The politically motivated proposal by Roland Castro

It is always surprising and a cause for excitement when high-profile politicians turn their discussions to architecture. When the Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë and French President Nicolas Sarkozy launched a research competition on the future development of Greater Paris, there was a great surge of anticipation amongst the city’s large community of architects.

Ten multidisciplinary teams headed by architects have been working for nearly a year to develop schemes, which are now on display at the Cité de l’architecture in Paris. The results are hugely diverse, due to the varied membership of each team and the personalities of the lead architects, most of whom collaborated with architecture schools, universities or research laboratories, engineers and even other architects.

The teams were asked to address 10 issues including what a post-Kyoto Protocol metropolis means; mobility, urban exchange, urban sprawl and logistics, and the big questions of centrality and urban self-organisation, proximity and separation.

Architects are not necessarily urban planners and are not always able to overcome the temptation to suggest architectural proposals, even at this large scale. From proposals of a thousand little architectural interventions to ambitious metropolitan overviews, the plans often use sustainability as an add-on rather than as integralto a project’s intentions.

Only two teams had worked with a global vision of what Paris is, or will be, as a metropolis. Yves Lion and the Groupe Descartes’ project is orientated around the idea of a polycentric metropolis with 20 cities of 500,000 inhabitants surrounding Paris: a scheme characterised by over-optimism and wishful thinking that envisages an extra 20sq m of land for each house.

The other team, made up of Rogers Stirk Harbour, the London School of Economics and Arup, was the only one to propose making Paris more compact and link the centre, containing just two million inhabitants, to the nine million people living in the metropolitan region beyond the BoulevardPériphérique, through the development of a collective transport network. The scheme suggested ‘armatures’ comprising linear parks built over ‘the divisive and publicly inaccessible urban canyons of the existing rail networks’ and containing amenity and energy infrastructure.

Rogers Stirk Harbour’s global vision for Paris

Another large-scale vision, albeit in a totally different way, was the project Seine Metropole by Antoine Grumbach who has imagined a conurbation stretching from Paris to Le Havre, an idea first mooted by Napoleon Bonaparte. Finn Geipel, Djamel Klouche and Bernardo Secchi developed forms of ‘soft’ urban planning, called The Soft Metropolis, Greater Paris Stimulated and the Porous City. As usual the vocal French architect Roland Castro made a political statement: ‘Paris as a capital for human beings, a capital for the world’. He considers his project a devoir d’urbanité (a duty to urbanity) in which new monuments will stand for a ‘republican identity’.

Rogers’ team produced the most complete and global overview of Paris as a metropolis of the future but it is unlikely that it will ever be realised, given the recent announcement that the French state plans to build a new 35bn regional concentric underground transport system for Paris. To this end, a central management agency will be created to counterbalance the city and the region’s governing of local and regional transportation. By doing this, the president will supplant the mayor.

We have our suspicions about the genuineness of the president’s interest in architecture and his stated fascination with starchitects. If, once again, architecture is just a pretext for a hidden political agenda, we can only hope that architects do not turn out be to be the scapegoats.

Exhibition: Le Grand Pari(s), 29 April-22 November, Cite de L’architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris