The Fragmented Politics of Urban Preservation: Beijing, Chicago, and Paris

4. Paris: Intergovernmental Competition and Joint Preservation

C H A P T E R F O U R Paris Intergovernmental Competition and Joint Preservation But if the big city is largely responsible for the invention and public extension of the museum, there is a sense in which one of its own principal functions is to serve as a museum: in its own right, the historic city retains, by reason of its amplitude and its long past, a larger and more various collection of cultural specimens than can be found elsewhere. Every variety of human function, every experiment in human association, every technological process, every mode of architecture and planning, can be found somewhere within its crowded area. —LEWIS MUMFORD, The City in History In January 2007, at the end of my research trip to Paris, I was stunned by the news that the Paris Municipal Government was sued by the French National Government in the Administrative Court of Paris. The cause of the lawsuit was an urban development plan (Plans Locaux d’Urbanisme [PLU]) made by the city in 2006, in which a total of 5,607 buildings were designated as the Municipal Heritage of Paris (Patrimoine de la Ville de Paris [PVP]). This had been the first urban development plan made by the Paris Municipality and the first landmark designation made by a local authority , instead of the national government, in the long history of urban preservation in France. However, as soon as the plan was approved by the City Council, it was denounced by the prefect of Paris, the state representative in the city, as illegal. Among a number of accusations from the national officials, the legitimacy of the 5,607 municipal heritage buildings was particularly questioned.The conflict over the urban development plan 104 PA R I S could not be reconciled, so eventually the prefect brought the case to the Administrative Court of Paris. This lawsuit became one of the most wellknown political disputes in France in recent decades. In Paris and in the rest of France, urban preservation had long been the privilege of the state. The national government invented a comprehensive legal framework of urban preservation and implements strict protection of the built environment through a group of highly specialized civil servants. The situation began to change in recent decades when decentralization reforms significantly increased the autonomy of local authorities. To exercise its discretion over the urban territory, the city government began to propose its own agenda of urban planning and urban preservation. Some of those initiatives induced severe conflicts with the state, as the beginning of the chapter shows, and reinforced the political fragmentation between tiers of government. This chapter explores how intergovernmental fragmentation between the city and the state shapes the policy process of urban preservation in Paris. It begins with a discussion of the history of urban transformation and urban preservation in Paris. I then provide a historical overview of intergovernmental fragmentation in France, followed by an investigation of the political institution of urban preservation in Paris. In order to elaborate the impact of intergovernmental fragmentation on urban preservation, the chapter examines in detail three major preservation projects initiated by the city in recent years. They demonstrate that although the state still plays an important role in major urban projects, its presence is no longer ubiquitous because it has adopted more indirect intervention approaches. It is evident from the cases that intergovernmental fragmentation in France has increasingly caused a mix of conflict, compromise, and cooperation across levels of government. Accordingly, urban preservation in Paris is gradually transformed from the monopoly of the state to a joint venture between the city and the state. Haussmann’s Great Urban Transformation Paris is considered by many to be the cultural capital of the nineteenth century and one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Like Beijing, the urban landscape of Paris was created by a centralized national authority, but they were fashioned in very different ways. Beijing was designed to be a cohesive artistic statement under a complex set of Chinese design philosophies when the Ming emperor Yongle launched the construction in the early fifteenth century. By contrast, Paris developed over several centuries. PA R I S 105 It grew from a medieval town to the cultural and political center of Europe in the Age of Enlightenment and, finally, in the era of industrialization , a city of tree-lined boulevards, unified streetscapes, and magnificent vistas illuminated by thousands...