Ep 83 - Navigating “Le Grand Paris” with Simon Kuper

Paris may no longer be home to medieval fortification walls, but that doesn't stop locals talking about Paris intra and extra muros. The wall, in this case, is the périphérique ring road, which has long been a stopper between the city and its suburbs. But a great plan for expanding Paris – and its métro system – outside of these walls into le grand Paris is changing lives, and the very culture of Paris. To explore how and why, Emily is joined by Simon Kuper, a Financial Times journalist and author of Impossible City. 

https://bookshop.org/p/books/impossible-city-paris-in-the-twenty-first-century-simon-kuper/20664638



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Credits 
Host: Emily Monaco. @Emily_in_France; Website: http://www.tomatokumato.com and http://www.emilymmonaco.com
Producer: Jennifer Geraghty. @jennyphoria; Website: http://jennyphoria.com

Music Credits 
Édith Piaf - La Vie en Rose (DeliFB Lofi Remix) 
🎵 MSKD Sounds:  https://www.instagram.com/mskd_sounds/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRql...  https://soundcloud.com/mskd_sounds
🎵 DeliFB:  https://www.youtube.com/c/DeliFB  https://soundcloud.com/delifb  https://www.instagram.com/cativo.kevin/  https://twitter.com/DeliciousFB 

About Us 
From one Emily in Paris to another... just speaking French isn't enough to understand the intricacies of the locals, but it's definitely a good place to start. Famously defended by armed "immortals" of the Académie Française (no, we're not making this up) the French language is filled with clues that show interested outsiders what, exactly, makes the French tick. 

Each episode, listen in as Emily Monaco and an expert take a deep dive into a word that helps us gain a keener understanding of the French.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Navigating the French on Paris Underground Radio.
For more great content and a bonus episode of Navigating
the French, please join us on Patreon.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hello and welcome to Navigating the French, the podcast where
each episode we take a look at a French word
and try and see what it tells us about French culture.
I'm your host, Emily Monico. Today I'm joined by Simon Cooper,
a Financial Times journalist and author of Impossible City. He's
here to discuss a phrase that signals a welcome breakdown
of the long standing great divide between Paris and its suburbs. Well,

(00:41):
welcome Simon to the podcast. Thank you so much for
joining me today.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Pleasure to be here. Emilee. Hi, So, for folks.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
Who aren't aware of you and your work, could you
tell us a little bit about who you are and
what you're doing here in Paris.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
I'm a Financial Times columnist. I moved myself here from
London twenty old years ago because I couldn't afford to
buy anything in London, and in those days, Paris was
remarkably cheap, so I bought an apartment here for I
guess about one hundred thousand dollars, which is no longer possible.
And I have acquired a Franco American wife. She was
an American and she's now French as well, and three

(01:19):
Parisian children who laugh at our accents. And while here
I've written a number of books, most recently Impossible City about.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Paris, and Impossible City is one of for me the
pieces that contributed to the word that we want to
talk about today, or the phrase which is la granp pappi.
And you know, the idea of Paris as kind of
the nexus. I think you refer to it as the
navel of the world in your book. This idea of

(01:48):
Paris being something that can become bigger or cannot become bigger,
is difficult to make bigger, is linked to the idea
that overtime Paris has often been a walled city and
that while hasn't always taken the same form or been
in the same place. So, in a sort of lifts
notes approach, would you take us through a little bit
about Paris as the walled city and what that frontier

(02:11):
kind of looked like through time, and of course all
what it looks like today.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
For about seven hundred years, I'd say from the Middle Ages,
there was a sort of military wall around Paris, like
around so many cities, to protect against invaders. And in
our century, in the twentieth century, that gets replaced by
a ring road, like in so many cities, which in
Paris is you know, is called the Betferic Ring Road,
which essentially cuts off the city from its suburbs. So Paris,

(02:41):
when people talk about Paris, it's this very small city
of two million people, which has all the picture postcards
that the world knows, the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame
plus la gon God, everything you saw during the Olympics.
But over the decades that city has become dwarfed by
the suburbs around it. So there are only two million

