MATERIAL REVOLUTION

Hawera Star, Volume XLIX, 16 November 1929, Page 11

MATERIAL REVOLUTION

TDARIS is suffering from acute growing pains and physicians and surgeons have been called in. City departmental and central government authorities have suddenly awakened to the fact that Hew York, London, and Berlin are far ahead of the French capital in coping with modern urban problems, and that immediate steps must be taken to cure the city’s serious ills, writes the Paris correspondent of the “San Francisco Chronicle.” Paris to-day complains of almost every urban malady, but the authorities are preparing for action, and Paris apparently is due for a material revolution.

The reverent lover of what still remains of the French capital of the Middle Ages, of the day of Mirabeau and Napoleon, and even .the Victor Hugo, will perhaps drop a tear. This prospective material revolution means the destruction of a considerable number of landmarks to each of which Mr Baedeker gives a paragraph or a half-page, one, two or three-starred. Probably Paris’s worst anachronism, from a purely material viewpoint, has been the continuous band of fortifications that are now in process of demolition. During the siege of 1870 these battlements stood the city in good stead, but for the last two or three decades these walls have served for noth, ing other than a gross obstruction to traffic from city to city. The capital’s boundaries still follow the line of fortifications. Just- outside of this now disappearing band of stone exists one of the capital’s peculiar phenomena —a band of Beds. Seeking dwelling places immune from city regulations and near the factories, industrial workers swarmed into the communities just outside the fortifications. Communism flourishes in these centres, with the result that the city is encircled by the Reds. Here

MODERNISING PARIS

start the periodic attempts at 'radical demonstrations that so worry the authorities. One of the principal objects the officials have in view is an attempt t-o break up these cradles of social and political revolutions. Traffic congestion from and to the city is sufficiently acute, but it is still worse during the rush .hours in the business sections, which, in their narrow’, w'andering streets, show* a great resemblance to sections ’of Boston. In the last 70 years the population of Paris proper has increased 70 per cent, and that of the environs 800 per cent. The population of the city is '2,870,000 but the Parisian area numbers more than 5,000,000. Within and without the city which contains some of the most densely populated spots, .in the world,, -the- housing problem is acute. It is estimated that 42 per cent, of the more than 5,000,000 in the Parisian area is badly housed.

The .Government has now’ taken a hand. Undei: the direction of the Minister of the Interior, a colossal plan is being worked out to bring Paris to a place where she can be called a truly modern metropolis. The giant project includes provision for the demolition of congested sections and the construction of new parks and thoroiighfares, zoning or assignment to definite areas w’ithin and without the city proper of factories and small industries and garden cities, the extesion of fifteen subway lines far out into the surrounding suburbs and the co-ordination of the administrative efforts of the central government, the Department of the Seine, and the various communities on the edge of the capital. The last problem perhaps will prove the hardest, for each administrative unit is jealous of its rights and co-operates Avith others only reluctantly. There is also the perennial problem —where is the money coming from?