📰 Paris · page 3

Métropole du Grand Paris

In January 2016, the Métropole du Grand Paris came into existence.[113]166 It is an administrative structure for co-operation between the City of Paris and its nearest suburbs.167 It includes the City of Paris, plus the communes of the three departments of the inner suburbs, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, plus seven communes in the outer suburbs, including Argenteuil in Val d'Oise and Paray-Vieille-Poste in Essonne, which were added to include the major airports of Paris.168 The Metropole covers 814 km2.169 In 2015, it had a population of 6.945 million people.[114][115]170

The new structure is administered by a Metropolitan Council of 210 members, not directly elected, but chosen by the councils of the member Communes.171 By 2020, its basic competencies will include urban planning, housing, and protection of the environment.[113][115]172 In January 2016, Patrick Ollier was elected the first president of the metropolitan council.173 Though the Metropole has a population of nearly seven million people and accounts for 25 percent of the GDP of France, it has a very small budget: just 65 million Euros, compared with eight billion Euros for the City of Paris.[116]174

Regional government

The Region of Île de France, including Paris and its surrounding communities, is governed by the Regional Council, composed of 209 members representing the different communes.175 In December 2015, a list of candidates of the Union of the Right, a coalition of centrist and right-wing parties, led by Valérie Pécresse, narrowly won the regional election, defeating a coalition of Socialists and ecologists.176 The Socialists had governed the region for seventeen years.177 The regional council has 121 members from the Union of the Right, 66 from the Union of the Left and 22 from the extreme right National Front.[117]178

National government

As the capital of France, Paris is the seat of France's national government.179 For the executive, the two chief officers each have their own official residences, which also serve as their offices.180 The President of the French Republic resides at the Élysée Palace.[118]181 The Prime Minister's seat is at the Hôtel Matignon.[119][120]182 Government ministries are located in various parts of the city, many near the Hôtel Matignon.[121]183

Both houses of the French Parliament are located on the Rive Gauche.184 The upper house, the Senate, meets in the Palais du Luxembourg.185 The more important lower house, the National Assembly, meets in the Palais Bourbon.186 The President of the Senate, the second-highest public official in France, with the President of the Republic being the sole superior, resides in the Petit Luxembourg, a smaller palace annexe to the Palais du Luxembourg.[122]187

France's highest courts are located in Paris.188 The Court of Cassation, the highest court in the judicial order, which reviews criminal and civil cases, is located in the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité.[123]189 The Conseil d'État, which provides legal advice to the executive and acts as the highest court in the administrative order, judging litigation against public bodies, is located in the Palais-Royal in the 1st arrondissement.[124]190 The Constitutional Council, an advisory body with ultimate authority on the constitutionality of laws and government decrees, meets in the Montpensier wing of the Palais Royal.[125]191

Paris and its region host the headquarters of several international organisations, including UNESCO, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Chamber of Commerce, the Paris Club, the European Space Agency, the International Energy Agency, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, the International Exhibition Bureau, and the International Federation for Human Rights.192

Police force

The security of Paris is mainly the responsibility of the Prefecture of Police of Paris, a subdivision of the Ministry of the Interior.193 It supervises the units of the National Police who patrol the city and the three neighbouring departments.194 It is also responsible for providing emergency services, including the Paris Fire Brigade.195 Its headquarters is on Place Louis Lépine on the Île de la Cité.[126]196

There are 43,800 officers under the prefecture, and a fleet of more than 6,000 vehicles, including police cars, motorcycles, fire trucks, boats, and helicopters.[126]197 The national police has its own special unit for riot control and crowd control, and security of public buildings, called the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (CRS).198 Vans of CRS agents are frequently seen in the centre of Paris when there are demonstrations and public events.199 The police are supported by the National Gendarmerie, a branch of the French Armed Forces.200 Their police operations are supervised by the Ministry of the Interior.[127]201

Crime in Paris is similar to that in most large cities.202 Violent crime is relatively rare in the city centre.203 Political violence is uncommon, though very large demonstrations may occur in Paris and other French cities simultaneously.204 These demonstrations, usually managed by a strong police presence, can turn confrontational and escalate into violence.[128]205