(03:02):
people in Paris, but there's about eight million in the
suburbs now. And these suburbs are very largely built after
the War oft an apartment blocks. There's this sort of
fantasy that they are terribly violent, scary places that is
almost never true. They tend to be poorer than Paris.
Not all poorer, but they tend to be poorer, some

(03:24):
somewhat drab, I would say, generally low middle class, working class.
And the tragedy of Paris is that the suburbs have
been cut off from the city by this ring road.
And also because the people inside Paris, the elite who
run the country from Paris, never with that on creating
brilliant links so that suburban nights could come into Paris,

(03:44):
because you know, they didn't want the lower orders running
around the city, which is an issue that has plagued
Paris for at least since I Sma and the city
builder of the eighteen fifties, who also didn't want the
lower orders coming in. So now, for the first time,
as you say, we're entering a ganpati where the aim,
for the first time ever is to connect the suburbs

(04:05):
with the city through public transport. So they're building sixty
eight new metro stations, all of them in the suburbs.
Every new station is in the suburbs because Paris already
has enough metros. And just imagine sixty eight new subway
stations in New York or in London. I mean, that
would be huge and transformative, and it is in Paris.
And there's also other regional train lines that are being expanded.

(04:28):
There's enormous numbers of new biplanes, so many many people
now cycle in to Paris from the suburbs every day,
so generally, for the first time, we're creating a ness
of connections between this little city and these big suburbs
that never existed before, and that really creates a whole
new different idea of Paris. So I can't really emphasize

(04:49):
how big this changes, but I would say it's bigger
than the change created by Baron Usmann when he rebuilt
Paris famously with these as money and buildings from the
eighteen fifties.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, and for those who aren't aware of that rebuilding,
I mean every almost everything you see in Paris today,
with the exception of some small areas in the Marae
and you know, the very picturesque hilltop village of Monmouth,
is built according to this rebuilding project, this massive rebuilding project.
We don't see Paris the way that it was pre
nineteenth century, pre Houseman, really, so it's it's huge. And

(05:21):
the massiveness of this change, if you're sort of comparing
it with that, I mean, this is going to completely
change the way that Paris works and feels, right.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Yes, I mean it's going to change the lives of
many people who had a let's say an hour and
a half commute. In some cases that hour and a
half will go to twenty minutes. You can now go
from suburb to suburbs. So that means that in the
end Paris will have multiple senses. You'll start to get
centers outside the city itself, whereas now there's only one
center of Paris. But the similarity with the Osmund project

(05:51):
is that Paris is made by the central state. It's
central state that decides on a massive project on the
Osman then and now today, to spend a huge amount
of money to change the city according to a plan,
whereas if you think of New York or London, and
they're much more unplanned cities which are driven more by
private developers, whereas Paris is driven by the state.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
And one essential thing that you touched upon. But I
think we need to linger on a little bit with this,
especially if for those who aren't as familiar with Paris
is this idea of multiple centers. Paris as a city
is so central. I mean, when we say all roads
lead to Rome, all roads lead to lead to Paris,
at least in France. And it means that sometimes if
you're taking either a suburban rail line or even a TGV.

(06:37):
You know, you're trying to go from one place outside
of Paris to another place outside of Paris, you'll often
have to come to Paris to change trains. And so
if what you're saying is that now the suburbs are
going to be linked to each other without having to
come through Paris, that's obviously going to change the landscape
of what the Bonnieux really look like. Is that is

(06:59):
that correct?

Speaker 3 (07:00):
Well, one consequences they'll be linked to each other, but
for many suburbs they've never been linked before by public transport.
They've never had a metro station, so people were reliant
on you know, slow bus services. So that means that
whereas Paris is a very public transport city, only a
third of the population has a car. You know, either
you use the metro, you go to buy bike, but

(07:23):
very few people drive. Whereas the suburbs are much more
like America in the sense that they're much more car bound.
There are more people with individual homes, although with houses,
although those are much smaller than in the US. So
when you go to the suburbs, it feels like a
kind of mini version of the United States with cars

(07:43):
and with shopping malls, and so it's just a very
different life from Paris, and having metro stations will make
life enormously easier for people and also cheaper given that,
I mean, you look incomes in the Paris region of
the highest in France, but they would be low compared

