Abstract
As Saskia Sassen well defined it, a global city region is a region that “overlaps the global city” . Today, it can be admitted that Paris has a lot features that make this city close to a “global city”, such as the central corporate functions, and the “highly specialized and networked services sector” that Sassen mentions, but also a growing participation to transnational networks (with the Paris Bourse for instance). Paris is the second city in the world for the number of international organization centers (OCDE, UNESCO…). But, unfortunately, the “raising degree of spatial and socioeconomic inequality” is another global city's characteristic that Paris shares.
If Paris meets the criteria of a global city, the area that encompasses this global city can be called a global city region. Then, following Sassen's analysis, “both concepts have a problem with boundaries”.
That is exactly the problem of Paris and the Paris area. Today, there are twelve million people living in the Ile-de-France - which is the administrative region that includes the French capital, also called the “région parisienne” – among which 90% live in Paris. It is the gathering of eight administrative subdivisions, the “départements”. The region Ile-de-France remains one of the richest in the world. However, the local councilors and the citizens, as well as the economic decision-makers, have noticed that their region is losing competitiveness within the globalized world. Many features characterize this loss of dynamism: lack of innovative and structuring projects, illegibility of the town and country planning and an inaudible political voice are some of them.
This last problem is linked to the main one, recently well summed up by President Sarkozy: “nobody knows who decides”. Thus, Ile-de-France's central weakness is about power and authority in the region.
It is clear that things have to be changed in the administrative organization of the Paris area, in order to turn the entire region into an efficient global city region.
