Putting Sarkozy’s Design Plans for Paris in Historical Perspective

By Steve Delahoyde on March 20, 2009 11:03 AM

When we reported on French president Nicholas Sarkozy‘s announcement that he wants Paris to be completely overhauled and redesigned, we thought it was interesting, but certainly didn’t stop to think about the decision in an historical perspective. Luckily there exists a man whose job it is to do such things, namely the Times‘ critic Tom Dyckhoff, who put together this great piece about the long-running trend of French rulers deciding to leave their mark in history by figuring out ways to make Paris look different. After all, if it was good enough for Napoleon and Mitterand to do, you have to figure that a man like Sarkozy wants a piece of the action too. Though it certainly isn’t all ego-based as it may seem, Paris, as Dyckhoff explains, has also long been in the midst of something of a city-planning crisis, with exclusion and separation plaguing the way is laid out, specifically keeping the haves and the have-nots far away from one another, with very few ways of the latter working to join the former, which is something that likely won’t serve the city well for much longer. Here’s a bit:

The very exclusion of so many from French public life has plagued parts of French cities for years, boiling over periodically in race riots like those in 2005 in Paris’s banlieu, Clichy-sous-bois. This exclusion is physical – architectural even – as much a social, political or psychological. In Paris, especially, the division between the moneyed central ‘city’, ruled over by mayor Bertrand Delanoe, and the banlieus, each governed by separate councils, is exacerbated by what is effectively a modern city wall – the peripherique orbital motorway.

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