I moved to Paris in 2002. When you live in the same place for ever, life comes to seem pleasantly uneventful. But elections serve as a marker of time. This month’s elections for mayor are a prompt to realise how much Parisians have been through since Anne Hidalgo was voted into the job in 2014.
We’ve had the Bataclan terrorist attacks, repeated sackings of the city by gilets jaunes, Notre Dame in flames, temperatures hitting 42.6C during last summer’s record heatwave, the worst floods since 1982, and now the coronavirus. More quietly, a housing boom is pricing out even the upper-middle classes, partly because Paris has more Airbnb listings than any city except London.
This isn’t simply a sequence of accidents. Rather, it’s a catalogue of the issues from climate to real estate now besetting every big, globalised, rich city. London, New York, Berlin and San Francisco are all living through some -version of this. But only Paris is remaking itself for the future. It’s even building a whole new Paris: 68 metro stations surrounded by housing are now going up in the city’s suburbs.