Will Paris soon overflow its peripheral walls? The High Commissioner for Strategy and Planning, Clément Beaune, proposes in a note released on Wednesday June 3 to make the capital and its inner suburbs a unique city. In an interview with Le Parisien, he called for reform so as not to “live another century within the confines of the ring road”. A “national issue”, he insists.
To get Paris out of its surrounding wall, the High Commissioner for Planning suggests abolishing the Greater Paris metropolis, a community created in 2016 and which brings together 130 municipalities for 7.2 million inhabitants. An “institutional simplification”, he assures, which would involve “the creation of the City of Greater Paris”, a merger of Paris with the departments and municipalities of the inner suburbs and which would lead to a single territorial collectivity. This would also include the elimination of the departments (Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne) and municipalities in the inner suburbs, as well as the Greater Paris metropolis.
The merger of these levels with the City of Paris would lead, according to the High Commission’s projections, to the creation of a new community with a special status which would be organized into forty new districts. The key is a “simplification” of both the “current millefeuille of the inner suburbs of Paris” and “of the skills currently split between town halls, departments, intermunicipalities, MGP and Region”.
A line of thought, at this stage, that Clément Beaune defends by invoking the growing inadequacy of the administrative organization of the Parisian conurbation, unique in Europe, with “the reality of the territories included”. Despite a significant increase in the population in the inner suburbs and a decrease in the number of inhabitants in its central city, Paris “has not experienced any major modification of its administrative boundaries” since a law extending the city limits dated June 1859 which created the twenty current arrondissements.
From two departments to seven in 1968
“Paris has grown through successive changes,” recalls Clément Beaune in the columns of Le Parisien. In fact, before the law of 1859, Paris was made up of only 12 districts since 1795. Their number increased to twenty after the annexation of the suburbs located between the fortifications of the Thiers enclosure and the wall of the Farmers General. The municipalities of Belleville, Grenelle, Vaugirard and La Villette are thus absorbed.
Also in Île-de-France, the change has been gradual. Until the reorganization of the Paris region in 1964, the territories of Paris and its crown were subdivided into three departments: Seine-et-Marne, Seine-et-Oise and Seine. If the first retained its name and its territory, Seine-et-Oise and the Seine disappeared in 1968 in favor of seven new departments.
The Seine department, completely surrounded by Seine-et-Oise, then brought together 15% of the French population over 480 km2, in contrast to that of Seine-et-Oise which concentrated almost only much poorer or landlocked municipalities. Also all the municipalities which made up these two departments were distributed between Paris, its inner suburbs (Seine-Saint-Denis, Hauts-de-Seine and Val-de-Marne) and part of its outer suburbs (Essonne, Yvelines and Val-d’Oise, to which must be added Seine-et-Marne).
According to Clément Beaune, the project presented by the High Commission for Planning, which would in fact return to this division to merge the departments of the inner suburbs, would generate “short-term costs and medium-term gains”, but would allow “savings, particularly administrative ones”. At this stage, its implementation has not been costed.
