Sarkozy has a grand plan for Paris

The diminutive French leader with expansionist dreams made a grand pronouncement: He would seek a “Greater Paris” that would reach all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, more than a hundred miles away.

Napoleon Bonaparte would be thwarted in his territorial ambitions. Two centuries later, President Nicolas Sarkozy, who shares more than a few attributes with his hard-driving predecessor, hopes to succeed where the emperor failed.

Sarkozy, armed with a vast project called Grand Paris, is saying that Parisians should “prepare for the future.”

It’s too late to stretch the capital’s official borders; few would agree to such sacrilege. But Sarkozy hopes the project will fade current boundaries to form a larger territory with improved housing and transportation, a region that would foster the arts and, perhaps most important, outshine other capitals.

Paris “is not only the capital of France. She is also the rival of London, New York, Tokyo and Shanghai . . . but she can lose her standing if we aren’t careful,” Sarkozy said in late April as he inaugurated an exhibit of 10 architectural and urban planning proposals at the City of Architecture and Heritage museum.

“To stay in the first rank, you have to see far, you have to see large,” he said with his characteristic grin, jutting his chin forward for emphasis.

The international teams involved in the proposals also had the challenging task of leveling out the sharp imbalance between the saturated, wealthier capital and its impoverished, relatively isolated suburbs, or banlieues.

But just as Napoleon had his skeptics, critics of the plan worry about losing their local identity to a larger metropolis.

“What matters is to cultivate your identity, not your rivalry,” said Jean-Marie Rouart, a member of the French Academy, France’s language preservation group, and author of “This Opposition Which Is Called Life,” which analyzes Sarkozy’s “herculean” work method.

Many visitors to the exhibit also expressed concern.

Regis Briday, 28, couldn’t help dropping his jaw, laughing and covering his face in horror at the “grotesque propaganda.” He derided what he called Sarkozy’s territorial “megalomania” despite agreeing that something had to be done to improve living standards in outlying suburbs.

“To rethink the ensemble of a city in front of a computer screen is exactly what Haussmann did, except he didn’t have a computer,” Briday said, referring to 19th century Paris city planner Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, who tore down winding alleys to make way for efficient boulevards and grand stone buildings with rows of ornate, narrow shuttered windows.

Some of the projects suggest building mini-clusters of skyscrapers around the capital limits. One proposal, by architect Jean Nouvel, includes an illustration of spiked, glowing glass towers reaching into the Paris night skyline like some kind of Emerald City.

Some have questioned the viability of pursuing the project during a global economic meltdown. France’s budget deficit is expected to grow this year, but to Sarkozy, the economic crisis was a “now or never” opportunity to invest in public works and pump jobs into the economy.

The president, however, has provided few details about costs or funding for the proposals, including creating an ocean port for landlocked Paris.

That idea came from architect Antoine Grumbach, and is meant to help make Paris more competitive. High-speed rail would connect the capital to Le Havre, about 100 miles northwest at the mouth of the Seine River, cutting travel time to about an hour.

In the exhibit, architects suggest ways to eventually unify Paris and its environs into an entity that better characterizes the region today, while aiming to maintain the individuality of towns and villages along the way.

Cumbersome rail lines that divide the city could be covered with public walkways and parks, impenetrable highways traded for raised tramways; a forest planted around an airport would ingest pollution; and even a Central Park a la francaise could help absorb urban sprawl, some proposals demonstrated.

“You have to be able to adequately meet the situation today,” said Francis Rambert, director of the French Institute of Architecture. “Now, we have to deal with the in-betweens [empty lots and urban sprawl]. That’s the new territory to reconquest. That’s the aim of Grand Paris. It’s not to make it bigger and bigger; it’s to make it stronger and bring more justice.”

Amid the financial crisis, the project was seen as a potential source of new jobs and gained initial popular approval: 58% to 77% of respondents thought that various aspects of the initiative were positive, according to a poll by the newspaper Le Parisien.

The city’s current boundaries are marked by a circular highway built in the 1970s that is not only an eyesore, but also blocks easy passage.

“That is a problem,” Rambert said as he looked at a massive photo of the highway at the Grand Paris exhibit.

“This is a picture of immobility,” he said, adding with a laugh that “it could be of Los Angeles!”

The Greater Paris project “is about mobility,” he explained.

The concrete encircling the capital also helps solidify the gap in the standard of living between residents within the city boundaries and the 1.2 million who live in ghettos around most of the eastern side of Paris, according to the studies on display at the exhibit.

In 2005, car-burning riots broke out in those suburban towns, where most of the residents originate from former French colonies.

Suburbanites also depend on the city center for employment, but the commute can take hours because of inadequate public transportation. The RER suburban rail system forces many people to travel to the center of Paris first to reach neighboring areas, and still others have two-hour commutes, despite living only 10 miles outside the periphery.

Outlying towns “are part of the same body” as the capital, Rambert said. But they remain too disconnected, and are best known for their empty lots, urban sprawl and bleak housing projects.

But changing Paris always stirs anxieties. The French are “extremely attached to their past, to their heritage,” the French Academy’s Rouart said. “The Frenchman is a revolutionary who is extremely conservative.

“You have to respect our way of life. We’re not like the Americans or the Japanese.”

But Rambert remains positive about a new generation to come.

“I don’t think that the French are so conservative,” he said.

“Yes, they are attached to their inherited treasures, but at the same time they want a new contemporary city, and are in search of a new balance.”