Suitable area for Paris to get a French global city region

Résumé du document

As Saskia Sassen well defined it, a global city region is a region that “overlaps the global city” . Today, it can be admitted that Paris has a lot features that make this city close to a “global city”, such as the central corporate functions, and the “highly specialized and networked services sector” that Sassen mentions, but also a growing participation to transnational networks (with the Paris Bourse for instance). Paris is the second city in the world for the number of international organization centers (OCDE, UNESCO…). But, unfortunately, the “raising degree of spatial and socioeconomic inequality” is another global city's characteristic that Paris shares.

If Paris meets the criteria of a global city, the area that encompasses this global city can be called a global city region. Then, following Sassen's analysis, “both concepts have a problem with boundaries”.

That is exactly the problem of Paris and the Paris area. Today, there are twelve million people living in the Ile-de-France - which is the administrative region that includes the French capital, also called the “région parisienne” – among which 90% live in Paris. It is the gathering of eight administrative subdivisions, the “départements”. The region Ile-de-France remains one of the richest in the world. However, the local councilors and the citizens, as well as the economic decision-makers, have noticed that their region is losing competitiveness within the globalized world. Many features characterize this loss of dynamism: lack of innovative and structuring projects, illegibility of the town and country planning and an inaudible political voice are some of them.

This last problem is linked to the main one, recently well summed up by President Sarkozy: “nobody knows who decides”. Thus, Ile-de-France's central weakness is about power and authority in the region.

It is clear that things have to be changed in the administrative organization of the Paris area, in order to turn the entire region into an efficient global city region.

Extraits

[...] Next, Paris is missing a lot of opportunities by remaining in these out of date borders. For instance, the most dynamic business district of the region is located in La Défense, in the Hauts-de-Seine, at less than two kilometers from the Périphérique. As a very powerful business center, it can seem strange to be outside of Paris, whereas the “financial is the heart of all the other global cities, such as New York or London. By letting all the economic dynamism leaving Paris, the city risks to be turned into a “museum city” and then to lose so much competitiveness that it could leave the “global cities” list. [...]

[...] Indeed, they are mostly based on technical improvements. And yet it corresponds to Jean-Paul Huchon's stance President of Ile-de-France's Regional Council. According to him, the plans which consider changing Paris's frontiers are needless; even more, the citizens would find them useless, as he said haven't seen any street demonstration to claim for a “Grand He sees these plans as an attempt from the State to challenge decentralization. Instead, Huchon only proposes the creation of new organs of collaboration in some specific fields, such as a SLIF[17] dedicated to housing, made on the pattern of the STIF. [...]

[...] For instance, a “metropolitan conference” was created in July 2006, gathering local authorities from all the “petite couronne”s municipalities and even further. This workshop is trying to elaborate a concerted reflection on the Paris region's governance. To finish with and to please the most conservatives one, we could say that it would finally be the reedition of a past situation, given that this “Grand Paris”'s frontiers would be quite close to those which existed before 1968, when Paris was part of the unique département of the Seine. [...]

[...] At last, those who could benefit a lot from this reform are the students of the region. Indeed, having an overseeing authority above all the universities of the region would get the construction of real and competitive campuses more conceivable. The rise of many plans to adapt Paris's size to the global world In his report for the Senate research institute on decentralization[15], Senator Dallier Senator of Seine-Saint-Denis - listed the ten conceivable scenarios, from the status quo to the most ambitious plans. [...]

[...] This last problem is linked to the main one, recently well summed up by President Sarkozy: “nobody knows who decides”. Thus, Ile-de-France's central weakness is about power and authority in the region. It is clear that things have to be changed in the administrative organization of the Paris area, in order to turn the entire region into an efficient global city region. The central debate remains about the size and the boundaries that have to be given to this global city in order to maximize both the well-being of the citizens and a greater efficiency in our globalized world. [...]