ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of the difficult and contested efforts to construct Paris as a metropolitan space. Covering the period of 2000 to the present, it focuses on the search for a collective actor and the production of collective action through the quest for alliances between players, be they the central State, local governments or business associations. More specifically, the chapter concentrates on the relationships between core metropolitan stakeholders through the analysis of four political initiatives aiming at building collective action and territorial leadership at the metropolitan scale.
In the Île-de-France region, many competing conceptions of metropolitan space are co-present and are conflicting. First the regional council, whatever its political leaning, has always considered the Metropolis to be the Île-de-France region. In that perspective the construction of metropolitan space is understood to mean the strengthening of the powers and resources of the regional authority. Second, the city of Paris considers the core area to be the most relevant space to address the important problems of the metropolis. Third, the State maintains an ambiguous position as regards its conception of the metropolitan space, identifying it as the city region in the period 2007–2012 when the State was controlled by the conservative parties, but restricting it to the core area in the period 2012–2017 by the new Socialist government. In this context, the most important business associations have been ready to accommodate any initiative, provided that the treatment of the most important issues of economic competitiveness, transport and housing, was taken care of.
This story clearly indicates the importance of politics in the construction of metropolitan space and shows the critical role that politics plays in shaping scalar conflicts. In this context, decentralization and globalization can be understood to be both structuring forces and elements which are instrumentalized. First, there is the issue of territorial leadership which has consistently led to a stalemate, because of a governance system whose main feature, unregulated competitive decentralization, prevents any leader from being accepted as legitimate at a regional scale. Second, the building of a coalition at the metropolitan level, to ensure capacity to act at that scale, has proved impossible, first, because of a relative balance of powers between local governments and, second, because of the incapacity of the State to successfully act as the leader of a coalition because of its political instability and its lack of resources. Third, players also conflict about the vision they have of the future of the metropolitan area. Two clearly opposed visions coexist, one in which priorities are to fight against social and territorial inequalities and to initiate an alternative mode of development based on ecological transition, another one in which economic competitiveness is the top priority to which social, territorial and environmental issues must be subordinated. Since these two visions are supported by alliances of players which are roughly equal in strength, the not surprising result is conflict and the blockage of the governance system.
