Taxpayers, in your pockets

Alone of the world's major cities, Paris has no expansion plan

Why do we persist in being behind all the big cities of the world? Why do London and Berlin, to name but a few, have a practical organization of their agglomerations?

While Paris is trampling and its population is choking between its fortifications, which, having been demolished, nevertheless retain an impassable theoretical virtue.

What is the City Council waiting for to have, to make a healthy policy of the Parisian agglomeration? It is essential. Whether he likes it or not, it has to be done. Financial problems or household waste, everything is clarified by this policy. Apart from it, everything is only bastard solutions.

Isn't it extravagant to note that Paris does not yet have an extension plan! Paris that is cracking everywhere, Paris that is dying of congestion!

— But, you will say, there is a direction for the Parisian extension! There are services, and they work.

Yes, of course. There is a direction and services. But there is no plan. Just last week, the General Council called for this plan, the need for which is obvious. We promised him it, but when will we give it to him?

In the meantime, instead of trying to clear Paris according to normal and logical arrangements, duly studied according to the map of the department, which would be so simple, we allow, we admit that the first mercantis to come cut up the land as they please. that the administrative plan would have the duty to include, and build wrongly and through so-called "garden cities", in spite of all the rules of hygiene and aesthetics, garden cities without pipes, which , subdivided during sunny days and distributed to naive and hypnotized buyers, soon became uninhabitable and unhealthy.

L'Œuvre has already pointed out the actions of these shameless developers, who are not content to hold the unfortunate city dwellers to ransom – generally workers with families and who wish for their children the invigorating air of the countryside! — but still cause serious harm to the community.

Because, one day or another, by force of circumstances, the City of Paris, finally having its extension plan because it will not be able to do otherwise, will find itself facing these mercantis, facing these lands unsanitary and that it will have to carry out very costly expropriations.

This out of a lack of foresight, when it would have sufficed for him to have now, since the time that the need for it had been demonstrated, a plan easy to establish.

The City of Paris can, in fact, foresee — but thinks so — that, within ten years, its population will have, for at least a third, been poured into the suburbs. From 1911 to 1921, it increased by 250,000 inhabitants. If it hadn't been for the construction crisis, how many Parisians would have left the city for a little air, freshness and light!

The City seems to ignore all this. Snuggled up in her hotel, as in a citadel, she sees nothing beyond. One may wonder, in the presence of this fatal negligence, what use is this old anachronistic aedility to the frequent and costly trips she makes abroad!

Henri SIMONI