Europe & Central Asia » France » Le Grand Paris
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La Metro-Matrix du Grand Paris |
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| President Sarkozy in 2007 decided to run a competition to design the ‘Grand Paris’.
The idea, apart the fact that it was in the French tradition of trying to be in the forerun of cultural and world leadership, was an excellent idea understanding that metropolitan phenomena are not contained in limited municipal areas but expand across large territories that work in a symbiosis of economic, social and environmental synergies. The idea was good but the implementation, as is the risk of Cartesian approaches that prefix ideas to pragmatism, was wrongful. The teams selected belonged to the stardom establishment of Architecture. Professionals unable to understand the spatial mechanisms of the very large scales (1/500.000) and approached the mega-metropolitan phenomena with their limited intellectual skills of the architectural scale (1/50, 1/500, and 1/5.000) The result was a set of anecdotal proposals with an imagery of small scale visual proposals that do not address the real problems of the mega scale. The competition did not result in any implementation policy and just remained as a promising but unsatisfactory exercise. If Sarkozy had gathered the adequate professionals, the ones that know about mega metropolises (very few) instead of the media-glamour stardom, Paris would be now on tracks of keeping the world class leadership it has hold for so long. |
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