From Impasse to Improvisation: Grand Paris Express as negotiation agent in the fragmented metropolis
Lara Belkind harvard.academia.edu
This article examines a conflict between two narratives for the future development of Greater Paris – the &#39;just city&#39; versus the &#39;global city&#39; – embodied in two competing regional rail proposals, one put forward by the Paris Region
At the center of a media and political debate, the Grand Paris topic is blurred by the quantity of news and opinions which are continuously spread, made misted in the complex interaction between the stakes of public interest and divergent wills – essentially political – of the numerous actors. This paper proposes studying the construction process of the Grand Paris as an applicative example of the strategic spatial planning methods, decisive in the determining bend taken by the management of the Paris region development. It implies, to well measure the scope of the subject, taking into account the urban area of Paris, as it is the capital-region, has a singular status in the national context. It justifies the interest to integrate this question into a wider reflection, which accounts for the intricacy of the administrative levels involved in the management of territorial planning as well as the confuse distribution of assignments. This institutional complexity, which appears as an important source of conflicts and slowness in terms of public policies, allows explaining the multiplicity of actors, interests and procedures which articulates the construction of the Grand Paris. Planned at the moment of its launch in 2008 by the government, as an attempt of redefining the priority guidelines of the urban area, with the clear objective of replacing the French capital to the rank of world-cities, the metropolitan project carried by the Grand Paris appears as a major change in the planning practices of the Paris region. The analysis of the successive planning procedures which took place reflects indeed the evolution of the various applied theories of planning. If the traditional model inspired the first regional Master Plans which were developed by the State, it is the collaborative model that the Region, which afterward got back the planning assignments at the regional scale, tried to implement within the framework of the SDRIF revision, approved in 2013. It is thus in confrontation with these procedures that the Grand Paris project has been launched. The study of its strategic dimension is based on the analysis of the actors' configuration, the contents and the committed perimeters of action. This approach allows to shed light on the stakes manifested on this occasion between the various administrative levels – sometimes grouped in communities of interest – in the claiming of their legitimacy to govern and to plan the territories of the urban area; and on the consequences of the confrontation – materialized in particular by the conflict between the State and the Region on the transport project – between the different stakeholders. This contextual analysis leads to question the strategic character of the results achieved until now, often concluded at the end of compromise agreements; as well as the evolution of the planning process subjected to the pressures of the politico-institutional system and to its variations. This process has in one hand the merit to reveal the complexity of the actors set and the superimposed territorial realities, and in the other hand, to permit the construction of a debate zone between the diverse stakeholders (experts, politicians and civil society). This one should even so be clarified to create a legitimate arena of discussion which establishes the constructive bases of the strategic project of the Parisian metropolis.