandoning or severely modifying existing zoning laws, the Nouvel team asking the visitor to imagine "vertical eco-estates whose mixed-use towers overtop the current authorised height limits" at the presently grim suburb of La Courneuve. Plans are already afoot to improve transport networks outside Paris, but these have been extended and made more ambitious in the proposals on show. In general, it is in their suggested transformations of the environment beyond the Périphérique that the teams are the most interesting. Development of the Paris agglomeration has long been characterised either by radial development, with new developments being connected to the centre as if by spokes on a wheel, or in concentric circles around the centre, the two forms not being mutually exclusive. These having led to the now-familiar problems, the teams have considered ways in which hierarchies of centre and periphery can either be softened or removed. Pragmatic solutions involve making the urban fabric denser and more variegated beyond the existing city boundaries, Nouvel's team presenting a series of studies of how the existing landscape of tower blocks and empty spaces could be made more attractive and diverse through mixed-use development, for example. For their part, the Castro Denissof Casi team have imagined "symbolic nodes" like "postcard views" of splendid new landmark buildings, while the Groupe Descartes team claims to be able to resolve "the disconnect between the local and the metropolitan global -- by the creation of 20 cities of 500,000 people," densified versions of existing suburbs, "which introduce a connection between these two scales." Walking through the exhibition, or leafing through the 250-page book produced to accompany the show, it is easy to be struck by the fantastic character of much of the material on display, particularly since, perhaps more so in Paris than almost anywhere else in the world, planning decisions are notoriously slow, and there are many political considerations at stake. Any decisions regarding the future of the Paris metropolitan area would involve the agreement of governmental, regional, city and local authorities, managed by different political parties and operating according to different election schedules. The Rogers team confronts this problem head-on, noting that "the fragmentation of [the region's] governance structure prevents strategic action at the metropolitan scale." Sometimes the exhibition is reminiscent of the confident schemes of half a century or more ago, which also purported to show the shape of cities to come but that are now interesting chiefly as historical curiosities or as reminders of how difficult it is to predict the future. Other intriguing details strike the casual visitor. City-planning, apparently even more than architecture, has developed a language of its own, and competing teams outbid each other in their use of metaphor. For Richard Rogers, the city is a matter of "skeletons" and "armatures," while for Christian de Portzamparc the city is structured by "rhizomes, like bamboo roots, which follow linear pathways rather than depending on a single trunk." To heal a city that is "riven with fractures," write the Studio 09 team, "a porous city re-establishes connections, facilitates communication, mixes populations" something like fluid in a sponge. All in all, though, such language, while it represents a challenge for the translator -- all the material at the exhibition is available in French and English -- invites different ways of imagining the city, whether organically or mechanically. Taken together with the sometimes magnificent graphic renderings on display, it gives an exhilarating taste of the scale and ambition of the ideas on show. Le Grand Pari(s): Consultation internationale sur l'avenir de la métropole parisienne, Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, until 22 November 2009 Miracles in iron ANYONE interested in the future of the world's major cities cannot fail to learn from the Greater Paris exhibition and from comparing the strategies proposed for Paris to those employed in cities elsewhere, for example in Cairo. However, there is another exhibition now in Paris that has a link to the Egyptian capital. Wandering through Le Magicien de fer, an exhibition about the work of the 19th-century French engineer Gustav Eiffel, designer of the famous tower, one cannot help but be reminded of the Abou Ela Bridge that once linked the Cairo district of Bulaq to the island of Zamalek, as well as of the recently restored suspension bridge at the Cairo Zoo. Built at the end of the 19th century and once attributed to Eiffel, the Abou Ela bridge, dismantled a few years ago, struck a chord in many people's imaginations, not least through its role in films set in Cairo and in novels by Naguib Mahfouz, for example The Beginning and the End. For its part, the ornamental bridge at Cairo Zoo, commissioned at the end of the 19th century for what were then the Khedival Gardens and said to be by Eiffel, has survived better and is still in use by visitors. Even for those who know, or think they know, as much about the Eiffel Tower as they are ever likely to need, this exhibition, on show at the Paris H�tel de Ville until the end of August, will hold some surprises. Built for the 1889 Exposition universelle, the Tower, when it was built 300 metres high and using steel in original and decorative ways, was intended as a temporary structure aiming to show the possibilities of material Eiffel had employed elsewhere for more utilitarian purposes in his many bridges and viaducts. Saved by radio -- its height made it an ideal transmitting station -- the Tower later became a Paris landmark and, for many, an instantly recognisable emblem of the city. It has appeared in works by well-known artists -- pictures by Delaunay, Raoul Dufy and Léger are on display -- and it has been endlessly recycled for souvenirs, thereby crossing more than one cultural divide. The Tower was hated on its first appearance -- the exhibition includes the text of the famous "pétition des artistes," signed, among others, by de Maupassant and the composer Charles Gounod, denouncing Eiffel and his plans -- but it is now perhaps as much a focus for national events in France as the Arc de Triomphe. However, the famous Tower is only one project from Eiffel's long career considered in the exhibition. Also included are the plans for the magnificent viaduct he built at Garabit in France, as well as for the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty, presented to the United States in 1886 by the French government. As this exhibition points out, Eiffel's career coincided with the development of the railways, and there was money to be made designing and building railway bridges and viaducts. Eiffel himself worked in Asia and Latin America as well as in Europe, and his ready- made designs, shipped in parts to be reassembled on site, were sold by the company he founded until 1940. While the Abou Ela bridge was not in fact designed or built by Eiffel, judging from this exhibition and from the geographical scope of Eiffel's designs it very well could have been.