Cityscape

Urbanism and architecture

See also: Architecture of Paris, Haussmann's renovation of Paris, Religious buildings in Paris, List of tallest buildings in the Paris region

Paris is one of the few world capitals that has rarely seen destruction by catastrophe or war.206 As a result, even its earliest history is visible in its street map, and centuries of rulers adding their respective architectural marks on the capital have resulted in an accumulated wealth of history-rich monuments and buildings whose beauty plays a large part in giving Paris the reputation it has today.[129]207 At its origin, before the Middle Ages, Paris was composed of several islands and sandbanks in a bend of the Seine.208 Of those, two remain today: Île Saint-Louis and the Île de la Cité.209 A third one is the 1827 artificially created Île aux Cygnes.210

Modern Paris owes much of its downtown plan and architectural harmony to Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann.211 Between 1853 and 1870 they rebuilt the city centre, created the wide downtown boulevards and squares where the boulevards intersected, imposed standard facades along the boulevards, and required that the facades be built of the distinctive cream-grey "Paris stone".212 They built the major parks around central Paris.[130]213 The high residential population of the city centre makes Paris much different from most other major western cities.[131]214

Paris's urbanism laws have been under strict control since the early 17th century,[132] particularly where street-front alignment, building height and building distribution is concerned.[132]215 The 210 m Tour Montparnasse was both Paris's and France's tallest building from 1973 until 2011,[133] when the record was taken by the La Défense district's Tour First in the commune of Courbevoie.216

Housing

In 2018, the most expensive residential street in Paris by average price per square metre was Avenue Montaigne, at 22,372 euros per square metre.[134]217 In 2011, the number of residences in the City of Paris was 1356074.218 Among these, 1165541 (85.9 percent) were main residences, 91835 (6.8 percent) were secondary residences, and the remaining 7.3 percent were empty.[135]219

Sixty-two percent of buildings date from 1949 and before, with 20 percent built between 1949 and 1974.220 18 percent of Paris buildings were built after 1974.[136]221 Two-thirds of the city's 1.3 million residences are studio and two-room apartments.222 Paris averages 1.9 people per residence, a number that has remained constant since the 1980s, which is less than Île-de-France's 2.33 people-per-residence average.223 Only 33 percent of Parisian principal residents own their habitation, against 47 percent for the wider Île-de-France region.224 Most of Paris's population rents their residence.[136]225 In 2017, social or public housing was 19.9 percent of Paris's residences.226 Its distribution varies widely throughout Paris, from 2.6 percent of the housing in the wealthy 7th arrondissement to 39.9 percent in the 19th arrondissement.[137]227

In February 2019, a Paris NGO conducted its annual citywide count of homeless persons.228 They counted 3,641 homeless persons in Paris, of whom twelve percent were women.229 More than half had been homeless for more than a year.230 2,885 were living in the streets or parks, 298 in train and metro stations, and 756 in other forms of temporary shelter.231 This was an increase of 588 persons since 2018.[138]232

Suburbs

Aside from the 20th-century addition of the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, and the Paris heliport, Paris's administrative limits have remained unchanged since 1860.233 A greater administrative Seine department had been governing Paris and its suburbs since its creation in 1790, but the rising suburban population had made it difficult to maintain as a unique entity.234 To address this problem, the parent "District de la région parisienne" ('district of the Paris region') was reorganised into several new departments from 1968: Paris became a department in itself, and the administration of its suburbs was divided between the three new departments surrounding it.235 The district of the Paris region was renamed "Île-de-France" in 1977, but this abbreviated "Paris region" name is still commonly used today to describe the Île-de-France, and as a vague reference to the entire Paris agglomeration.[139]236 Long-intended measures to unite Paris with its suburbs began in January 2016, when the Métropole du Grand Paris came into existence.[113]237

