For the “Bling-Bling” President, Redesigning Paris Isn’t in the Cards

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled his plans to redesign Paris earlier this year, he created an instant buzz in the urban planning world. But now it's looking unlikely that he will be the country's next Le Corbusier.

His project was monstrous and included a plan to reorganize government and integrate poor suburbs into the city. But his plans have since been scaled back somewhat, which is likely a smart move for the “bling-bling” president and his legacy.

Met with disapproval and the sheer financial reality of his ambitions for redesigning Paris, Sarko has been forced into pragmatism. Instead of reorganizing local government, implementing reforms and rebuilding the city from the ground up, he’s gone back to basics. The extravagant plans drawn up by 10 of the world’s most famous architects may not even be brought off the shelf.

Instead, Sarkozy is focusing on transportation improvement and hopes to build an extensive subway line around the city that would connect each suburb. He’s also looking to increase housing units in the city to limit overcrowding and meet the population’s living demands. A combination of restoring old Paris and building modern, functional transportation systems might be optimal for pumping blood into the city’s veins.

Such infrastructure changes appear to have worked for Valencia, Spain, where old landmarks were renovated around the same time the futuristic City of Arts and Sciences was constructed. Since the mid-1990’s, Valencia has emerged from its status as a lackluster industrial town and become a quickly developing mecca of Spanish culture and tourism.

In a century, Sarkozy probably won’t be known as the president who solved all of Paris’s problems and created a utopian metropolis. Instead, he might be known as the president who compromised some extraordinarily lavish and expensive urban planning projects in order to simply better the daily life of his nation’s capital.