GRAND PARIS III. The infrastructures of modern Paris put to the test by the Grand Paris

The Material and Immaterial infrastructures of modern Paris are currently put to the test by the Grand Paris initiative. It is difficult to reduce the complexities of the metropolis into commensurable units, symbolically unitary, spatially defined and therefore capable of helping us to find a clear ideogrammatic synthesis, of the urban post-post-modern condition. If we were to adventure into this exercise on the territory of the Parisian metropolis a broad range of places and urban protagonists would rapidly emerge, leaving us the embarrassment (and the pleasure) of the choice. Therefore, how can we select the points, the lines and the routes that identify and distinguish what Paris and the Grand Paris are from what they are not? How can we define a list of the priorities and the correct dialectic relationship between reading scales and project? Beyond any possible evaluation of the seemingly neo-liberal economic-political project which is at the origin of the initiative, we can say that the paradoxical mission that emerges from the Grand Paris’ imagination exercise is that of developing a new vision, a general theory of the metropolis, which reunifies in a retroactive unicum, the planning multiplicities in a constantly updated state on its territory, in search of a more reactive and elastic meta and macro-planning instrument than that offered by regional urban studies with the SDRIF (Regional Directional Scheme of Ile-de-France), by many accused of being excessively “slow” compared to the dynamics of territorial development. The search for a strategic infrastructure, that keeps together the idea of a global metropolis with that of a local geography, not through the means of a mechanic neo cartesian approach, by rigidly combining scales and projects in distinctly separated units of time and space, but rather through a dialectic articulation, complex and retroactive, between different scales and different temporalities of the metropolis. How can the local integrate itself with the global in the metropolitan project? What type of gouvernance can guarantee a sustainable balance between the ambitions of two very different scales and between protagonists of metropolitan life with, at times, antagonistic requirements? Which specific metropolitan landscapes can help us in this synthesis exercise? It is probably necessary to analyse the recent transformations in the immaterial infrastructure of the Grand Paris’ gouvernance and, at the same, observe how the material and symbolic infrastructure of the French capital can evolve in its distinctive characteristics. In this third dossier we walk about a transversal path, moving from an initial glance at the current condition of the emerging gouvernance system, referred to as the Immaterial-Soft Structure of this metropolis-in the making, to the design analysis of two urban metropolitan objects; two hard infrastructures charged with such a significative symbolic and strategic status that they have attracted some brilliant theoretical reflection with significative design outcome, The Boulevard Périphérique and La Défense. Two protagonists of the contemporary design literature of Paris and I-d-F. We’ve discussed of the previous topic with Prof. Bertrand Lemoine, General Director of the AIGP-Ateliers du Grand Paris, an institution midway placed between the political-territorial instituions of GP and the world of Urban Design professionals, AIGP is currently launching a wide international consultation open to groups of Urbandesign firms on the topic of Greater Paris, Habitat and Metropolitan Systems. We’ve then met Pierre Alain Trévelo, founder, with Antoine Viger-Kohler, of TVK Architectes-Urbanistes, expert of the Boulevard Périphérique and of the Parisian metropolitan condition, as well as author of two essential books for the understanding of the present condition of the Périphérique: No-Limit and La Ville du Périphérique. The topic of La Défense, was deepened with the contribution of Clement Blanchet, Associated Architect at OMA and director of OMA’s French projects, author, with Rem Koolhaas of Memorandum La Défense, a comprehensive text on OMA’s projects for La Défense.