(08:03):
to the United States. So running a car is a
huge cost for many people in the suburbs, and so
you might move towards a more Paris like situation where
cars become sort of eased out for many people.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Now you and I in talking about the areas outside
of Paris what a lot of Parisians would call extra
muros as compared to intramuros inside the wall versus outside
the wall. We're using this word suburb, and that's a
word that a lot of the Anglophone media uses to
describe what we in France call the bonnieu, which is
going to kind of take the place of the extramuros

(08:36):
areas from the faubool, which used to be the extramuros
areas when we still had that fortification while that you
were talking about. But I find suburb to be an
imperfect translation of bonieu, because we think of suburbs as
being much wealthier in the anglophone world, whereas Bonieu, as
you were mentioning, is often middle class or lower middle class,
working class in France, and even I found I don't

(08:58):
know why this connection didn't come to my mind, but
as I was reading your book, you were talking about
bon you and the actual etymological root of that word
as being almost that same route as banishment and you place.
So it's almost as that you're being forced out of
the city. So we see these areas as being kind
of poorly represented in the news media, both in France

(09:22):
and abroad. You've had a lot of up close and
personal time spent in the Bonneu, in large part due
to your children's active space in the football scene. Can
you tell us a little bit about sort of the
framing of the bonneux and how it's perceived in the
media and whether that's the reality.

Speaker 3 (09:42):
Yeah, both in the French media and in the international media,
the moment only really get publicity when there are riots,
which happens not very often, and because as you know,
protests and riots all the classic French way of expressing
any political view, so everyone gets very excited when there
are riots. There were big ones in two thousand and five.

(10:04):
Subsequently they've been so that's nearly twenty years. It's been
almost none. Twenty twenty three, a seventeen year old boy
of Arab origin was killed by police. We have similar
kind of police killings here that you're getting the United
States of ethnic minority youths. There were riots for about
two days. This became huge news and then they piece

(10:27):
it out. I think interestingly it piece it out because
parents and grab parents in the bolo said no, we're
not going to riot, and they kind of stopped youths.
Most of the rioters that the median age of those
arrested was seventeen years old, so it's a way for
kind of teenage boys to express masculinity. And there are

(10:47):
very impressive scenes of parents, you know, arriving at the
riots to grab their kid and take him home, and
a woman stopping boys who are trying to attack a
school by shouting do not attack the school. Because I
think one thing to realize about these monu many of
them are quite new. They're built from the seventies onwards often,
but they have acquired an identity by now. So whereas

(11:10):
in the sixties people would say, oh, I live near
Paris because Paris was the only place that had a
kind of name and identity. Now people say, you know,
I am from Cologne, I am from champiinusild Mama, and
these places, over time, they've acquired an identity. I mean,
sixty years ago, there weren't even cemeteries there because nobody
had ever died there. Because these were just tiny villages

(11:31):
that suddenly get turned into post war big suburbs, and
over time, people, many people live and die there and
acquire an identity and pride in it, and so people
care about these places. They're not particularly violent, so this
idea that they're these violent helllls is factually wrong. I
looked for the book at the homicide rates in greater Paris.

(11:53):
They've fallen seventy five percent in the last thirty years.
So the monua are much safer than they've ever been.
And I've never personally felt in any danger anywhere. I'm
not saying these places are paradises, although a couple of
them are. Something are. There's a huge variety, but mostly
they're sort of drab, workaday places from which people commute
to jobs. Is very low. Unemployment suddenly by French standards

(12:17):
in Greater Paris, and in many parts of the Greater
Paris you can't actually find staff anymore. It's very hard
to hire people. So yeah, the image of them is
these violent places full of unemployment, is and always about
to boil over is incorrect. There's also a racial element.
So whereas Paris is a mostly white city, we shouldn't
exaggerate that. I mean, Paris is pretty mixed. It's also

(12:40):
mixed in economic terms because the culture of the housing
in Paris itself is social housing. But sill Paris is
more white and the suburbs are much less white. They
tend to be quite mixed. You don't see just I've
never seen a suburb where everybody is black. You tend
to get mixes of black and Arab origin, white people,