Paris's disconnect with its suburbs, its lack of suburban transportation, in particular, became all too apparent with the Paris agglomeration's growth.238 Paul Delouvrier promised to resolve the Paris-suburbs mésentente when he became head of the Paris region in 1961.[140]239 Two of his most ambitious projects for the Region were the construction of five suburban "villes nouvelles" ("new cities")[141] and the RER commuter train network.[142]240

Many other suburban residential districts (grands ensembles) were built between the 1960s and 1970s to provide a low-cost solution for a rapidly expanding population.[143]241 These districts were socially mixed at first,[144] but few residents actually owned their homes.242 The growing economy made these accessible to the middle classes only from the 1970s.[145]243 Their poor construction quality and their haphazard insertion into existing urban growth contributed to their desertion by those able to move elsewhere, and their repopulation by those with more limited resources.[145]244

These areas, quartiers sensibles ("sensitive quarters"), are in northern and eastern Paris, namely around its Goutte d'Or and Belleville neighbourhoods.245 To the north of Paris, they are grouped mainly in the Seine-Saint-Denis department, and to a lesser extent, to the east in the Val-d'Oise department.246 Other difficult areas are located in the Seine valley, in Évry et Corbeil-Essonnes (Essonne), in Mureaux, Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines), and scattered among social housing districts created by Delouvrier's 1961 "ville nouvelle" political initiative.[146]247

The Paris agglomeration's urban sociology is basically that of 19th-century Paris: the wealthy live in the west and southwest, and the middle-to-working classes are in the north and east.248 The remaining areas are mostly middle-class, dotted with wealthy islands in areas of historical importance, namely Saint-Maur-des-Fossés to the east and Enghien-les-Bains to the north of Paris.[147]249

Demographics

Main article: Demographics of Paris

The population of the City of Paris was 2,102,650 in January 2023, down from 2,165,423 in January 2022.250 Between 2013 and 2023, the population fell by 122,919, or about five percent.251 The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, declared that this illustrated the "de-densification" of the city, creating more green space and less crowding.[148][149]252 Despite the drop, Paris remains the most densely populated city in Europe, with 252 residents per hectare, not counting parks.[150]253 This drop was attributed partly to a lower birth rate, the departure of middle-class residents, and the possible loss of housing in Paris, due to short-term rentals for tourism.[151]254

Paris is the fourth largest municipality in the European Union, after Berlin corpus, Madrid corpus and Rome corpus, and is the 34th most densely populated city in the world as of 2020.[152]255 Eurostat places Paris (6.5 million people) behind London (8 million) and ahead of Berlin (3.5 million), based on the 2012 populations of what Eurostat calls "urban audit core cities".[153]256 The population of Paris today is lower than its historical peak of 2.9 million in 1921.257 The principal reasons are a significant decline in household size and a dramatic migration of residents to the suburbs between 1962 and 1975.258 Factors in the migration included de-industrialisation, high rent, the gentrification of many inner quarters, the transformation of living space into offices, and greater affluence among working families.259 Paris's population loss came to a temporary halt at the beginning of the 21st century.260 The population increased from 2,125,246 in 1999 to 2,240,621 in 2012, before declining again between 2012 and 2023.[154][155]261

Paris is the core of a built-up area that extends well beyond its limits: commonly referred to as the agglomération Parisienne, and statistically as a unité urbaine (a measure of urban area), the Paris agglomeration's population of 11,013,774 in 2023 made it the largest urban area in the European Union.[4]262 City-influenced commuter activity reaches further, in a statistical aire d'attraction de Paris, ("functional area", a statistical method comparable to a metropolitan area),[156] that had a population of 13,320,752 in 2023,[4] 19.6% of the population of France,[157] and the largest metropolitan area in the Eurozone.[158]263

In 2012, the Commune of Paris was the most densely populated city in the European Union.264 There were 21,616 people per square kilometre within the city limits, the NUTS-3 statistical area, ahead of Inner London West, which had 10,374 people per square kilometre.265 In the same census, three departments bordering Paris, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne, had population densities of over 10,000 people per square kilometre, ranking among the 10 most densely populated areas of the EU.[159]266