How Big is Grand Paris? Paris, Its Suburbs, and Its Periurbs

Résumé En

In this chapter, we will address two issues. The first is the relationship between the capital city of Paris and its suburbs. Several particular aspects of this relationship will be examined: the persistence of relations of inequality, and even of domination, between Paris and its popular suburbs; the determining role of large housing estates in the representation of the suburbs; and the tensions that accompany the emergence of an intercommunal government uniting Paris and its suburbs.The second issue concerns the area beyond Grand Paris (Greater Paris), and the place of the periurbs within it. On 1 January 2016, the French government created the Grand Paris metropolitan authority (Métropole du Grand Paris)—a new institutional entity that brings together the commune of Paris, its adjoining departments (départements) of the inner ring, and seven communes belonging to departments of the outer ring. Not all suburbs were integrated into this new entity. Because the institutional choice was to bring together Paris and the departments of the inner ring, periurban territories—which were long considered minor but have been gaining major social and political importance in recent years—have remained outside the perimeter of the Grand Paris metropolitan authority (hereafter “Grand Paris”). Over the last decades, as suburbs have urbanised and turned into in-between cities and post-suburbs (Sieverts, 2003; Phelps & Wood, 2011; Keil et al., 2017), the periurbs developed in a way that takes them back to the original ideal of garden cities, as formulated by Ebenezer Howard. In these territories, the central state has very little presence, apart from largely incantatory summons (at least until recently ) to combat urban sprawl. On the institutional level, the periurbs constitute a space of extreme fragmentation, which raises new questions for the governance of the Grand Paris and its surroundings.This chapter puts these two issues into perspective in the light of three key ideas. First, the construction and functioning of governance in the suburban territories around Paris city can only be understood with regard to the latter’s specific urban and political history. Indeed, population patterns and territorial representations are highly persistent (Sampson, 2012) and largely determine the way in which each of the territories is governed. Hence the large place given here to the history of those territories.The second key idea is that suburbs, around Paris as elsewhere, are highly diverse, and that, depending on the context, different types of government and modes of governance are formed within them. Table 6.1 below gives an overview of these differences, and shows them to be so important that we can wonder about the existence of a mode of governance that would be specific to the Paris metropolitan region. From this perspective, two questions arise : To what extent can this region be considered as a unique case whose specificities might be compared with those of other urban regions? Should we not, on the contrary, construe it as a pool of cases allowing us to study different configurations? It is in this spirit that we wrote the present chapter, which offers not so much an overall picture of the government and governance of the Paris suburbs but snapshots of specific spaces, while also leaving aside territories such as new towns. Although the latter do play an important role, they are already fairly well known in the French and English literature (Berroir, Catan, Saint Julien & 2005; Savitch, 2014).These choices were guided by a third key idea: France is not only a very centralised country; it is also a highly decentralised country with regard to urban issues. The latter dimension of France’s political organisation is often ignored to the benefit of the first, especially in the international literature where the image of a hyper-centralised central state in charge of urban development and governance predominates. And yet, since the start of decentralisation in 1982, the powers of communes and of their municipal councils have been decisive (see Table 6.2 for details on these powers). This is why the present chapter gives them special attention, to the detriment of an important but better-known actor: the central state.