(13:01):
white people of immigrant origins, hey Portuguese. So there's an
enormous mexita, as the French call it that you see
in Pneumonia, which I think is quite a healthy and
encouraging thing.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
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Speaker 3 (13:27):
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Speaker 1 (13:28):
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Speaker 2 (13:47):
Radio Navigating the French will be right back after award
from our sponsors, and now back to Navigating the French.
I was interested in what you were talking about when
it comes to the identity of living in one of
these Greater Paris sort of towns or suburbs. I've heard
a lot of people, you know, evoke the department number

(14:09):
that they come from. You know, I come from the
nine three or I come from the nine to four.
And then you also sort of mentioned that with the
rise of football as sort of the great I don't
know if it's the great equalizer, but the massive hobby
that people are going to have in these areas where
football is often the one thing that people have to do.
You'll have things that are like, oh, this is the

(14:30):
town that ex footballer or why footballer is from, and
that sort of puts the town on the map. So
can you talk a little bit about sort of the
identity that one feels if one comes from greater Paris.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
Yeah, so I mean the whole region of the ninety
two north of Paris. People do talk about the post code. Actually,
once played against the soccer team called FC ninety two,
which at the time I was in the start. I
also one of the players. Why are you called ninety two? Planed?
And Quillanbabe is the most famous French footballer. He's from Bundi,

(15:05):
which is a relatively poor bonne just east of Paris,
and it was the place where I think they brought
the city's excrements in the nineteenth century. There were highwaymen
there in the forest, and now you see a lot
of these places. They look like you took an old
French village with the church and a few nice little

(15:26):
rural homes, and then you plunked the Soviet city on it,
and then you added fast food joints. So Bundy looks
a bit like that. But sincebe won the World Cup
with France when he was nineteen years old in twenty eighteen,
Bundi has very much been identified as the home of
hometown of Kilian and Babe, and it's produced a couple
of other international football since so Bundi has very much

(15:51):
been branded by Babe. There's a massive mural of him
on a wall of an apartment building there. And yeah,
I think soccer because the Risian suburbs are the biggest
talent pool in global soccer. There is no region of
the world that produces better players. That has become a
mark of local identity and of pride. But you know,
even in places where there are no great soccer players,

(16:14):
I think that just the passage of time and also
the improvement of Bonnieoux. So in the sixties they built
some really terrible, huge blocks of apartments that you know,
you also get in some American sort of poor bits
of the United States that just don't work. They've been
dynamizing those for the last twenty years or so. So

(16:34):
now often in Bonnos you get much nicer, more low
rise buildings or the kind of seven story buildings that
you have in Paris. So as these places have become nicer,
as people live and die there and generations come from there,
they've acquired an identity. So if you think of you
know what the view of France that many French people
and foreigners have is that the real France is the

(16:56):
village where it's church, steeple and bakery and butcher's shop,
and that that is they call it La France performed,
the deep France. But now I'd say that the real France,
the most typical France that French people have, is the suburb,
the suburb of a big city, and it's becoming with
a little pavilion which is a kind of small house,

(17:19):
that's becoming the norm way that French people live.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
It's so interesting to consider the fact that we have
this the imagined France, that is the France performed, but
that actually did persist for a really long time, and
there are still people who live in small villages like
that today. But many of those villages are losing their EPCC,
they're losing their butcher shop, they're losing their bakery, and
people are in large part traveling by car to get

(17:46):
out to big areas where you have massive industrial bakeries
or massive you know, strip malls like we do in
the US. So we're having that sort of we're having both.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Yeah, and many of those people from villagers have emigrated
to to the Grater Paris region, you know, which is
the Squaring region in France. So you know your grandparents
had a farm there and then your parents moved to
a suburb of Paris where you grow up. But you're
still attached to the village where your grandparents live. You
still go there on holiday.

Speaker 2 (18:16):
Right, okay? And you mentioned also that state power is
very present in the Paris suburbs. Is that in terms
of the economics of it or the actual physical buildings
that are there. How is state power so present in
the Paris suburbs.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
Both the economics, so a lot of people work for
the state. They work in the local town hall, they
work in the health service, they work in the social
security apparatus, and also physically. So there will be health offices,
often on the high street, and there will be a
massive sports complex, and there will be a bunch of

(18:56):
schools and creshes for the under fours. So I've done
reporting in some small, some poor areas of Britain, like
North Manchester or the surrounds of Liverpool, some of the
poorest parts of Britain, and there you find yourself wondering,
but where is the state? You know, people say they

(19:19):
don't know where to get medical care. There's little evidence
that the States is doing anything, has a presence, whereas
in France the state is very present, I mean to
some degree. Also the public the private sector is not
a present. So if you're in a in a poor bolnuo,
that won't often be a big private sector employee, although
you can drive somewhere nearby to get a private sexor job.

