A Transit Expansion Designed to Force Paris to Make Peace With Its Suburbs

Its walls may have been demolished a century ago, but some Parisians still see their city as a fortress. Residents living inside the French capital’s narrow official limits (an area called “Paris Intramuros”) are cut off from their city’s later expansion by the canyon of the Boulevard Periphérique beltway, a form of motorized rampart whose breadth and congestion draws a sharp line around the city core. The suburbanites who live beyond (usually in conditions far more metropolitan than any American suburb) are often regarded as a separate breed, with problems that are exotic and possibly even threatening to the “real” city itself.

This sharp, archaic border does more than just institutionalize the metropolitan snobbery endemic to big cities. It creates a sometimes toxic disconnect among the people who live in Europe’s largest urban area. If any European city needed a radical structural rethink, it’s Paris.