Paris Olympics can help unify a fractured city

By Lionel Laurent

Paris faces the test this week of launching the Olympic Games safely and affordably at a time of war, political polarisation and social unrest. It’s not a done deal. Heavy-handed security barriers and Covid-style QR codes are already infuriating residents and tourists trying to navigate a River Seine that’s been cleaned at great expense.

Yet the real challenge will begin once the athletes have packed up and gone home. The world’s greatest city (okay, Top Five) must complete its gold-medal transformation into something greater: A megalopolis that binds the hipsters, financiers and flaneurs of historic, densely populated Paris to the sprawling regional economy where many Olympic events will actually take place.

This would be a more inclusive kind of change from the one Paris has gone through recently. Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s crusade to pedestrianise, modernise and de-motorise swathes of the city has seen road congestion fall and air quality improve but has also made her a divisive figure and irritated commuters who don't make up her core voter base.

There’s certainly a thrill in strolling along the banks of the Seine or down car-free Rue de Rivoli — provided one can block out the roared insults from cyclists who seem to think traffic lights are just there for decoration. Yet there have also been missteps, like the embrace of electric scooters that ended up banned last year.

Gentrification and tourism have also made the city pricier and more exclusive, even as social unrest and bouts of violence have risen. A post-Brexit influx of bankers and tech types has boosted Paris’s soft power, its startup scene and its attraction for AirBnB speculators — though that bubble has burst somewhat. The cool crowd has migrated eastward to Belleville, away from the un-hip Champs Elysees. The newly reopened Samaritaine store has become a symbol of Paris’s doubling-down on luxury; Bernard Arnault’s LVMH is sponsoring the Olympics and also chipped in to help repair Notre-Dame after a 2019 fire.

From income to accessing services, the gap has grown between Paris’s 2 million inhabitants and the 10 million who live in the region. “The center is gentrifying, while the periphery is getting poorer,” says urbanism expert Laurent Chalard. I’ve seen this first-hand, having lived on both sides of the peripherique ring road that did away with the city walls but not the psychological barriers of living intra or extra muros. As a father of two “inside the walls,” I can enjoy the fruits of what really is a 15-minute city: That’s how long it takes me to walk to my kids’ daycare, my local park, my doctor and my metro stop. But many essential workers live way beyond that radius, priced out by a city that doesn’t build enough housing. The walls have gone but segregation remains: A 2019 study found the income gap between the richest and poorest of the Paris region — those earning €4,500 a month ($4.900) and below €900 — was the biggest in France.

Of course, Europe remains more equal — and with longer life expectancy — than the US. Cities are always going to be places where rich and poor live cheek-by-jowl. And gleaming Olympics venues are transforming some areas of Paris, such as the suburb Saint Ouen. Still, better social and economic cohesion would be good at a time of polarised politics. It might address some of the resentment that fueled last year’s rioting and looting in outlying towns like Kylian Mbappe’s childhood home of Bondy, where shops and businesses perceived by locals as unaffordable were targeted. Carless Parisians would also benefit from smarter integration: Paris depends upon workers coming from outside the city for more than half of its labor force (according to pre-Covid figures), and last year’s garbage collectors’ strike also showed how dependent it was on incinerator chokepoints beyond the peripherique.

A more cohesive Greater Paris needs to rewire the region, as imagined by ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy in the wake of 2005 urban rioting and the failure to win the 2012 summer games (which went to London). It has already started with the “Grand Paris Express,” a plan to create four new circular metro lines across 200 kilometers of tracks to connect the suburbs. It’s a project that has none of the glamor of Baron Haussmann’s iconic reshaping of Paris in the 19th century, which gave us landmarks like the Opera Garnier and the wide and airy boulevards that bear his name. But it’s just as vital if you consider that students will be able to reach their school in half an hour rather than an hour, or that jobs and housing might be redistributed more evenly. “A rebalancing is underway...It’s a big lever for change,” says geographer Daniel Behar.

Transport links can’t do everything, of course. The bigger step towards more joined-up thinking and policy across Greater Paris would be political integration, unifying decision-making for the whole region. That might help more housing projects get off the ground and reduce the likelihood of turf wars between the capital and other local authorities. It will also be very difficult to achieve.

Still, we may be just a few years away from a more efficient regional engine responsible for 30 per cent of France’s economic output. In the meantime, though, Paris needs to navigate the Olympics and choppy political waters. It’s maybe apt that the city’s motto — fluctuat nec mergitur — could be roughly translated as: “Buffeted by the waves, but not sinking.” Yet.