(19:40):
And I've heard that in you know, small rural poor
towns in the United States, the state just isn't there
at all. You feel that the republic has abandoned you.
In the suburbs of Paris, you do not have that feeling.
I think French people who do feel aboundoned by the
state are people in the villagers, because often there there
is no doctor, there is no local school. But in

(20:01):
the suburbs of Paris, because of the density of people,
the Republic is very much there.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
And when one does, or if one does, decide to leave,
and I assume this will be changing now that we're
talking about Paris expanding out into the suburbs. But leaving
the suburbs isn't just a question of physicality. It isn't
just a question of moving a little bit closer to
Notre Dame or to the Louver. It's a it's a
mindset change. And I think you mentioned that a lot

(20:29):
of people feel a sense of hiding in plain sight
and feeling like they need to somehow adapt to the
Parisian culture. Why is that? Is that a question of
social socioeconomic class? Is that a question of culture? Why
do you think it's so hard to migrate from the
Bonnyeu into Paris intramuros or has been historically?

Speaker 3 (20:49):
Well, I think it's culturally hard to migrate from anywhere
into Paris on tremos. I mean I found that. I
don't know if you found that as a foreigner, that
this is a city which has very strong about how
to behave, how to dress, how to eat, how to
talk at dinner. And you're really judged very much on

(21:09):
how you behave because prisionness is obviously the highest form
of civilizations. So you must have you must know how
to talk about the right books, the right art exhibitions,
the right places to go on holiday, the right wines.
And you're judged very much because the parents' escat is
much stricter than say the London or the New York

(21:31):
etic care, which are more anything goes cities. Paris is
not in anything go city. And so foreigners like me
who come to Paris, I think we feel often we
spent our whole lives trying to work out how to
behave so that Prisians don't snub you. And I used
to think it was just me, it was just me
and the other foreigners that felt this, But then I
realized most people in Paris are sort of Charlatan's trying

(21:55):
to learn the codes and presenting to be Parsians. Because
also true of all the people who come from the
French provinces. I had breakfast the on the morning with
a French friend of mine who's from gaul in the southwest,
and yeah, he came to Paris and he was a
little provincial and freestid as a little provincial, and he
had to learn how to be a Parisian. And it's true,
maybe even more so people who come from the suburbs

(22:17):
of Paris. So I have a friend Julianne in the
book I describe I'd go with him to he takes
me to his old Mougneu where you grew up, and
he shows me the cafe and that his mother used
to run and the fights that would break out at
the bar every evening. She is a twelve year old
watch and he says, you know, it's taken me twenty
years to cover the thirty kilometers to travel the thirty

(22:39):
kilometers from my bonnyo to central Paris where he now lived,
and he still feels he's an impostor. So we would
take our kids to soccer mattress in the Mono on
Saturday morning. As we'd meet and he'd be wearing his tracksuit,
his sweatsuit, saying, I guess an American, and he'd say, well,
I know you can't wear this in Paris, but it's
my native costume. It's what I war in the Belneu.

(23:01):
And he says, I never feel more at ease than
going to the volume in my tracksuit. And so these
are people who spend their whole lives off and trying
to mimic the codes of prisons, trying to figure out
what the codes of prisons are. Sometimes you get them
explain to you, like, if you're less than a quarter
of an hour late for an appointment, do not apologize.

