President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has enlisted some of Britain's leading architects for one of his most daring projects. He wants to make Paris more like London. Proposals now emerging reflect the French leader's admiration for Anglo-Saxon dynamism. They are likely to horrify Parisians. As part of the master plan architects are proposing high-rise suburbs modelled on Croydon, south London, and an orbital railway to link them. They will encourage the middle classes to move out of the centre of Paris and ordinary working people to move in. Professor Richard Burdett, design chief for the London Olympics and one of the experts working on the "Greater Paris" project with the Richard Rogers architecture practice, said: "The notion of mixing different types of people and activity, so that people are cheek by jowl, makes a city over time much more tolerant and resilient to change.
President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has enlisted some of Britain's leading architects for one of his most daring projects. He wants to make Paris more like London.
Proposals now emerging reflect the French leader's admiration for Anglo-Saxon dynamism. They are likely to horrify Parisians.
As part of the master plan architects are proposing high-rise suburbs modelled on Croydon, south London, and an orbital railway to link them. They will encourage the middle classes to move out of the centre of Paris and ordinary working people to move in.
Professor Richard Burdett, design chief for the London Olympics and one of the experts working on the "Greater Paris" project with the Richard Rogers architecture practice, said: "The notion of mixing different types of people and activity, so that people are cheek by jowl, makes a city over time much more tolerant and resilient to change.
ordinary working people to move in.
Paris property prices and rents will have to go down a long, long way before that happens.
Will someone unplug this catastrophe on legs? Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
Now that the left controls Paris and the Ile-de-France (Greater Paris) region, and Delanoe has managedto improve relations with the neighboring cities around Paris to the point that there are discussions about more ambitious cooperation, in particular on transport, Sarkozy wants to barge into the situation to (i) divide the left, and (ii) grab attention on him for the flagship projects and (iii) do whatever will help the right win in the next round of elections. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
But the president is meant to uphold the Constitution, not act as if it were irrelevant. I know it is wishful thinking these days. But it would be a great danger to become accustomed to the impostor.
By the way, this is something I thought about and started to fear. Sarkozy has been so unbelievably awful from the start that people are likely to become used to it. And it may take a colossal catastrophe in 2012 to remind them of quite how incompetent he is -especially since most of the media will play his songs even more than now. It may well be that had he been less incompetent, he would have stood a lesser chance of staying in power. As it is, the bar will be so low that people may have forgotten how angry they were about him. Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
But here is my comeback: at least you haven't ever elected Bush (OK, that he should get over 5% of the votes was embarrassing enough). Voter fraud took care of that, while he had lost both elections. There does not appear to have been significant fraud in France, so we must accept the fact that 'we' chose him.
Having said that, McCain appears to be leading in the polls at the moment. Ahem. Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
