ABSTRACT
The population of Paris was largely accommodated within the confines of the walled City until the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Clearly Paris no longer dominates the growth of the French population as it has for over a century and a half. Many reasons have been suggested for this change including the high cost of rent and property, the expense and tedium of long journeys to work and other diseconomies. Congestion at the centre and confusion in the suburbs; such, in a phrase, were the problems of interwar Paris. In the City, housing was old and overcrowded, there was little open space, and existing buildings were ill-equipped to accommodate the expanding office-based industries. Despite the loosening out of industrial employment from inner Paris, there remains a wide mismatch between place of residence and place of work in the Region as a whole.