(23:21):
That's the gardel. The politests you have fifteen to fifteen
minutes and if you apologize, then you you're showing yourself
to be a pluka provincial what do you call it,
a country bumpkin type. If you ask about the dress
code for an event, you're a plucure country bumpkin because
you should know what the dress code is. Prisons know
they don't have to ask these kinds of things, And.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
I think it's telling. I mean, all of those those
little things that you need to learn to navigate. I mean,
that's part of what inspired me to start this podcast
in the first place, is all of these sort of
nond the things that we're supposed to know that nobody
says that you're just supposed to be able to figure
out on your own. I think it's telling that Asians
have this high minded view of themselves and the fact
that everybody says Monte Paris to go up to Paris

(24:06):
when they move to Paris. And so I'm wondering now
that we're talking about this Comparis project, do you think
that that's going to change the conception of what Paris
is as a city for its residents or do you
think there's still going to be this nexus, this sort
of nucleus of like the real Paris, or the high

(24:28):
minded Paris, the almost I think you describe it as
almost still being a bit of a court in Paris,
and then everybody else the hoye ploi.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
I think the image of Paris is so powerful that
being in Paris, you know, sort of being near or Toredam,
is still going to be something that counts one hundred
years from now and will still be different than being
three kilometers away but not in the right neighborhood. So
I think Paris will endure in some ways as a

(24:58):
concept that the world has, but I think it will diminish,
and I think you'll start to get many parts of
what we now call the bonneu that will think of
themselves as maybe they won't say they live in Paris,
but they say they live in Grand Paddi where you're
from Combati, and so if you live in sen somebody,
which is the forest department in metropolitan France. But it's

(25:22):
only about five minutes by metro now from Paris. They
opened a new metro line for the Olympics, and you know,
I was there before the Olympics. There's some very nice buildings,
nice parks, you know, kids playing sport, as a market
people are cycling around, and I think that in a
few years people there, they are now fifteen minutes from

(25:46):
the center of Paris by metro. People there are not
really going to think of themselves as that distinct from
Paris anymore. They're going to think, yeah, I live in Gompadi.
I live, you know, twenty minutes from the Notre Dame.
And you're going to get much more mixing. They're trying
not to price people out because they're going to build
so much social housing into the plan that or people

(26:07):
will also be able to continue to live in these places.
So I'm quite optimistic about a much more democratic, mixed
future of this city. You're also going to get very
high status places outside Paris. So the University of Sacle,
which is where they combine various of the best sort
of educational institutes higher education institutes in France. It's southwest

(26:31):
of Paris. There's mere metro station there, and that is
going to It's already in the top twenty global universities
as right now, I think, in one of the main rankings,
and so SUCLE is going to be a really high
status place where high status people will live and high
status people will travel to but it's not in Paris,
and so you can have more and more of those

(26:51):
kinds of important centers that are on the metro system,
but not in what we think of now as Paris.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
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Speaker 2 (27:33):
Podcasts navigating the French. You'll be right back after a
word from our sponsors, and now back to navigating the French.
Lu Grand Paris as a concept is something that various
presidents have spoken about. I mean, I've been here for
seventeen years and i know I've heard it, you know,
bits and pieces, but it's never felt quite so present

(27:55):
as right now? Why do you think it's working now?
And also why aren't you know you mentioned these sixty
eight new metro stops, and the international press has not
really started talking about it in the way that they
might if it was London or New York. Why do
you think it's happening now and why aren't we talking
about it?

Speaker 3 (28:12):
Because it takes time to build sixty ever stations. So
the decision is made in two thousand and eight by
the then president Nicolas Sarcrosine that they're going to spend
this money they're greater goran Pardi because a city of
two million in Paris itself couldn't sort of be an
Internet a global city that could compete with London and
New York. And remember Paris sees itself as a global

(28:35):
cutting out city. So Paris is competing with London and
New York. It doesn't want to be like Rome, which
is a kind of museum city when the food all attached.
Paris wants to be as good as London and New York,
but not as polusocratic and obviously prittier and with better food.
And so Cycrosine makes this decision in two thousand and
eight we're gonna spend a lot of money. Actually, in

(28:56):
the end it's somewhere under forty billion euros, so it's
a lot less than London and New york'span for comparabil infrastructure.
Well they don't have comparabil infrastructure projects, but it's actually
quite reasonable. It's a lot less less than Anglo countries
paid for their infrastructure. So it just takes time to deliver.
So the first stations of the Gombey project come online

