Economist.com Cities Guide: Paris Briefing - July 2006

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Dreaming the Radiant City

On June 12th city councillors approved a new master plan to shape growth and development in Paris for the next two decades. The Plan Local d’Urbanisme, or PLU, aims to stem the exodus of businesses to cheaper suburban outposts and to provide affordable lodging to keep the middle classes intra muros. Rapidly rising prices and general penury have driven more than 100,000 families onto the waiting list for subsidised housing. Paris has lost an estimated 130,000 jobs since the 1980s.

After three years of fierce debate, the PLU’s final version calls for construction of 4,000-4,500 subsidised flats per year, and encourages the relocation of businesses from the affluent west and centre of the city to the poorer eastern side. The most controversial proposition—to do away with a ban on buildings higher than 37 metres (120 feet)—failed to gain enough support. Though generally detested by Parisians, tall buildings were promoted as a means to increase office and housing space on the outskirts of the capital. Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor, complained that a “coalition of conservatives from both right and left” had attacked the skyscraper plan. The Greens, his partners in city governance, argued that Paris was already overcrowded with businesses, which bring traffic and pollution. They abstained from voting.

Thinking big

Paris and its suburbs have begun working together to plan improvements, after years of often testy relations and direct competition. With 2m inhabitants stuffed into 105 sq km, Paris is one of Europe’s smallest capitals, surrounded by 11m people in adjoining areas. After 18 months of preliminary footwork, the regional council for Ile-de France met on June 23rd to reveal a draft for the “SDRIF”. Like the PLU, the SDRIF is a grand scheme for new motorways and public transport, public housing and open spaces. Jean-Paul Huchon, the council president, pledged to fight urban sprawl, saying that each year 60,000 homes or flats should be built in areas that are already developed—up from 40,000 now. Cities will be encouraged to build townhouses and apartment blocks near train stations, and to incorporate more public housing, which is currently concentrated in just a few eastern suburbs. The SDRIF also calls for building business hubs, like a “kind of Silicon Valley” on the suburban Saclay Heights and a “science valley” on the Left Bank.

Authorities have also mapped out the first city-suburb rehaul, in the gritty Porte de la Chappelle in northern Paris. It will get a family-friendly makeover in the next six years, with more gardens and shopping centres serving the capital, Saint Denis and Aubervilliers beyond. It will also play host to a waste-treatment centre and a giant heating utility, a sign that the city can no longer dump its unattractive industries in the suburbs.

Black, white and in the red all over

Serge July, the founder and chairman of France’s most important left-wing newspaper, Libération, is being forced out by the dominant new shareholder over the paper’s flagging fortunes. Edouard de Rothschild took a 39% interest in “Libé” last year—making his the largest block of shares—and has called for Mr July to quit. Mr July agreed to leave if Mr de Rothschild would reinvest in the paper, but his departure will deprive Libération of its figurehead. Mr July set up the Paris-based daily with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973 to provide a media outlet for France's burgeoning generation of leftists. But despite the paper's place as a mainstay of intellectual and cultural life, its circulation is slipping. It sold fewer than 137,000 copies per day in 2005, compared with 163,000 in 2001 and 182,000 in 1990.

Several national dailies are in crisis. The only remaining evening paper, France-Soir, was nearly bankrupt and off newsstands for two months until it was recently sold to Jean-Pierre Brunois, a property investor, and Olivier Rey, a sports writer; Le Figaro, the right-leaning national best-seller, was taken over in 2004 by a military manufacturer Dassault. In June the Le Monde publication group, which also includes some regional dailies and weekly magazines, announced losses in 2005 of €28m ($35m).

Fashion victims

In June police dismantled a ring responsible for trafficking handbags, jewellery and other high-end French merchandise to Japan. Seventeen Asians—Japanese, Malaysian and Chinese—were arrested and €122,000 (about $153,000) in cash was seized along with some 500 items of leather goods and jewellery from iconic French brands such as Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Chanel.

During the sting, traffickers passed cash to covert police officers loitering outside the Vuitton flagship store on the Champs-Elysées, to go inside and buy goods on their behalf. Police say the traffickers were planning to sell the luxury goods at a discount rate in Japan, where they are subject to a high sales tax. French companies, wary of Asian counterfeiting and illegal resale schemes, often limit the number of items nationals of those countries can take back with them. Vuitton, for example, records the passport information of bag buyers. It is not uncommon for the brand’s Japanese and Chinese fans to hand a wad of cash to startled Parisians outside the Champs-Elysées store and ask them to shop on their behalf.

Diet for a new planet

The World Food Market, a trade fair showing off ethnic foods ranging from sushi to shwarma, opened on June 14th in Paris with the aim of catering to France’s 5m-plus Muslims. The market for halal foods has grown by 15% annually since 1998 and is now estimated at €3 billion. At the Paris fair, attended by some 5,000 food professionals, merchants hawked halal chicken-nuggets, burgers, lasagne and even baby foods. The fair also had new non-food items, such as cosmetics made without mistreating animals (under halal standards), and philanthropic sodas, such as the France-based Mecca Cola, which gives 10% of profits to Palestinian charities and 10% to local ones under the slogan, “No more drinking stupid—Drink committed.”

Some big supermarkets, especially in Paris suburbs with large Muslim communities, have dedicated halal aisles. Auchan, a supermarket company, reports that Muslims provide 12% of its business, a number expected to rise to 20% within two years. But most halal sales—usually beef, sheep and chicken—are at small specialised butcher shops. A looming problem for the industry is that there is not a strict definition of halal, beyond some basic rules: a ban on alcohol and pork, the avoidance of bloody meats, and the need for a religious authority to oversee the slaughter. France is home to more than 50 groups who certify halal, drumming up animated debate among Islamic scholars about the finer points of the practice.

Catch if you can

July 2006

Musée du Quai Branly

President Jacques Chirac's inauguration of the Quai Branly on June 20th was arguably the most important cultural event of 2006. Eleven years in the making, the €232.5m ($293m), state-financed project began as Mr Chirac's bid to counter “the arrogance and ethnocentrism” of Europe's museums and to create a prestigious home for the world's “forgotten civilisations”. The new building on the Seine’s Left Bank houses a stunning collection of nearly 270,000 items—3,500 of which are on display—from Africa, the Pacific, the Americas and Asia, including masks, statues, headdresses, jewellery and paintings. It marks a departure from the city’s main museums, which concentrate on Western art, and will encourage serious academic research in the field through a scholarly institute and sponsored fieldwork.

The building is an artwork in itself. Jean Nouvel, the architect who also designed the Institut du Monde Arabe, succeeded in a bold gamble to impose modernity on a conservative, chic neighbourhood near the Eiffel Tower. The Quai Branly should serve as a “lung” of green space to Parisians, with its large gardens and a huge rooftop terrace overlooking the river, as well as a wall of verdure: plants of 150 different species that cover one facade entirely. French presidents have long commissioned monuments forever associated with them—Franςois Mitterrand’s Grand Arch and Opéra Bastille, for example, or Georges Pompidou's Centre Pompidou. The Quai Branly will be Mr Chirac's legacy.

Musée du Quai Branly, 55 quai Branly, 7th arrondissement. Tel: +33 (0)1 56 61 70 00. Open: Tues-Sun 10am-6.30pm (Thurs until 10pm). Métro: Alma-Marceau. For more information see the museum's website.

More from the Paris cultural calendar