The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, launched a city-sponsored design competition last year that invites teams of architects and developers to carry out “an urban experiment on an unparalleled scale,” with these words:
Paris has to reinvent itself. A city like Paris must be able to reinvent itself at every moment in order to meet the many challenges facing it. Particularly in terms of housing and everything relating to density, desegregation, energy, and resilience. It is important in today’s world to find new collective ways of working that will give shape to the future metropolis.
To lovers of Paris, this can only be dismaying. Reinvent Paris? The universally admired archetype of the traditional city? Given previous attempts at reinvention—think of the Centre Pompidou and the other “grands projets” of the Mitterand era—one thinks immediately of constructing barricades and waving red flags.
Of course, Paris, like many old cities, has been reinvented many times, from its days as a Roman town to the royal projects of Louis XIV and his successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The architects of Napoléon Bonaparte, Percier, and Fontaine, set the standard for the modern streetscape with their arcaded façade along the Rue de Rivoli, and the city was totally transformed in the nineteenth century by Napoléon IIIand his executive Baron Hausmann, becoming the exemplar of the modern city, to be imitated across the globe. But these makeovers were all intended to increase the orderliness and harmony