(29:17):
this summer before the Olympics. It's not that they're built
for the Olympics. They decided in two thousand and eight,
long before parents got the Olympics, but the Olympics set
a deadline. You know, we have the Olympics, so some
stuff has to be ready for the Olympics so that
people can get from or League Airport to the Olympic
Stadium by metro. And that happened, and so you're now

(29:39):
seeing it. What was just a kind of policy plan
that's boring and there's always delays, is now actually on
the ground and is changing people's lives. You get loads
and loads of people now using metro stations that didn't
exist in May and they use them every day. And
it changes their lives. And so the first dozen or so,

(30:00):
so don't quote be on that, but something like that
are now built, and the sixty eight are supposed to
be finished by about twenty thirty, so pretty soon, and
then you have a totally different city. But it's true
people don't know about it. Even many Parisians not quite
aware of what's going on. But when I was speaking
to a lot of international media during the Olympics and

(30:20):
trying to explain this, people had no idea.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
And one side effect that I'm already noticing is that
certain places that that are technically outside of Paris, like Montreux,
are becoming sought after and even gentrified. So people who
would have been living there historically are being pushed even
further out, as Parisians who can't afford to live in
Paris Entramuros are moving more towards sort of the sought

(30:47):
after eastern suburbs. Is that something that you think is
going to continue, Is gentrification going to push Paris and
then push outer Paris even further out.

Speaker 3 (30:59):
I don't think so. I mean, I think Montoy is
an example of where that happens. That Montrey in parts
is very pretty it's a summer of the city of Paris.
It's very accessible. It was already had a metro station before,
so it's not really part of Gonberi. You see the
same in Bonda, northeast of Paris. They're they're very nice
places to live. It's very accessible to Paris, and so

(31:21):
you do get the kind of Parisian up middle class
younger people who conford to buy in Paris buying there.
But I don't think we're going to see people being
pushed out because the plan is to build an enormous
amount of social housing. So typically you build a metro station,
and on top of the metro station you build hundreds
of homes and often there's space across the street to

(31:43):
build other apartment blocks, because one striking thing about the
bonnyos is that they're under built usually, so Paris is
there is no space to build anything. It's the densert
city and Europe. It's denser than New York City, denser
then New Delhi. You can't build any more housing in
Paris now, a sort of Paris is social housing, as
I said, and they're trying to raise that to thirty
five percent, so they don't want it to become like

(32:06):
New York or any rich people can live or poor
people live in New York but struggle enormously. So there's
going to be more social housing in Paris. But the
big build is going to be in the Bulnu and
happily there is space to do that. So they want
to just build eight to ten stories, so not kind
of massive high risers, but much more Paris style in

(32:27):
and around all these new metro stations. And that makes
people's lives good because you have new housing built in
the twenty twenties, it's either on top of the metro
or just across the street, and then in fifteen minutes
you can be at your place of work by metro.
And the problem with housing is you just need to
build enough of it. That's why housing in New York

(32:49):
has got so expensive, or in San Francisco, because there
isn't enough of this, and then people compete for it.
If you added, you know, thousands and thousands of new
homes in San Francisco, prices would fall because supply rises.
That it's just classic economic supply and demand. And Paris
is saying, well, we can add supply, and we can
add it's in the Bonnieu. The example I would cite

(33:09):
is the Olympic Village, which is very nice housing on
the river just outside Paris Incentius underneath the pool department,
and that's will now becoming homes amazing.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
Well, anybody who's been intrigued by this idea of the
compapis and also just about insights into Paris should definitely
pick up a copy of Impossible City. We're going to
drop a link to that book in the show notes
as well as to your column in the Financial Time.
So you want to read more of Sybon's insight, I
highly recommend it. Thank you so much for joining me

(33:41):
on the podcast today, Simon, and have a fantastic rest
of your day.

Speaker 3 (33:45):
Thank you, Emily. It was a great pleasure.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
This has been Navigating the French. You can find more
from me Emily Monico at Emily Underscore in Underscore France,
on Twitter and Instagram. This podcast is produced by Paris
Underground Radio. To listen to other episodes of this podcast,
or to discover more podcasts like it, please visit Paris
Underground radio dot com. Thanks for listening and abientu.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
This episode of Navigating the French was produced by Jennifer
Garrity for Paris Underground Radio. For more great content, join
us on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Paris Underground
Radio