Antoine Grumbach and his associates have revived Napoleon's 1802 vision of Greater Paris, described as "Paris, Rouen, Le Havre all merged into a single city with the Seine as its central boulevard". Antoine Grumbach says he had a dream in which "the Seine valley provided the frame for a global metropolis unifying the urban and natural worlds..."

His team has proposed the gargantuan project of turning Paris into Europe's largest sea and river port. For Grumbach, developing links to the rest of the world on a truly massive scale is the only real way into the post-Kyoto world. It will help alleviate heavy vehicle traffic by using Le Havre as an entry point for goods, transforming the Seine into a liquid "highway" lined with green "nature-city" parks running continuously from Paris to the sea.

This project was long awaited and certainly shakes up our preconceptions. The vision of Paris that Jean Nouvel and his studio have come up with reflects the architect's flamboyant and majestic style, with a Paris striving upwards to the heavens!

This plan focuses primarily on housing and on the massive use of renewable energy. It gives pride of place to very large new towers, and to redesigning existing buildings - adding a golden cap to the Tour Montparnasse, for example. Buildings need no longer be strictly zoned, so that high-elevation housing can be constructed in previously low-rise-only areas. New green spaces will be added to the existing parks and gardens by the greening of Paris' renovated roofs. One would behold a Greater Paris submerged in foliage.

Instead of delivering a fully worked-out, dictatorial blueprint, Christian de Portzamparc's project offers a package of ideas and suggestions mainly focused on transportation, the key totomorrow's metropolis: "An international metropolis is like a huge head that interacts with the entire world. It acts as a node in a network, as part of a higher system, and could not exist on its own," explains the architect.

To improve inter-suburban connections, a major challenge for Paris for the last thirty years, Portzamparc suggests merging Paris' existing Est and Nord rail stations into a single North-Europe hub in Aubervilliers. These stations will become modern agoras, offering a vast concentration of services and shops, like the rail stations in Japan. His other key idea is to build a rapid overhead monorail - the Ring - above the current Paris ring road in order to streamline intra-regional transportation.

There are three guiding ideas here. First, divide the whole region into a score of communities, each with 500,000 inhabitants, so that people can live together on a more human scale. Second, reduce travel time, a fervent hope we all share.

But Descartes also makes practical suggestions, such as slowing down and taxing road traffic so as to reduce the average journey in the Ile de France region to half an hour. Not easy, but fairly innovative. Third, extend the forested areas in the Ile-de-France (from 20% to 30% of the total surface area), thereby lowering the temperature by 2°, according to a simulation carried out with Météo France. This would mean converting agricultural land into woods, and creating more "Agriparks" around cities to "reduce the green divide between city dwellers and farmers."

What if Paris became the most compact city in the world (The Cube)?
This Dutch collective's approach is intentionally provocative. As it is hard to manage "Greater Paris", with all its transport problems and social inequalities, the solution is to make it much denser. So they suggest "compressing" it into a 30-km diameter in order to achieve greater efficiency. Here again, certain neighborhoods would be converted into building zones to address the need for housing. MRVD uses rooftop solar panels on a massive scale along with wind parks and Seine-powered generators. And Paris grows higher and higher. This Nordic vision may not win over many Parisians.

Despite the desire to involve city planners and sociologists, this contest is ultimately directed at architects, talented though they may be. None of them really addresses the problems of political governance, perhaps intentionally, even though the future of Greater Paris will have to emerge within a proper institutional framework. The winning team should be selected before the end of the year.

See the special issue of amc, the Architecture Monitor that is devoted in its entirety to the international consultation on Greater Paris, and showcases all the projects.
Download the summary (pdf - 110 ko)