In Paris, they always seem to be dreaming up nice things for the people who live there. Last summer the mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, spent £2,5-million transforming quays along the Seine into a temporary beach, with sand, loungers, umbrellas and games for children. It proved so popular he’s going to do it again this year.
At major interchanges on the Paris metro, regional transport authority officials sometimes hand out free green tea and give passengers 10-minute massages to soothe them. ”Let’s dream, let’s smile, let’s relax, let’s love,” say the posters.
None of this seems fair. It’s Londoners who need free massages, ideally performed by sexy French masseuses/masseurs. It’s Londoners who need well remunerated public workers, public officials happy and motivated enough to come up with creative schemes that will make them dream, smile, relax and — imagine! — love each other. It’s Londoners who deserve tea and sympathy, especially if they rely on the Central line.
But they won’t get them. Instead, as London sits poised to introduce a congestion charge that will, at best, only fiddle with the city’s massive traffic problems and at worst punish those least able to pay, Paris unveils a scheme to preen its self-image even more. It’s a sickeningly poignant juxtaposition, a tale of two very differently managed cities.
Paris’s elected officials and residents’ associations have just announced schemes to subsidise local butchers, greengrocers and chemists to help them thrive and stop shoppers feeling compelled to drive to malls on the ring road. Combined with improvements to public transport (two new tramways and metro line extensions) and greater provision of pedestrian zones, Delanoe and his allies envisage peaceful quartiers where children can play in the street and ride their bicycles in safety, where neighbours might know each other. Under the Parisian scheme, each arrondissement will be given its own cultural centre for local artists and performers and trees planted wherever possible to make a congested, polluted city greener and more humane.
Part of this is a nostalgia for a Paris that is fast disappearing, and in London has already gone. A city where you knew your butcher, and he knew what you wanted before you ordered it; where community spirit wasn’t blighted; where boules rather than drug dealing was the chief activity in city parks. But the French, lovably stubborn people that they are in terms of public planning, won’t let their dream for the city die under the imperatives of globalisation, private transport, one-stop hypermarkets, gentrification and crime.
The result may be for some a pristine museum, a city clinging to the remnants of what once made it great; for others, though, it’s a salutary city filled with civic pride that refuses to bend the knee before creeping vulgarisation. Couldn’t London aspire in a similar direction? Such an imaginative leap is all but impossible in our capital, a city that is devoid of civic pride and where work in the public sector is about 24/7 crisis management and dealing with underfunding. True, next month ministers will hear the latest plans to develop Crossrail, the much-delayed east-west rail link across central London, and, yes, last year Ken Livingstone gave the go-ahead for two tramways, one of which is due to start operating before the end of the decade. But these schemes, though welcome, will only make London more tolerable to travel in than a capital city that makes its citizens proud.
Why is it like this? One simple reason is that Paris is lavishly funded by central government; London isn’t. Paris is deemed by those who take responsibility for it as a place worth loving. London, by contrast, doesn’t have anyone to properly take responsibility for it, still less love it as much as it needs. The result is a hobbled place, where working for public services can only with difficulty make you proud. This is a capital city that doesn’t have the swagger to bid confidently for the Olympic Games, where a motor falls off a supposedly safe tube train.
Ken Livingstone may want something similar for London as Delanoe is planning for Paris. He may want to bulldoze the dome and string Greenwich peninsula with beach huts that Londoners can patronise in the summer, and then travel home on state-of-the-art tube trains to places where well-adjusted people thrive in strong communities, nurtured by excellent public services for which they are happy to pay. Instead, he has negligible powers, many of which have been occupied recently in a costly and fatuous court wrangle over how to fund the tube. Livingstone seems powerless to dream of, still less impose, a vision for London as creative as the one being devised for Paris; nor can he afford to come up with jaunty seasonal projects that may make Londoners feel public officials are keen to make their city a joy to live in. In Paris, life’s a beach. In London, it’s something much worse. – Guardian Unlimited Â